Monthly Archives: March 2014
Alan Dershowitz has a blistering column in Haaretz today explaining why no self-respecting pro-Israel liberal should support J Street. Yet many genuinely pro-Israel liberals will likely continue doing so, for the same reason they continue giving to the New Israel Fund despite its track record of funding political warfare against Israel: They want an outlet for pro-Israel sentiment that also allows them to try to alter Israeli policies, whether foreign or domestic, with which they disagree. And absent a genuine outlet, it’s human nature to cling instead to groups that falsely purport to fill this niche, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Hence an alternative model for pro-Israel liberalism is desperately needed.
The good news is that such a model exists. The bad news is that few people know about it–which is why Haaretz’s profile of philanthropist Robert Price earlier this month ought to be required reading for pro-Israel liberals. Price, who self-identifies as “toward the J Street side of things,” is a major donor to Israel, but on principle, he refuses to give to any Jewish Israeli institution: He focuses exclusively on the most disadvantaged fifth of Israeli society–the Arab community. Yet unlike, say, the NIF, Price doesn’t seek to “empower” Israeli Arabs by financing their leadership’s political war on Israel. Instead, he tries to promote Israeli Arabs’ integration, by focusing on educational initiatives that will ultimately improve their job prospects and earning power: early-childhood community centers in Arab towns and, more recently, an Arabic-language version of PJ Library. As he put it, “Arabs represent 20 percent of the population and have an opportunity, we think, to be productive citizens and to actually enrich the fabric of life in Israel if provided reasonable opportunities.”
This is a radical contrast to the NIF, which claims to promote integration but actually promotes Arab separatism. For instance, it’s a major funder of Adalah, an Israeli Arab NGO that actively promotes boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, terms Israel an “apartheid state,” and demands a “right of return” for millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees. It was also a major funder of Mada al-Carmel, another Israeli Arab NGO, whose flagship project was the infamous Haifa Declaration. This document, compiled by dozens of Israeli Arab intellectuals, terms Zionism a “colonial-settler project” that, “in concert with world imperialism,” succeeded in 1948 “in occupying our homeland and transforming it into a state for the Jews,” partly by committing “massacres.” Israel, it adds, can atone for this sin only by transforming itself into a binational state with an Arab majority (via an influx of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees).
Needless to say, such activities by Israeli Arab NGOs not only undermine Israel, but also worsen Jewish-Arab tensions and exacerbate anti-Arab discrimination: Why would any Israeli Jew want to help or even associate with a community whose leadership actively seeks the Jewish state’s annihilation? Thus by funding such activities, NIF hurts both Israel and the Arab minority it ostensibly seeks to help.
By promoting integration, in contrast, Price is helping both Israel and its Arab minority, and working to reduce discrimination–which is precisely what one would expect a pro-Israel liberal to want to do.
There are numerous ways to promote liberal goals while also genuinely helping Israel. Examples include programs that help ultra-Orthodox Jews acquire secular educations and enter the workplace, or that promote the integration of Ethiopian-Israelis, or that foster Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. But by clinging instead to groups like J Street and NIF, while turning a blind eye to their reality, liberals aren’t just harming Israel. They’re also missing precious opportunities to genuinely make Israel a better, more equal, and more just society.
Originally published in Commentary on March 28, 2014
Getting aid takes so much time and energy that the poor have little left over to help themselves
An OECD report released last week found that Israel has the highest poverty rate in the developed world – 20.9%, compared to an OECD average of 11.3%. Granted, this number may be exaggerated: Only 9.3% of Israelis said they couldn’t afford adequate food, which is significantly less than the OECD average of 13.2%. Nevertheless, Israel’s official poverty rate has been persistently high for years, and the government consequently established a commission on how to fight poverty last year.
Unfortunately, based on media reports, the recommendations the Alalouf Committee is slated to issue next month seem unlikely to break much new ground: They center on time-honored measures like raising various types of welfare allowances. But Western countries have been throwing money at poverty for decades with limited success; thus there’s no reason to think more of the same will produce different results. What’s needed is a broader reform of Israel’s anti-poverty efforts – and a new study by Israeli-born Eldar Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton University, offers useful insights.
Shafir, whose book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much came out last year, concluded that the pressure of poverty leads otherwise sensible people to make poor choices. In one of his experiments, for instance, volunteers at a New Jersey mall were presented with two scenarios – a car repair costing $150 and one costing $1,500 – and then asked to solve cognitive puzzles. Afterward, the researchers asked the volunteers about their incomes.
Rich and poor proved to be cognitively identical when presented with the $150 scenario. But in the $1,500 scenario, the poor scored significantly worse on the cognitive tests: Just thinking about how they would cope with such a bill reduced their cognitive function by the equivalent of 13 to 14 IQ points. That, Shafir noted in an interview last month, is the difference between borderline and normal intelligence, or between normal and gifted.
This has real-world consequences. For instance, college greatly improves earning power, yet only 30% of Americans eligible for financial aid actually take the money and go to college, Shafir said. Even people who take the trouble to get financial aid forms often don’t fill them out, he noted, because the forms are long and complicated, and the poor, preoccupied with the day-to-day pressures of survival, lack the time and mental energy to cope with them.
Here in Israel, a friend who used to run a charity told me she frequently saw people saddled with thousands of shekels in debt due to a single bad decision: Unable to pay a relatively small bill and uncertain how to solve the problem, they simply put it off – and meanwhile, the debt ballooned, thanks to interest, fines and inflation adjustments.
All this suggests an obvious conclusion: Reducing the bureaucracy of poverty, and thereby reducing the time and mental energy people must expend to obtain help, might leave them with more mental energy to make better decisions. And that would do far more to help them escape poverty in the long run than simply giving them a bit more money.
Currently, Israel’s poverty bureaucracy is enormous, with each type of financial aid handled by a different office: Welfare allowances are handled by the National Insurance Institute, housing assistance by the Housing Ministry, municipal tax discounts by municipalities, etc. Thus to get the aid to which they are legally entitled, people must spend dozens, if not hundreds, of hours running around to various government offices, in between trying to hold down a job, care for a sick child, do the grocery shopping and so forth. Not surprisingly, many people find this so overwhelming that they end up forgoing assistance to which they are entitled. Indeed, an NII official told the Alalouf Committee that in her office’s estimation, about half of all people eligible for welfare allowances never apply for them.
Moreover, for the working poor – of whom Israel has a growing number – time spent at government offices is literally money out of their pocket. Salaried employees can take a morning off for such purposes without reducing their monthly paycheck. But the poor are usually hourly workers, for whom every hour spent in government offices is an hour not spent on the job earning money.
So what if, instead, we turned the poverty bureaucracy into a one-stop shop – a single office where the poor could obtain all relevant types of financial aid with a single visit to a single clerk? With modern computerization, that’s certainly feasible: If, for instance, someone is eligible for a municipal tax break, the poverty office’s computers should automatically forward the relevant data to the municipality’s computers.
Additionally, our one-stop shop should provide help in filling out the paperwork. Many people find government paperwork beyond them; the difference, as Shafir noted, is that the poor can’t solve the problem the way other people do – by hiring professionals to deal with it. Aside from reducing the drain on applicants’ mental energy, such assistance would also reduce the number of people who forgo needed benefits because they can’t handle the paperwork.
Finally, the current crazy quilt of disparate benefits should be simplified so that people must apply for only a few instead of many, and our one-stop shop should include experts who can tell the poor what these benefits are. Most people have no clue what benefits they might be eligible for, and trying to find out can consume enormous quantities of time and energy. That’s another reason why many forgo aid they should receive.
To its credit, the Alalouf Committee apparently does plan to recommend establishing special offices whose job would be to help the poor exercise their rights. But while such help would be beneficial, making people run to yet another government office definitely won’t be.
Simplifying the poverty bureaucracy is admittedly much harder than raising allowances, because it requires forcing numerous entrenched bureaucratic fiefdoms to cede power. And it clearly won’t eradicate poverty all by itself. But as Shafir’s research shows, it could make a significant contribution toward this end. Thus any government serious about fighting poverty must make reducing the bureaucracy part of its plan.
As Jonathan Tobin noted yesterday, facts are irrelevant to the diehard anti-Israel crowd; nothing will change their views. But since they remain a minority (at least in America), I’m far more worried about the many well-meaning people who do care about the facts, but never hear them, because the journalists they rely on for information can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.
Take, for instance, a New York Times report earlier this month about Islamic Jihad’s barrage of more than 60 rockets at southern Israel and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. The online version says, unexceptionably, that “the only reported injury was to an Israeli woman who fell while running for cover.” But the print version of the Times’s international edition–which reaches some 242,000 people–added a shocking comment: The lack of casualties, it asserted, is “a sign that each side wanted to make a forceful showing without risking further escalation.”
Anyone reading that would never know Islamic Jihad shoots rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns (a bona fide war crime); they’d think Gazan terrorists, just like Israelis, carefully aim their fire to avoid civilian casualties. They’d also never know that this indiscriminate rocket fire causes so few casualties only because, as a new study shows, massive civil defense measures–even playground equipment in the border town of Sderot is designed to double as bomb shelters–have reduced Israeli fatalities by a whopping 86 percent. And because people don’t know all this, they are easily persuaded that Israel’s responses to the rocket fire, from airstrikes to the naval blockade of Gaza, are “excessive.”
Or take a Reuters report on Lebanon this month, which asserted as fact that “Israeli forces still hold at least three pockets of occupied territory which are claimed by Lebanon.” This isn’t a quote from a Lebanese official; it’s the Reuters reporter.
Anyone reading that would never know Israel withdrew from every inch of Lebanon in 2000; that this withdrawal was unanimously certified as complete by the UN Security Council; and that only afterward did Hezbollah, backed by its Lebanese puppet government, suddenly lay claim to additional territory to justify its continued war on Israel. They’d think Israel indeed continues to “occupy” Lebanese territory. And anyone who believes this is easily persuaded that Hezbollah is a legitimate political player that seeks only to regain “occupied Lebanese territory,” rather than a viciously anti-Semitic terrorist organization whose goal is Israel’s eradication, and which any civilized country ought to shun.
This steady drip of media falsehoods even permeates stories that ostensibly have nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict–like a New York Times review of Reza Aslan’s biography of Jesus, which casually refers to events in “first-century Palestine.” As the reviewer, a Yale professor of religious studies, certainly ought to know, there was no “Palestine” in Jesus’s day. The Roman province Jesus inhabited was called “Judaea,” a word whose linguistic similarity to “Judaism” is no accident; Judaea was a Jewish commonwealth. Only after the Bar-Kochba revolt more than a century later did the Romans rename it “Palestine,” after the Philistines, in a deliberate effort to obscure Jewish ties to the land.
But anyone reading this review would easily conclude that just like the Palestinians always claim, they–not the Jews–are the Holy Land’s indigenous people: Look, there never was a Jewish state there; “Palestine” existed even back in the first century! And if so, then Israel is indeed a thief who stole the Palestinians’ land.
All this means that many well-meaning people don’t know even the most basic facts, like the Jews’ historic ties to Israel or the indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza. And unless pro-Israel activists tell them, they never will–because the media certainly won’t.
In craving something it can never obtain, Israel endangers both its democracy and its survival
To make the case that their preferred policies are essential to Israel’s future, both Israeli and American Jewish liberals frequently argue that Israel’s current policies – even if justified – are costing it Western and American Jewish support. Last week’s op-ed by Haaretz columnist and award-winning author Ari Shavit is a classic example: Though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right about Iran’s nuclear program, right about Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state and right about the essential justice of Israel’s cause, Shavit wrote, this is “yesterday’s message,” which young Americans, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to hear. Thus to avoid losing the future, Israel must remake itself into a country more attractive to these young Americans, whose “liberal” and “pacifist” worldview “utterly rejects the occupation, the use of force and human rights violations.”
Just consider the practical implications of Shavit’s prescription. Since these young Americans abhor “the occupation,” winning their love would presumably require withdrawing from the West Bank. But what if the West Bank then becomes a base for suicide bombings against Israel, as it did when Israel withdrew from parts of it in the mid-1990s? Or a base for launching rockets at Israel, as Gaza did after Israel left in 2005? Shavit certainly knows that’s possible; he’s not one of those fantasists who think territorial withdrawals will bring peace.
Yet by his own admission, these young Americans also abhor “the use of force and human rights violations.” Thus if Israel responds to such a terrorist onslaught militarily, they will immediately hate it again – especially since counterterrorism operations in urban areas inevitably produce civilian casualties, and liberal pacifists generally view all civilian casualties, however unavoidable, as “human rights violations.” Nor is this mere speculation: It’s how Western liberals in fact responded to Israeli counterterror operations in the West Bank in 2002-04 and Gaza in early 2009.
Thus Israel could retain the liberals’ love only by meekly absorbing suicide bombings and rocket attacks without responding. Such unchecked terror, as the past two decades amply showed, would also destroy the economy. And deprived of both personal and economic security, Israelis would flee in droves.
Or consider Iran. Shavit has written repeatedly that Iranian nukes would be an existential threat to Israel. But what happens if all else fails, and only Israeli military action can prevent a nuclear Iran? Those liberal, pacifist Westerners whose love he seeks “reject the use of force”; they would never countenance a preemptive strike. Indeed, they overwhelmingly believe an Israeli attack would be worse than Iranian nukes, which they don’t actually consider much of a threat.
In short, liberal pacifist love can be bought only at a price most Israelis believe would endanger their very existence: letting Iran go nuclear, withdrawing to the 1967 lines even without a peace treaty and abandoning efforts to combat Palestinian terror. That’s hardly a convincing survival strategy.
Moreover, precisely because it requires overriding Israelis’ own policy preferences – as repeatedly expressed through both opinion polls and elections – it’s also anti-democratic. One recent poll, for instance, found that only four percent of Israelis favor withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank. Another found that while 45% would support removing settlements if the IDF remained – which wouldn’t satisfy liberal pacifists, since it wouldn’t end “the occupation” – only 9% supported withdrawing the IDF as well. Polls also show majorities against withdrawing to the 1967 lines, even with a peace deal, and pluralities or majorities for bombing Iran if other efforts to keep it from going nuclear fail. And of course, in both 2009 and 2013, Israelis elected governments whose stated positions aligned with these preferences.
So courting the liberal pacifists would require Israel to eviscerate one of the most fundamental liberal values – democracy – by substituting the policy preferences of non-citizens for those of its own citizens. Granted, this might not bother many Western liberals, who seem to have little use for democracy when it doesn’t produce their preferred outcomes. But it ought to bother anyone who actually cares about liberal values.
Moreover, gutting Israel’s democracy in itself endangers Israel’s survival, because that survival has always demanded extraordinary commitment from Israel’s citizens. For instance, most Israelis devote three years of their lives to the army and do annual reserve duty for years afterward; without that willingness to defend their country, Israel wouldn’t long survive in a hostile region.
But most people would fight more willingly in defense of policies they – or at least their fellow citizens – chose democratically than for policies imposed by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their own choices. Similarly, they’ll pay taxes more willingly to finance democratically chosen policies than policies chosen by non-citizens who don’t bear the costs of their choices.
If Israelis are deprived of the chance to try to make this the kind of country they want, whatever that happens to be, then many might head for the exit. For what makes the price of living here worth paying is precisely the privilege of influencing the nature of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. If instead, the nature of that state is to be dictated from abroad, why wouldn’t Israelis prefer to move overseas themselves, to countries with higher standards of living and no compulsory military service?
And if Israelis lose the will to maintain their own state, who will take their place – those young American Jewish liberals whose affection Shavit so craves, most of whom wouldn’t even consider Israel’s destruction a personal tragedy?
Yes, Israel needs supporters overseas. But above all, it needs the support of its own people. Thus its overseas supporters must be sought among people who share Israelis’ core values – not among liberal pacifists uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state, and who reject the use of force even in self-defense. The chimerical pursuit of liberal pacifist love is nothing but a recipe for Israel’s destruction.
That Desmond Tutu once again accused Israel of apartheid yesterday is nothing new; he’s one of several Nobel Peace laureates who have made second careers out of Israel-bashing (think Jimmy Carter or Mairead Maguire). But it’s far more worrying when similar rhetoric is used by a sitting U.S. president – as Barack Obama did in the most outrageous but widely overlooked line of his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this month. Culminating a series of rhetorical questions about what Israel would do if no Palestinian state arises, he asked, “Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”
As Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid noted, “There is not much distance between this statement and an explicit warning that Israel is liable to turn into an apartheid state.” In short, even if Israel isn’t an apartheid state today, the U.S. president considers it perfectly reasonable to assume it will be someday soon – that instead of a democracy where all citizens are equal before the law, it will become the kind of state that imposes legal restrictions on certain citizens because of their ethnicity. But since Israeli Arabs haven’t been subject to special restrictions since Israel abolished its military administration in 1966, and no subsequent Israeli government has ever contemplated reinstating such restrictions, on what exactly does Obama base this assumption?
The logical conclusion is that he got it from the Israeli Arab leadership and radical Jewish leftists, both of which accuse Israel of apartheid ad nauseam. Yet believing these accusations requires willfully ignoring the facts.
This past December, for instance, one Ahmed Tibi wrote an article for The Hill accusing Israel of treating its Arab citizens like southerners treated blacks in the Jim Crow era. The analogy was a trifle marred by the tagline at the end, in which Tibi admitted he is currently deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset: Blacks didn’t occupy prominent positions in southern legislatures under Jim Crow, much less in South Africa under apartheid. It was further undermined when another Arab deputy Knesset speaker, Hamad Amar, wrote a riposte in The Hill the next week terming Tibi’s claims arrant nonsense. The spectacle of two Arab deputy speakers of parliament publicly dueling, without any fear of consequences, over whether their country discriminates against Arabs isn’t exactly an example of proto-apartheid behavior. But hey, who you gonna believe: Tibi or your lying eyes?
Then there are all the other Arabs in prominent positions – college presidents, hospital directors, ambassadors, army officers, Supreme Court justices and more. The Elder of Ziyon blog has a must-see poster collection featuring these and many other examples that are the very antithesis of apartheid. But hey, who you gonna believe: Haaretz’s Gideon Levy or your lying eyes?
Indeed, on the issue that seems to concern Obama most – freedom of movement, which he highlighted in the rhetorical question immediately preceding the one on Arab Israelis – Arab citizens and permanent residents arguably have greater rights than Israeli Jews: For instance, they can freely visit the Temple Mount, which Israeli Jews can’t; they can also visit the Palestinian Authority, which Israeli law bars Jews from doing. In fact, their freedom of movement is precisely why terrorist organizations consider them prize recruits. It’s a sad day when Palestinian terrorists have a better grasp of Israel’s true nature than the U.S. president.
Obama, of course, is just a symptom of a much larger problem: Too many Western liberals willfully close their eyes to the truth when it comes to Israel, preferring to parrot the current bon ton. But for an administration that explicitly pledged to pursue “evidence-based policy,” a little more attention to the evidence on Israel would be a nice place to start.
Ali Jarbawi, a former Palestinian Authority minister, regurgitated several standard Palestinian talking points in a New York Times op-ed yesterday. Jonathan Tobin has already ably dissected most of them, but I’d like to focus on one he didn’t address: Jarbawi’s claim that the “right of return” is “guaranteed to refugees by international law.” Unfortunately for Jarbawi, this is a bad time to try to make that particular claim, because two European Union members, Spain and Portugal, are currently decisively refuting it.
Both countries recently announced plans to offer citizenship to descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews they expelled 500 years ago. At first glance, this might seem as if they had recognized a “right of return” – were it not for the fact that they’ve simultaneously refused to offer citizenship to descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Muslims expelled at about the same time.
This has infuriated Muslim organizations, which are demanding equal treatment for their co-religionists. And if, as Palestinians claim, “return” were indeed a right guaranteed to all descendants of refugees in perpetuity, regardless of circumstances, these organizations would be justified. But in reality, it’s no such thing. And the arguments raised against it in Spain and Portugal apply to the Israeli-Palestinian case as well.
First, according to the legislator who drafted Portugal’s law of return, the circumstances of the Jewish and Muslim expulsions were completely different. “Persecution of Jews was just that, while what happened with the Arabs was part of a conflict,” Jose Ribeiro e Castro said. ”There’s no basis for comparison.”
That, of course, is equally true of Palestinian refugees: Far from being the victims of persecution, they fled and/or were expelled during a bloody conflict in which five Arab armies, aided by large contingents of local Palestinian irregulars, invaded the newborn state of Israel and tried to eradicate it. Thus Israel owes no moral debt to the refugees comparable to that of Spain and Portugal to their Jews.
Second, as noted by Egyptian-Belgian journalist Khaled Diab, there’s the demographic issue: While “only a few thousand” Jews are considered likely to apply for Spanish and Portuguese citizenship, “unknown millions of Arabs and Muslims” might be eligible. And that creates a real problem:
If only a fraction of these were to apply, it could significantly and rapidly alter Spain’s demographic make-up. And in a country that was devoid of Muslims for half a millennium but lies on the fault line separating the two “civilizations,” this could well spark civil strife or even conflict.
That, of course, is far more true of tiny Israel, with only 8 million people, compared to Spain’s 47 million. If you believe UNRWA’s figures, the original 700,000 Palestinian refugees now have 5 million descendants. If substantial numbers of them relocated to Israel – and given the choice, they probably would, since Israel offers a better economy and more civil rights than the Arab countries where most now live – that could convert Israel’s Jewish majority into an Arab one. In short, it wouldn’t just risk “civil strife”; it would completely eradicate the Jewish state.
To be clear, nobody thinks Spain and Portugal have a legal obligation to offer citizenship even to descendants of their Jewish refugees: There is no such obligation under international law. But to the extent that one might posit a moral obligation, the Spanish and Portuguese cases clearly show that this obligation applies only to victims of persecution, not to those of armed conflict – and only if the demographic consequences won’t endanger the recipient country.
So the next time you hear someone claim Palestinians have a “right of return,” just refer them to Spain and Portugal for a brief lesson in what that “right” really means: exactly nothing.
Like any literary work, the Bible demands close attention to human psychology, politics and language.
This isn’t a topic I ever imagined myself writing about. But the unusual volume of mail I received questioning my interpretation of the Book of Esther shows that many readers, religious and secular alike, are keenly interested in traditional Jewish texts. And since my readers’ questions bear on two issues I care about – Israel and Biblical interpretation – I’d like to expand on last week’s cursory analysis by addressing them at greater length.
Readers raised three main objections to my claim that Esther culminates not in a massacre by Jews, but in a Jewish war of self-defense: The text doesn’t mention any fighting or Jewish casualties; war would have been unnecessary, because once Haman’s edict ordering the Jews’ annihilation had been balanced by Mordecai’s edict authorizing the Jews to kill their enemies, mutual deterrence was created; and Mordecai’s edict explicitly ordered the Jews to kill women and children.
Regarding the first issue, remember that the Jew-haters (as the text calls them) were prepared to execute Haman’s edict; these are people willing to kill. Moreover, Haman’s edict predated Mordecai’s by two months, during which they’d at least have started arming and training. And since Haman’s edict remained valid, killing Jews would entail no legal repercussions. Under these circumstances, it beggars belief to think they would let themselves be slaughtered without even raising a sword in self-defense. Even if the Jews attacked unprovoked, their enemies would have fought back.
So why no mention of battles or Jewish casualties? For the same reason you never hear about Israeli casualties in the Six-Day War or American casualties in World War II: After winning a sweeping victory in a war perceived as just, it’s human nature to celebrate the triumph and downplay the casualties. And like any great work of literature – which, until very recently, the Bible was widely acknowledged to be – Biblical texts usually strive for psychological realism.
American deaths were seven times higher in World War II than in the Vietnam War. Similarly, the 1967 Six-Day War killed more Israelis than the 1982 Lebanon War. Yet while remembrances of Vietnam and Lebanon usually highlight the casualties, remembrances of World War II and 1967 generally focus on the victories. Why? Because the first two were perceived as both unsuccessful and unjust, while the latter two were both successful and just: America defeated the genocidal Nazis; Israel vanquished three Arab armies that openly sought its eradication.
Purim, too, was a decisive victory over enemies who had threatened the Jews with annihilation. And therefore, what the text recalls is the victory – not the inevitable casualties of war.
Yet why was any fighting even necessary? After all, as the text tells us, the new edict allowing Jews to defend themselves, coupled with Mordecai’s appointment as vizier, made the Jews rejoice and other Persians fear them. In that situation, wouldn’t deterrence have sufficed?
Perhaps. But as Israel’s experience amply shows, deterrence doesn’t always work. If it did, two Arab armies wouldn’t have attacked Israel in 1973, just six years after it decisively demonstrated its military superiority. Nor would low-intensity conflict have persisted for decades.
Nothing demonstrates this better than the rocket fire from Gaza. Palestinian casualties from Israeli retaliatory strikes far outnumber Israeli casualties from rocket launches – inevitably, given the parties’ relative firepower. And every Palestinian knows it. Yet this hasn’t deterred Palestinian terrorists from launching almost daily rocket attacks for most of the last decade.
Esther doesn’t tell us exactly what happened 2,500 years ago. Perhaps the Jews simply attacked unprovoked. Perhaps they feared a devastating attack by the Jew-haters (rightly or wrongly) and attacked preemptively, as Israel did when Arab armies massed on its borders in 1967. Perhaps the Jew-haters attacked, because, like the Arabs in 1967 and 1973, they mistakenly thought they could win. Or perhaps, like the Palestinian rocket-launchers, they knew they would lose, and didn’t care. Based on the text, any of these is possible.
But based on 65 years of Israeli history, I find the first the least plausible. Human nature hasn’t changed much in 2,500 years, and neither has the nature of Jew-hatred. Thus there’s no reason to think Persia’s Jew-haters behaved much differently from those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Finally, there’s Mordecai’s edict explicitly ordering the Jews to kill not only armed men, but also “children and women.” The language of this edict was copied word for word from Haman’s edict against the Jews – possibly in order to sow fear among the Jew-haters, or possibly (as the commentator Ibn Ezra argues) because the parallelism was legally necessary to counter Haman’s edict. But today, threatening to kill women and children for any reason is unacceptable; so in this, Esther indeed violates modern moral standards.
Nevertheless, it’s far from clear that the Jews actually slaughtered women and children. The text doesn’t identify the casualties, but it does give some clues.
First, Mordecai’s edict definitely wasn’t followed to the letter: The edict also told the Jews to plunder their enemies’ property, yet the text explicitly tells us they didn’t. This also implies that the slain had families left alive to inherit.
Moreover, the word the text repeatedly uses to describe the casualties is ish. In Shushan, the capital, for instance, Jews killed 500 ish, plus another 300 ish the next day. Ish is ambiguous; it can mean either “men” or “people.” But usually, the Bible uses ish to describe conflicts between armies, while broader terms are employed to describe massacres of noncombatants. Thus when God orders King Saul to kill every Amalekite man, woman and child, the text reports that Saul’s army killed “kol ha’am” – “all the people” (I Samuel 15:8) Similarly, when Jews massacre the entire household of the (Jewish) Babylonian-appointed governor of Judea, the text says they killed Gedaliah and “all the Jews that were with him” (Jeremiah 41:1-3).
Readers can disagree with my specific interpretations, but the larger point remains valid: Divinely authored or not, the Bible resembles any other great work of literature in that reading it requires close attention to the nuances of human psychology, history, politics and language. Otherwise, you’ll miss half of what it says.
Since John Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams and Jonathan Tobin have all written excellent takedowns of the fallacies, outright lies and destructive consequences of President Barack Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on Sunday, you might think there’s nothing left to say. But there are some additional points that merit consideration, and I’d like to focus on one: settlement construction. Because on this issue, Obama’s “facts” are flat-out wrong – and this particular untruth has some very important implications.
According to Obama, “we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time.” But in reality, as a simple glance at the annual data published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reveals, there has been less settlement construction during Benjamin Netanyahu’s five years as Israeli premier (2009-13) than under any of his recent predecessors.
During those five years, housing starts in the settlements averaged 1,443 a year (all data is from the charts here, here and here plus this news report). That’s less than the 1,702 a year they averaged under Ehud Olmert in 2006-08, who is nevertheless internationally acclaimed as a peacemaker (having made the Palestinians an offer so generous that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn’t believe she was hearing it). It’s also less than the 1,652 per year they averaged under Ariel Sharon in 2001-05, who is similarly lauded internationally as a peacemaker (for having left Gaza); the fact that even Sharon out-built Netanyahu is particularly remarkable, because his term coincided with the second intifada, when demand for housing in the settlements plummeted. And it’s far less than under Ehud Barak, who is also internationally acclaimed as a peacemaker (for his generous offer at Camp David in 2000): One single year under Barak, 2000, produced more housing starts in the settlements (4,683) than the entire first four years of Netanyahu’s term (4,679).
It’s true that settlement construction more than doubled last year; otherwise, Netanyahu’s average would have been even lower. But it doubled from such a low base that the absolute number of housing starts, 2,534, is not only far less than Barak’s record one-year high; it’s only slightly larger than the 1995 total of 2,430 – when the prime minister was Yitzhak Rabin, signatory of the Oslo Accords and patron saint of the peace process. In previous years, housing starts under Netanyahu were only a third to a half of those in 1995.
In short, if settlement construction were really the death blow to the peace process that Obama and his European counterparts like to claim, Netanyahu ought to be their favorite Israeli prime minister ever instead of the most hated, because never has settlement construction been as low as it has under him. The obvious conclusion is that all the talk about settlement construction is just a smokescreen, and what really makes Western leaders loathe Netanyahu is something else entirely: the fact that unlike Rabin, Barak, Sharon and Olmert, he has so far refused to offer the kind of sweeping territorial concessions that, every time they were tried, have resulted in massive waves of anti-Israel terror.
But it doesn’t sound good to say they hate Netanyahu because of his reluctance to endanger the country he was elected to serve. So instead, Western leaders prefer to harp on settlement construction, secure in the knowledge that no journalist will ever bother to check their “facts.”
On Tuesday, I discussed how Israel Apartheid Week, which is taking place this week and next, feeds off latent anti-Semitism. But it’s a truism that anti-Semitism never harms the Jews alone, and IAW is a classic example. To understand why, consider three news reports from the last two weeks.
Some 500,000 Syrian civilians, or perhaps even more, have fled Aleppo in response to the government’s aerial bombing campaign, “creating what aid workers say is one of the largest refugee flows of the entire civil war”–an impressive achievement for a war that’s already created 2.4 million refugees and caused 6.5 million to be internally displaced. Tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing spiraling violence in the Central African Republic, “in what human rights groups and a top United Nations official characterized … as de facto ethnic cleansing.” And in South Sudan, where a fragile truce has broken down, almost 900,000 people have been displaced, while “millions could go hungry if fields remain unplowed before the coming rainy season.”
And those are just samples. Altogether, millions of people round the world are being killed, displaced, and/or facing starvation. Yet IAW activists are blanketing campuses throughout the West with a campaign aimed at persuading educated young people that the world’s biggest problem, the one they should focus on persuading their governments to solve, is a low-level conflict that isn’t generating mass slaughter, mass displacement, or mass starvation–one whose total casualties over 65 years are barely a tenth of those produced by Syria’s civil war in less than three. And because the miserable Syrians, Central Africans, and South Sudanese have no comparably well-funded and well-organized group to press their cases, a great many well-meaning Westerners have become convinced that Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinians truly is the world’s most pressing problem, and are lobbying their governments to direct their efforts accordingly.
In democracies, governments tend to react to public pressure. A classic example is the “Kony 2012” video, which detailed the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony’s militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army, in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan: The video went viral, and its popularity is credited with spurring Western governments to make hunting down Kony a higher priority, which in turn helped persuade the African Union to launch a mission to do so. Yet any government has only so much time, energy, money, and political capital to spend; thus a greater investment in one cause inevitably comes at the expense of other causes for which there is less public pressure.
Consequently, to the degree that groups like IAW succeed in generating public pressure for Western governments to make “Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians” a top priority, they inevitably cause these governments to devote less attention to real crimes happening in places like Syria, Central African Republic, and South Sudan. In other words, they are contributing directly to the ongoing slaughter, displacement and hunger in those countries by persuading Western citizens, and hence Western governments, that far more effort should be invested in trying to create a Palestinian state than in trying to ease the much greater distress elsewhere in the world.
Thus while Israelis are IAW’s main targets, they are far from being its main victims. The real victims are the millions being massacred, displaced, and starved while the West ignores them, because it’s too busy obsessing over Israel.