Monthly Archives: October 2014
The inaugural session of the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate took place last week, with scholars coming from around the world to participate in two days of discussion on a plethora of topics. Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya News, subsequently published a lengthy summary of the proceedings on Al Arabiya’s website, and reading it, I was struck by the absence of certain topics one might expect to feature prominently. Egypt, Iran, oil, ISIS, Turkey, Russia, the U.S., and Islamic extremism were all there. But in 1,700 words, the Palestinians weren’t mentioned once, while Israel appeared only in the very last paragraph–which deserves to be read in full:
Finally, it was fascinating to attend a two day conference about the Middle East in times of upheaval in which Israel was mostly ignored, with the only frontal criticism of her policies delivered by an American diplomat.
And this explains a lot about the current U.S.-Israel spat. President Barack Obama entered office with the firm belief that the best way to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world was to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and for six years now, he and his staff have worked diligently to do exactly that. Nor was this an inherently unreasonable idea: Even a decade ago, Arab capitals might have cheered the sight of U.S. officials hurling childish insults at their Israeli counterparts.
The problem is that the Arab world has changed greatly in recent years, while the Obama administration–like most of Europe–remains stuck in its old paradigm. Granted, Arabs still don’t like Israel, but they have discovered that Israel and the Palestinians are very far down on their list of urgent concerns. The collapse of entire states that were formerly lynchpins of the Arab world, like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; the fear that other vital states like Egypt and Jordan could follow suit; the rise of Islamic extremist movements that threaten all the existing Arab states; the destabilizing flood of millions of refugees; the fear of U.S. disengagement from the region; the “predicament of living in the shadows of what they see as a belligerent Iran and an assertive Turkey” (to quote Melhem)–all these are far more pressing concerns.
And not only has Israel fallen off the list of pressing problems, but it has come to be viewed as capable of contributing, however modestly, to dealing with some of the new pressing problems. Last month, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute published his impressions from a tour of the Mideast, including of Israel’s deepening strategic relationships with Egypt and Jordan. “Indeed, one of the most unusual moments of my trip was to hear certain Arab security officials effectively compete with one another for who has the better relationship with Israel,” he wrote. “In this regard, times have certainly changed.”
In fact, in this new Middle East, a U.S.-Israel spat probably generates more worry than glee in Arab capitals. Once, it was an Arab article of faith that America cared little about Arabs but greatly about Israel. Thus to the degree that Arab and Israeli concerns overlapped, as they do now on issues ranging from Iran to ISIS, America could be trusted to deal with the threat. Now, the Obama administration still appears to care little for Arab concerns; it seems hell-bent on striking a grand bargain with Iran and withdrawing from the Mideast. But the Arab world’s former ace in the hole to prevent such developments–Israel’s influence in Washington–suddenly looks more like deuce.
Yet all these shifting winds seem to have blown right by the Obama administration: It still acts as if America’s position in the Muslim world depends on showing that it hates Israel, too. And thus you reach the farce of a two-day conference in Abu Dhabi where “the only frontal criticism” of Israel’s policies was “delivered by an American diplomat.”
When it comes to Israel, the Arab world has moved on. But the Obama administration remains stuck in the last century.
Originally published in Commentary
For anyone who thinks the lack of a Palestinian state is a primary cause of Muslim grievance, the flood of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq in recent years poses a real problem. After all, none of the jihadi groups in those countries are fighting against Israel or for the Palestinians; indeed, as journalist Khaled Abu Toameh pointed out yesterday, ISIS ranks “liberating Jerusalem” way down on its list of goals and “did not even bother to comment” on this summer’s war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Yet while ISIS and its ilk have attracted thousands of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, the number of foreigners who have joined the Palestinian fight against Israel is near zero.
This certainly isn’t a problem of access. The thousands of Western Muslims now fighting in Iraq and Syria could easily and legally have reached the West Bank via either Israel or Jordan; so could those from Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. They simply never cared enough to do so.
And until last year, when Egypt cracked down on the cross-border smuggling tunnels, Gaza was accessible even to nationals of Muslim countries that lack diplomatic relations with Israel: They could enter Egypt legally and cross to Gaza via the tunnels. Hamas would surely have welcomed reinforcements, but they never cared enough to come.
In short, no matter how often Westerners like Secretary of State John Kerry say the Palestinian issue is a major source of the “street anger and agitation … humiliation and denial and absence of dignity” that helps jihadi groups recruit foreign Muslims, Muslims themselves are saying the opposite with their feet: There are causes they are willing to travel across the world to fight and die for, including the dream of an Islamic caliphate and the sectarian Sunni fight against Shi’ite- and Alawite-dominated governments in Iraq and Syria. But “Palestine” isn’t one of them.
The foreign fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria also undermine another common canard: that Israel is a “racist” or “apartheid” state. After all, a “racist, apartheid state” by definition subjects its minorities to far more “humiliation and denial and absence of dignity” than non-racist, non-apartheid Europe does, so if Israel were really such a state, one would expect its Arab citizens to head the pack of foreign recruits to ISIS and company.
Yet in fact, as journalist Yossi Melman noted yesterday, only about 30 of Israel’s 1.7 million Arab citizens have gone to fight for ISIS, a “much, much smaller” percentage than the “hundreds of French or British Muslims” who have done so. Based on his figures, a mere 0.002% of Israel’s Arab population is fighting abroad. Exact numbers for either the size of European countries’ Muslim populations or the number of fighters they have in Iraq and Syria are hard to find, but based on estimates gleaned from various press reports, my own rough calculation is that the proportion of British and French Muslims fighting abroad is at least three or four times higher.
And this isn’t because Israeli Arabs are flocking to the Palestinian fight instead: Few Israeli Arabs get involved in Palestinian terror, either.
This data reinforces a point I’ve made many times before: While Jewish-Arab relations in Israel aren’t perfect, overall, Israeli Arabs are reasonably well integrated and steadily becoming more so. Thus few have any desire to go off and join a glorious jihad.
The John Kerrys of the world rarely let facts disturb their theories. But for anyone who does care about facts, the foreign fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria offer a good clue as to what issues really inflame the Muslim world. And neither Israel nor the Palestinians are high on the list.
Originally published in Commentary
Reforming politicians earn little positive press to offset the costs of angering powerful interests
Last week’s uproar over the price of Milky puddings died down quickly once the myth that Israelis were flocking to Berlin was debunked, but the high cost of living remains unchanged. Although Israelis across the political spectrum regularly deem this issue one of their top concerns, successive governments have done little to address it. Various players share the blame for this failure, including politicians, big business, public-sector unions and the defense establishment. But one major culprit consistently escapes scrutiny – the media.
To understand how the media thwarts efforts at reform, try asking yourselves one simple question: What’s the most important economic reform carried out by the current government, and which minister made it happen?
The correct answer, in my opinion, is the awarding of contracts for building two private seaports to compete with the existing Haifa and Ashdod ports, a reform tenaciously pushed through by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz. Economists have been advocating this for decades and successive governments have talked about it for years, but until now, nothing has happened. So the fact that a Chinese firm signed a contract last month to build the new port near Ashdod, while the winner of the tender for the new Haifa port is slated to be announced imminently, ought to be big news. Instead, it’s been relegated to the bottom of the business pages, where most Israelis will never see it.
By giving such scant coverage to major reforms, the media create a massive political disincentive for politicians to make them. For such reforms often entail political costs, and positive media coverage is the only benefit that could compensate for these costs.
Granted, this isn’t an issue for those rare reforms whose benefits to the public are immediately evident. When competition was introduced into the cellphone market, for instance, Israelis’ cellphone bills promptly plummeted, making then-Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon an instant hero. But in many major reforms, the public benefits are neither immediate nor clearly ascribable to the reform.
The ports are a prime example. According to a 2009 study by the Antitrust Authority, Israel’s ports are 30% less efficient than similar-sized ports elsewhere, costing the economy some NIS 5 billion a year. The Trajtenberg Committee on socioeconomic reform echoed this conclusion in 2011, writing that “inferior service and low production in Israel’s ports cost the economy, which depends heavily on the ports, hundreds of millions of shekels a year. This is before taking into consideration the indirect damage, stemming from the business uncertainty imposed on the economy by the disruptions [in the ports’ work] and delays in developing new port infrastructures.”
The main culprit is the all-powerful dockworkers union, which has exploited its ability to shut down the ports to obtain outrageous benefits. That’s why “on-call” port pilots receive full salaries to sit at home and do nothing; why dockworkers earn far more than people doing similar jobs in the private sector; and why strikes are repeatedly called over demands like additional meal vouchers or the union’s “right” to dictate the identity of the CEO’s personal assistant.
The additional costs imposed by our monopolistic, inefficient ports jack up the price of every single imported product in Israel. They also jack up prices of locally made products that depend on imported raw materials, and even of products that have no imported components, since the latter face competition only from imports whose prices have been artificially inflated.
Thus building new ports to compete against the existing union-controlled monopoly is likely to result in lower prices. But any such benefits will arrive long after Katz has left office; the new Haifa port will open only in five or six years, and the Ashdod port in seven or eight. And even then, the benefits won’t be obviously and directly linked to the new ports: If prices begin falling in another eight years, few consumers will think to credit Katz’s reform.
The political costs, in contrast, are direct and immediate: The powerful dockworkers’ union, furious over Katz’s effort to break their monopoly, has declared war on him. And not only does this union command a solid block of votes in Katz’s Likud party, which it intends to wield against him in the next party primary, but so do other public-sector unions with which it is allied.
Many other vital reforms also involve confronting powerful interest groups and thus entail similar political costs. Hence absent compensatory political benefits, politicians face substantial disincentives to reform. And the only body capable of providing such benefits is the media.
If the media relentlessly exposed unproductive politicians while giving prominent and favorable coverage to those who implement significant reforms, this would provide reformers with a significant political benefit to balance the political costs. But instead, the media lavishes most of its attention on politicians who make a lot of noise while accomplishing little. Childish insults in the Knesset consistently win headlines, whereas politicians who quietly work to get things done are ignored.
Consequently, reforms happen only when a politician is either so politically strong that he can afford the political costs, so precariously situated that the alternative to reform is certain political death, or so committed that he doesn’t care about the political consequences. Katz, for instance, appears to combine genuine passion for port reform with a strong enough political base in Likud that he can probably weather the dockworkers’ revenge. But that combination is rare.
Moreover, many reforms can’t be implemented quickly. Work on the port reform, for example, began during the previous government, and could easily have stalled had Katz not made the unusual decision to remain in his ministry for a second term so he could finish what he had started. Greater media attention, however, would increase pressure on incumbent ministers not to abandon half-completed projects in favor of more prestigious ministries, and also on new ministers to complete reforms started by their predecessors.
Absent clear political incentives, reforms of the kind the economy desperately needs will remain a rarity. And only the media has the power to create the necessary incentives. Unfortunately, it prefers to waste its time, and ours, on covering trivialities.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
As long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do
The scene recurs with monotonous regularity before every Jewish holiday: Jews seek to visit the Temple Mount on the eve of the holiday, and Arabs stage meticulously preplanned riots to prevent them. But last Wednesday, on the eve of Sukkot, it ended differently than usual. Instead of police turning away the Jews to appease the rioters, they fought the rioters and let the visits proceed.
It’s not yet clear whether this represents a new trend: On Sunday, police closed the Mount to non-Muslims again due to fear of rioting; Monday, they fought the rioters and reopened it to visitors. Yet all Israelis should hope it becomes one, because the police’s longstanding reluctance to confront Arab thugs has negative consequences that go far beyond the Temple Mount. Large swathes of Jewish Jerusalem, facing what has been dubbed a “quiet intifada,” have suffered from this reluctance for months. Israeli Arabs nationwide have suffered from it for years. And all hope for improved Jewish-Arab relations in this country remains doomed as long as it persists.
I’ve written before about the dangerous consequences of police capitulation to Arab rioters on the Mount: It denies Jews the fundamental right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, undermines Israel’s diplomatic case for retaining Jerusalem as its united capital and encourages the Arab belief that violence pays. But while the first two are location-specific evils, the third applies throughout Israel. Hence it’s no surprise that such thuggery has spread.
In Jerusalem, Arab attacks on Jews have skyrocketed in recent months. School buses and cars have been stoned, cars and gas stations torched, houses pelted with Molotov cocktails and even shot at with live bullets – not just in predominantly Arab neighborhoods, but in veteran Jewish neighborhoods like Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill. The light rail has been vandalized so often that over a third of the trains are out of service. Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus has been repeatedly pelted with rocks and firebombs, and vehicles drive to and from the nearby army base in convoys, as if through a war zone.
But this violence doesn’t only harm Jerusalem’s Jews; it also harms law-abiding Arab residents of the neighborhoods whence it emanates, like Issawiya and Shuafat. Long before the violence spilled over into Jewish neighborhoods, for instance, thugs were routinely stoning Israeli ambulances that entered Arab neighborhoods. Consequently, ambulances won’t enter without a police escort, and waiting for this escort can waste precious time on life-saving calls. Moreover, in many Arab neighborhoods, the police’s refusal to confront the violence has allowed the thugs to take over completely, leading to rising crime and plummeting personal security. In Shuafat, for instance, “residents said that armed gangs wielding handguns, AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, and M-16 rifles roam the streets,” Nadav Shragai reported in Israel Hayom last month.
And this isn’t true only in East Jerusalem; it’s true of Arab towns nationwide. Because police for years treated Arab towns as no-go areas, they are now awash in illegal weapons, resulting in soaring crime rates. For instance, Arabs constitute 50% of all murder victims and 67% of perpetrators, despite constituting only 20% of Israel’s population.
In fairness, police neglected Arab towns largely because they were unwelcome there; residents often greeted them with riots and barrages of rocks. But 95% of Arabs now deem violence their community’s biggest problem, according to a recent study, and have therefore changed their attitude toward the police. That’s why Arab mayors and Knesset members have been demanding a greater police presence in their towns, and also why Arab mayors and merchants took the lead in trying to quell riots that erupted after Jewish extremists killed teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July: The law-abiding majority has realized that they are the main victims when police cede control to the thugs; both their security and their ability to earn a living suffers.
Yet the police’s unwillingness to confront Arab thugs doesn’t just hurt Arabs and Jews individually; it also undermines their ability to live together. Clearly, when thugs control Arab neighborhoods, Jews are afraid to visit and patronize Arab businesses. But in addition, ordinary Arabs are afraid to challenge the thugs’ anti-Israel party line.
Last month, for instance, Israel Hayom reported that an Arab teen had been forced to flee the country by the death threats he received after courageously making a video denouncing the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in June. Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Christian Arab who supports Arab service in the IDF and defended Israel last month at the UN Human Rights Council, has seen his son attacked and hospitalized because of his views. In both cases, police failed miserably to protect them from the thugs. So why would other Arabs want to follow their example?
Few people are heroes; most just want to live a quiet life. Thus as long as the thugs are in control, most Arabs will continue publicly assailing Israel even if they quietly support it, just because it’s the safest thing to do.
It’s important to note that little of this Arab thuggery is spontaneous. In last Wednesday’s incident on the Temple Mount, for instance, the rioters built barricades in advance, stockpiled rocks, firebombs, fireworks, metal pipes and concrete slabs, then slept on the Mount Tuesday night to be ready to start rioting bright and early. The “quiet intifada” in Jerusalem is similarly well-organized, Shragai reported: In each neighborhood, a Palestinian faction like Fatah, Hamas, the DFLP or the PFLP is in charge; the rioters have been trained to resist interrogation; the Palestinian Authority pays their legal fees; and someone as yet unknown is providing the thousands of shekels spent on their newest weapon of choice, fireworks.
In short, this is organized crime. And for the sake of Jews and Arabs alike, it’s vital that police make a determined effort to stop it instead of seeking to appease the thugs by such tactics as barring Jews from the Mount or failing to enforce the law in Arab towns and neighborhoods. For only thus will Jews and Arabs alike be able to enjoy not only security, but genuine coexistence.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Hateful graffiti targeting a minority have repeatedly been scrawled on cars and buildings, including houses of worship, yet police frequently fail to arrest the culprits. Innocent people have been viciously attacked and occasionally even murdered just because they belong to this minority. Clearly, this is a country awash in racism and prejudice that it’s making no real effort to stem, so it deserves harsh condemnation from anyone who cares about such fundamental liberal values as tolerance and nonviolence, right?
That’s certainly the conclusion many liberals leaped to about a similar wave of anti-Arab attacks in Israel. But what I actually just described is the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and there has–quite properly–been no similar rush to denounce America. Since the American government and people overwhelmingly condemn such attacks, and America remains one of the best places in the world to live openly as a Jew, liberals correctly treat such incidents as exceptions rather than proof that the U.S. is irredeemably anti-Semitic. But somehow, Israel never merits a similarly nuanced analysis.
Consider just a few of the attacks I referenced in the first paragraph: This past weekend–on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year–swastikas were spray-painted on a Jewish fraternity at Emory University in Atlanta, and also on a synagogue in Spokane, Washington, on the other side of the country. In August, a Jewish couple was attacked in New York by thugs who shouted anti-Semitic slogans, threw a water bottle at the woman, and punched her skullcap-wearing husband. In July, pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked by stick-wielding thugs in Los Angeles. On August 9, an Orthodox rabbi was murdered in Miami while walking to synagogue on the Sabbath; police insist this wasn’t a hate crime, though they haven’t yet arrested any suspects, but local Jews are unconvinced, as a synagogue and a Jewish-owned car on the same street were vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans just two weeks earlier. And in April, a white supremacist killed three people at two Jewish institutions near Kansas City, Kansas.
A Martian looking at this list, devoid of any context, might well conclude that America is a deeply anti-Semitic country. And of course, he’d be wrong. Context–the fact that these incidents are exceptions to the overwhelmingly positive picture of Jewish life in America–matters greatly.
Yet that’s no less true for anti-Arab attacks in Israel. As in America, both the government and the public have almost unanimously condemned such attacks. As in America, culprits have been swiftly arrested in some cases, like the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July; also as in America, the failure to make arrests in other cases stems not from tolerance for such crimes, but from the simple fact that some cases are harder to solve than others.
Finally, as in America, these incidents belie the fact that overall, Israeli Arabs are better integrated and have more rights not only than any of their counterparts in the Middle East, but also than some of their counterparts in Europe. Israel, for instance, has no laws against building minarets, like Switzerland does, or against civil servants wearing headscarves, as France does. Arabs serve in the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and sometimes the cabinet; they are doctors, university department heads, judges, and high-tech workers.
Clearly, anti-Arab prejudice exists in Israel, just as anti-Jewish prejudice exists in America. But a decade-old tracking project found that it has been declining rather than growing. And successive governments have been trying hard in recent years to narrow persistent Arab-Jewish gaps: For instance, an affirmative action campaign almost quadrupled the number of Arabs in the civil service from 2007 to 2011. Indeed, as Ron Gerlitz, co-executive director of Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, argued in August, it’s precisely the Arab minority’s growing integration that has outraged the anti-Arab fringe and helped spark the recent rise in hate crimes.
So it’s past time for liberals to give Israel the same courtesy they extend America: Stop looking at hate crimes in a vacuum and start seeing them for what they are–isolated incidents that don’t and shouldn’t condemn an entire country as “racist.”
Originally published in Commentary
Rising kashrut observance among millennials is a hopeful sign for both American Jewry and Israel
The new Jewish year opened with some encouraging Jewish news: According to a Pew Research poll cited by NPR last week, more than a quarter of the so-called millennial generation of American Jews now keeps kosher, almost double the percentage among their parents’ generation. This isn’t because Orthodox Jews have more children; as the NPR report noted, many millennial kashrut observers didn’t grow up in kosher homes. Nor have they become Orthodox themselves: The Pew data shows that only half of kashrut-observant millennials observe Shabbat. But by deciding to keep kosher, they have opted for a more distinctly Jewish identity – and that’s good news for anyone who cares about either American Jewry or Israel.
For decades now, soaring intermarriage rates and growing disinterest in organized religion have raised fears regarding the future of American Jewry. Indeed, the same 2013 Pew poll that NPR quoted greatly reinforced these fears: Inter alia, it found that while 93% of Jews born in 1914-27 consider themselves “Jews by religion,” that is true for only 68% of millennials, or people born after 1980; the remaining 32% of millennials define themselves as “Jews of no religion.” And by every conceivable measure, “Jews of no religion” are bad news for both the Jewish people and Israel.
A whopping 67%, for instance, raise their children “not Jewish,” compared to only 7% for Jews by religion, while 79% have non-Jewish spouses, more than double the 36% among Jews by religion. Fully 54% say being Jewish is of little or no importance to them, more than five times the rate among Jews by religion (10%); 55% feel little or no attachment to Israel, more than double the rate among Jews by religion (23%); and only 10% care about being part of a Jewish community, less than a third the rate among Jews by religion (33%).
In short, “Jews of no religion” are on a fast track to leaving the Jewish people altogether. Thus anyone who cares about American Jewry’s survival should be rooting for young Jews to become more attached to the Jewish religion.
And millennials who opt to keep kosher are necessarily doing exactly that, because keeping kosher requires them to recommit to Judaism every day anew: Day after day, they must decide what to eat or not eat, what to buy or not buy. Thus the fact that 27% of American Jews aged 18-29 keep kosher, up from 16% among the 50+ group, is a ray of light in the otherwise gloomy Pew data.
It’s also encouraging with regard to a related worry: that young American Jews are growing away from Israel. The Pew data unequivocally proves that the more American Jews care about Judaism, the more likely they are to care about Israel. That’s why Jews by religion deem caring about Israel “essential” to their Jewish identity at more than double the rate of Jews of no religion (49% to 23%), and why even among Jews by religion, the proportion who consider caring about Israel “essential” generally correlates closely with attachment to traditional Jewish praxis, rising from 31% among nondenominational Jews to 42% for Reform, 58% for Conservative and 79% for modern Orthodox (the ultra-Orthodox are anomalous; at 45%, they resemble Reform Jews).
This correlation was inadvertently highlighted by a front-page New York Times story last month in which rabbis who criticize Israel complained about congregational backlash. “Rabbis are just really scared because they get slammed by their right-wing congregants, who are often the ones with the purse strings,” said Conservative Rabbi Jill Jacobs. She didn’t bother analyzing that telling statement, but I will: Major synagogue donors, by definition, are people who care deeply about maintaining organized Jewish religious life. And those are precisely the people who, as the Pew data shows, tend to be most supportive of Israel, and hence most likely to object to anti-Israel sermons.
Even Peter Beinart, who has made a career out of blaming Israeli policy for “distancing” young American Jews from Israel, admitted in a surprising pre-Rosh Hashanah op-ed that the main culprit is actually their alienation from religion. “The greatest threat to Jewish life in the United States is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s religious illiteracy,” he wrote, before adding that, “the best way to ensure that American Jews stay connected to Israel is to ensure that they stay connected to Judaism … If you care deeply about Jewish tradition, you’re likely to care deeply about Israel,” whereas if you’re indifferent to the Bible and the synagogue and Jewish holidays, “you’re likely to be indifferent to Israel too.”
Thus the fact that some young American Jews are becoming more attached to Judaism offers hope for their attachment to Israel as well.
It’s also worth noting, as Mitchell Bard did last month, that decades of Gallup polling among Americans overall show a tendency for people to become more supportive of Israel as they age. In 1982, for instance, 49% of Americans aged 18-29 sympathized with Israel more than the Palestinians; today, when those same people are 55+, 74% of them support Israel. In 1996, 32% of 18- to 29-year-olds favored Israel; today, those people are aged 36-47, and 58% of them do so.
Why this happens isn’t clear, though I suspect moving from the left-wing hotbed of college campuses to the real world plays a role. But assuming American Jews resemble other Americans in this regard, one would expect millennials to become more supportive of Israel as they age regardless of their Jewish identity. When you combine this with a salient indicator of enhanced Jewish identity like increased kashrut observance, the widespread assertion that Israel is “losing” the millennial generation seems, at least, premature.
None of this justifies complacency: If we want to ensure that young Jews remain attached to the Jewish people and Israel, investing in their knowledge of and attachment to Judaism is vital. But as the upsurge of kashrut observance among millennials shows, it’s not yet too late. For far from losing interest in being Jewish, some young American Jews are clearly hungry for a Judaism with more to offer than just the latest liberal talking points.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
If the world hasn’t yet grasped that Palestinians aren’t interested in peace, it’s certainly not because Palestinians haven’t been working hard to make it clear. Mahmoud Abbas’s “genocide” speech at the UN last week did get momentary attention, being too public to ignore completely. But an even more telling incident has been almost completely overlooked: the expulsion of Haaretz reporter Amira Hass–a woman who has spent decades promoting the Palestinian cause–from a conference at Birzeit University near Ramallah, solely because she is an Israeli Jew.
Nobody, in Israel or outside it, is more pro-Palestinian than Hass. To the best of my knowledge, she’s the only Israeli reporter so dedicated to the Palestinians that she has made her home among them for decades, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. She reports relentlessly on Palestinian suffering under the “occupation regime” and is a tireless apologist for unattractive Palestinian habits such as stone-throwing. Her latest op-ed, for instance, was an apologia for Abbas’s genocide speech, and her report on her expulsion from Birzeit was similarly forgiving of the bigoted policy that bans all Israeli Jews–though not Israeli Arabs–from the campus simply because they are Israeli Jews. So if students and faculty at Birzeit, the Palestinians’ flagship university, can’t even tolerate having Hass on their campus, what does that say about Palestinian readiness to make peace with the Israeli majority, which doesn’t share her belief that their own country is evil and all justice is on the Palestinians’ side?
After all, universities are where the next generation of leaders is nurtured; this makes Birzeit’s position far more important than that of the 79-year-old Abbas, now in the tenth year of his four-year term. Abbas will soon be gone. But Birzeit’s students and graduates will be an influential force in Palestinian society for decades to come.
So how is peace possible when Birzeit is educating these future Palestinian leaders to believe all Israeli Jews should be shunned simply because they are Israeli Jews? And how is peace possible when these future leaders won’t even listen to any view of the conflict that contradicts their own, such as an Israeli Jew (though not Hass) might provide?
Needless to say, this is the polar opposite of how Israeli universities act: Their faculties overwhelmingly favor a two-state solution and educate accordingly, and Palestinian students are welcome regardless of their views. Even Omar Barghouti, leader of the BDS movement, famously (and hypocritically) obtained his master’s degree from Tel Aviv University and is now pursuing his doctorate there in between trips abroad to urge others to boycott the institution.
Under pressure from her many influential fans–including Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which sponsored the conference she was expelled from–Birzeit later said it would make an exception to its rule for “supporters of the Palestinian struggle” like Hass. But that doesn’t fundamentally alter either its bigoted policy or its unwillingness to listen to anyone who might challenge the Palestinian narrative.
Nor is Birzeit exceptional in this regard. In June, for instance, Prof. Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi was forced to resign from another leading Palestinian institution, Al-Quds University, for having dared to take some of his students to Auschwitz to teach them about the Holocaust. If a leading Palestinian university won’t even let its students learn about the Holocaust because it might increase their empathy for Israeli Jews, what does that say about prospects for peace?
As Haaretz blogger Matthew Kalman perceptively noted, peace isn’t the only victim of Birzeit’s behavior: Palestinian universities’ unwillingness to confront students with any perspective that might challenge their preexisting views has also hindered Palestinian economic development, because students aren’t developing the critical thinking skills necessary for success in today’s high-tech economy. But that’s the Palestinians’ problem.
Birzeit’s education to hatred and prejudice, in contrast, ought to be the problem of anyone who claims to care about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Unfortunately, most of the world would rather look the other way.
Originally published in Commentary
Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, Rory Miller made the classic mistake of using accurate facts to jump to an erroneous conclusion. He gleefully pronounced the failure of Israel’s effort to convert burgeoning economic ties with India and China into diplomatic capital, asserting that while Israel had expected these ties to “help secure greater international support” for its positions, in reality, China and India have both maintained staunchly pro-Palestinian policies. But though Miller is right about the Asian powers’ policies, he’s utterly wrong about the diplomatic gains Israel hoped to reap from these relationships.
For instance, Miller makes much of the fact that China still votes against Israel on every conceivable issue at the UN. But you’d have to be an idiot–which most senior Israeli politicians aren’t–to expect it to do otherwise.
Flipping China into the pro-Israel camp might be possible if and when it democratizes, since it’s one of the few countries where public opinion actually leans pro-Israel. Indeed, as the Australian paper Business Spectator noted this month, China was among the few places worldwide where Israel was actually winning the social media war during the summer’s fighting in Gaza. And it certainly makes sense for Israel to cultivate this public support in preparation for the day when democratization occurs. But right now, China remains a Communist dictatorship that sees America as its chief foreign-policy rival. Thus as long as Washington (thankfully) remains Israel’s main patron at the UN, Beijing will naturally take the anti-Israel side–not because it cares so passionately about the Palestinian cause (which, unlike Miller, I don’t believe it does), but because it cares about the anti-American cause.
India, despite growing ties with Washington, also has a long tradition of anti-Americanism, as well as a large Muslim minority. Thus New Delhi was never a likely candidate for UN support, either.
And in fact, Miller doesn’t cite any Israeli politician who actually espoused such unrealistic expectations. He simply assumes, on the basis of vague bromides like Naftali Bennett’s “diplomacy can follow economy,” that they must have held such expectations.
But in reality, Israel is seeking a very different foreign-policy benefit from its trade ties with India and China–one it has never spelled out explicitly, for very good reason: What it wants is an economic insurance policy against European countries that it still officially labels as allies.
The EU currently accounts for about one-third of Israel’s exports. This constitutes a dangerous vulnerability, because Europe is the one place worldwide where Israel faces a real danger of economic boycotts and sanctions. Granted, few European leaders actually want this; they consider the economic relationship with Israel mutually beneficial. But European leaders are generally far more pro-Israel than their publics, and since European countries are democracies, public opinion matters.
To date, the public’s anti-Israel sentiment has produced only marginal sanctions, like those on Israeli exports from the West Bank (a minuscule percentage of Israel’s total exports). But Israel can’t rule out the possibility that public pressure will eventually produce more stringent sanctions if Jerusalem continues refusing to capitulate to EU demands on the Palestinian issue that are antithetical to its security. In short, Israel could someday face a devastating choice between its economic needs and its security needs–unless it can diversify its trade enough to be able to weather EU sanctions if and when they occur.
And that’s precisely what Israel seeks from China and India, two countries with a history of not allowing policy disagreements to interfere with business: If it can build up its Asian trade enough to reduce its economic dependence on Europe, it will be better placed to withstand European pressure to adopt policies inimical to its survival.
Whether Israel will succeed in this goal remains to be seen. But if it does, that will be a diplomatic gain of unparalleled importance–even if it never wins Chinese or Indian support in a single UN vote.
Originally published in Commentary