Monthly Archives: February 2015
An imploding Middle East would seem an unlikely setting for finally realizing the Zionist dream of progress toward normalization with Israel’s neighbors. So I had to rub my eyes when I read the following report: Last week, Israel and Egypt ran a joint booth at the world’s biggest apparel trade fair, in Las Vegas. In addition, they’re discussing plans to double textile exports from the Egyptian-Israeli Qualifying Industrial Zone, and also to expand the zone to other products, like foodstuffs and plastics. Given that normalization with Israel has long been anathema in Egypt, this is an astounding turnabout.
The QIZ, which the U.S. created 10 years ago in order to bolster Egyptian-Israeli peace by encouraging economic collaboration, allows Egypt to export textiles to America duty-free if Israel contributes a certain percentage of their value. But until now, Egypt has kept its cooperation with Israel as low-profile and limited as possible due to the sweeping consensus against normalization.
After all, this is a country where a leading author was expelled from the writers’ union and saw his books banned for the “crime” of traveling to Israel and writing about his experiences. It’s a country where translated Israeli books sparked such outrage that the culture minister had to defend himself from accusations of “normalization” by saying the translations were intended only to enable Egyptians to “know their enemy” and promising that the project would involve no contact with Israeli publishers, but only with the Israeli authors’ foreign publishers. It’s a country where every candidate in the 2012 presidential election vowed to either scrap or “renegotiate” the peace treaty with Israel. And none of this was long ago.
Yet now, suddenly, Egypt is running a joint booth with Israel at a trade fair and discussing ways to expand the QIZ.
In part, this may indicate that Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi is more serious about trying to improve his country’s battered economy than he’s often given credit for–to the point that he’s even willing to bolster cooperate with Israel to do so, despite the risk of antagonizing the anti-normalization trolls, who quite definitely still exist.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine this happening without the growing recognition that Egypt and Israel face a common enemy: the Islamist terrorists in the Sinai and their Palestinian collaborators from Gaza. As a result, not only has security cooperation between the two defense establishments never been closer, but attitudes have also begun changing among ordinary Egyptians. During last summer’s war in Gaza, for instance, some Egyptian media commentators openly rooted for Israel to defeat Hamas (which an Egyptian court has since declared a terrorist organization).
Just how much Egypt’s enemy list has changed in recent years was somewhat ironically highlighted by a front-page article in the daily Al Ahram last week, after ISIS killed 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya and the Obama administration refused to support Egypt’s retaliatory airstrikes. In the best tradition of Egyptian conspiracy theories, the article accused Qatar, Turkey, and the U.S. of collaborating to sow “chaos and destruction” in Egypt. Notably absent from the list was the usual suspect–the one that used to routinely figure as the villain in every Egyptian conspiracy theory, like the 2010 classic that blamed the Mossad for shark attacks on Sinai beaches.
Having long since despaired of the dream that the cold peace with Egypt would someday thaw into normalization, most Israelis figured the new and improved security coordination was as good as it gets and expected nothing more. And yet, improbably, more seems to be happening. After all, it’s hard to imagine anything more “normalized” than a joint booth at a trade fair. And it offers hope that just maybe, something good can emerge from the current Mideast madness.
Originally published in Commentary on February 25, 2015
Why do people still back Netanyahu? Because in statecraft, as in medicine, the first rule is ‘do no harm’
The outcome of next month’s election is currently anyone’s guess. But if Benjamin Netanyahu ends up becoming prime minister again, it will have a lot to do with the attitude exemplified by Haaretz columnist Uri Misgav.
In an op-ed earlier this month, Misgav wrote that he could understand voting for any other party, but “I find it very difficult to explain what is going through the minds of those who are planning to vote for Likud headed by Netanyahu … Despite serious efforts, I am unable to understand them, or even to imagine their ideological and emotional world … In the name of God: Who are you, Likud voters, and why?”
A week later, another left-wing Haaretz columnist, Kobi Niv, published a blistering retort. Too many “members of the broader Ashkenazi liberal Zionist camp” simply dismiss Likud voters as idiots, and that’s no way to persuade them to switch their allegiance, Niv wrote. Nor are any of the common variations on this theme: that people vote Likud “because they came from countries without a tradition of democracy … because their parents didn’t found the state, because they don’t know right from wrong,” etc.
But the problem goes much deeper than the patronizing attitude Niv correctly skewered. Because after all, Misgav is a journalist, and obtaining information is the essence of a journalist’s job. Thus if he truly wanted to know the answer to his question, one would expect him to make some effort to find it – for instance, by tracking down a few Likud voters and asking them. Yet his column offers no indication that he did so.
And that’s no accident; it’s the heart of the problem: Many Israeli leftists don’t want to know why people vote for Netanyahu, because confronting the reasons would force them to honestly confront the problems created by their own policy prescriptions. People who still believe in territorial withdrawals with religious fervor don’t want to admit that the results of previous pullouts could pose legitimate questions about their wisdom. Yet that’s precisely what most Likud voters would tell them if they asked.
None of the Likud voters I know – myself included – are big Netanyahu fans; we’d happily vote for a better candidate if we saw one. We all think he’s done some things he shouldn’t have done and failed to do some things he should have done.
But he also hasn’t perpetrated any major disasters on the scale that almost all his recent predecessors have. And in statecraft, as in medicine, the first rule is, “Do no harm.”
Over the last 20 years, several ambitious premiers who sincerely tried to radically improve our lives have ended up making them much worse. Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, signed the Oslo Accords, which handed most of Gaza and parts of the West Bank over to Yasser Arafat’s PLO. But under PLO rule, those areas became hotbeds of anti-Israel terror, culminating in the second intifada, which produced more Israeli casualties in four years than all the Palestinian terror of the previous 53 years combined. Most Israelis didn’t consider this an improvement; they’re glad the IDF subsequently resumed security control of the entire West Bank and thereby brought terror back down to pre-Oslo levels.
Similarly, Ehud Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 enabled Hezbollah not only to effectively seize control of that country, but also to engage in a massive arms build-up. This terrorist organization now has an arsenal of some 100,000 missiles, dwarfing that of many countries in both quantity and quality, and they’re all pointed straight at Israel. Granted, the month-long Second Lebanon War of 2006 killed only about half as many Israelis as the IDF’s 15-year presence in south Lebanon. But defense officials unanimously say the next round will be much worse – and that it’s only a matter of time until it happens.
In addition, Barak insisted on conducting final-status negotiations with Arafat despite the latter’s reluctance, and unsurprisingly, the talks failed, leading directly to the second intifada.
Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 enabled Hamas to seize control of the coastal territory and conduct its own massive arms build-up. Over the ensuing decade, Palestinian terrorists have fired some 15,000 rockets and mortars at Israel from Gaza. Contrary to the oft-heard claim, the withdrawal did not save soldiers’ lives: The rocket attacks have already forced Israel into three wars, resulting in more IDF fatalities than policing Gaza ever did, even at the height of the second intifada. And here, too, defense officials say the next round is just a matter of time.
Netanyahu has embarked on no such grand adventures; he moves only cautiously and incrementally. So he produced no earth-shaking achievements, only modest ones. But he also, thereby, avoided making things dramatically worse.
He sought to manage the Palestinian conflict with a minimum of bloodshed, and overall, he succeeded. The economy didn’t roar, but it grew steadily during years when few other Western economies did; and unemployment actually fell to historic lows. No sweeping domestic reforms were enacted, but there were several smaller ones that ought to modestly improve living standards (the open-skies agreement, tenders for new ports, the expansion of state-funded daycare, etc.). Relations with Europe and the Obama administration – though not the United States as a whole – deteriorated, while relations with China, India and Japan improved markedly; but both developments stemmed at least as much from the internal dynamics of the countries concerned as they did from Netanyahu’s diplomacy.
Is this a stellar record? No. But neither is it a bad one. And I’d take it any day over the disastrous grand initiatives of Rabin, Barak and Sharon.
This, then, is the question leftists must answer if they hope to woo Likud voters: Why should we believe that the diplomatic initiatives and/or unilateral withdrawals you advocate today won’t make our lives significantly worse, just as those earlier ones did? I’ve yet to hear anyone provide a convincing answer.
And that’s why Misgav and his fellows would really rather not know why many Israelis still support Netanyahu. Because dismissing Likud voters as idiots is much easier than having to honestly confront that question.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 24, 2015
I’ve written frequently about how the West’s obsession with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians helps perpetuate global misery by diverting attention from people in far greater distress (think Syrians or South Sudanese). Yet this obsession also perpetuates suffering among the one group it’s ostensibly supposed to help–the Palestinians. Three Jerusalem Post reports over the last week show why.
One warned that a leading Palestinian hospital is at risk of closure because of a $30 million debt. A major reason for this debt is that for years, the Palestinian Authority has failed to pay Mokassed Hospital for many of the patients it treats. This isn’t because the PA lacked money; it has ample funds to pay generous salaries to thousands of terrorists sitting in Israeli jails. Rather, it’s a matter of priorities: On the PA’s scale of values, paying terrorists for killing Israelis is evidently more important than paying doctors for healing Palestinians.
Almost 40 percent of the PA’s budget consists of foreign aid, with the vast majority coming from Western countries. The West is therefore uniquely placed to pressure the PA to alter its spending priorities. But it has never tried to do any such thing, because it only cares about what Israel does or doesn’t do.
Thus one factor that has recently exacerbated Mokassed’s problems has elicited worldwide condemnations: Israel’s withholding of tax revenues from the PA over the last two months in response to the latter’s egregious violations of the Oslo Accords, including joining the International Criminal Court. Yet even if Israel handed over that money tomorrow, there’s no reason to think the PA would suddenly start using it to pay Mokassed when it never did so in all the years before Israel halted the transfers.
In short, pressuring Israel won’t actually solve the problem; only pressuring the PA would do that. But since the West doesn’t care what the PA does, Palestinian patients will continue to suffer.
In the second report, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon criticized the PA for failing to take control of Gaza’s border crossings as it promised to do after last summer’s war. This failure, he noted, has greatly delayed Gaza’s reconstruction, since the reconstruction mechanism devised by the UN and Western donors mandated PA control of the crossings in an effort to minimize diversions of dual-use materials to Hamas’s war machine.
But because Israel has never sealed its border with Hamas-controlled Gaza completely–it has sent in 62,000 tons of construction supplies since August despite the PA’s absence from the crossings–the real hardship has occurred along the Egyptian border. The Rafah border crossing is Gaza’s main gateway to the world, but it has been closed almost hermetically for months, because Cairo considers Hamas a terrorist organization and refuses to reopen Rafah as long as Hamas controls it.
A particularly horrific consequence ensued in November, when an 11-year-old Palestinian died because the Rafah closure prevented her from entering Egypt for needed medical treatment. So why didn’t she go to Israel instead? Because Hamas refuses to talk to Israel directly, so requests for medical entry permits from Gaza are sent through the PA. But according to Razan al-Halkawi’s relatives, the PA refused to forward her request because it was embroiled in one of its periodic spats with Hamas.
In short, the PA refused to do what was needed to enable al-Halkawi to get treatment in either Egypt or Israel. And so she died.
As the PA’s major donor, the West could be pressing the Palestinians to live up to their post-war commitments. But it won’t, because if Israel can’t be blamed, it doesn’t care.
Report number three: Thousands of Palestinians who bought homes in the new Palestinian city of Rawabi can’t move in because the city isn’t connected to the water system. Why? Because all West Bank water projects need approval by the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee, which the PA has refused to convene for the last five years. Evidently, it would rather deprive its own people of better housing than agree to meet with Israeli officials.
Here, too, the West could use its financial leverage to press the PA to convene the panel and let Rawabi open. But it hasn’t, because if Israel can’t be blamed, it’s not interested.
In short, in numerous cases where the West could use its leverage over the PA to better the lot of ordinary Palestinians, it has refused to do so, because it only cares about Israel’s actions. And thus the biggest victims of the West’s Israel obsession have ended up being not Israelis, but the Palestinians themselves.
Originally published in Commentary on February 18, 2015
The left controls such centers because it invested decades of effort in doing so. The right doesn’t even try
One of the more perceptive responses to the recent uproar over the composition of the Israel Prize juries came from columnist Ariana Melamed. Responding to the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s complaint that these juries have become a “private playground of the radical Left,” Melamed retorted, “while it’s true that a huge number of leftists have won the prize, that [is] only because the right has failed to establish an alternative to an elite that began turning to the left way back when Begin was giving speeches in city squares.”
Though her explanation of this failure is ludicrous (she essentially argues that great artists and intellectuals almost by definition vote left), the failure itself is undeniable. Because an intellectual or cultural elite isn’t just a random collection of individuals who produce intellectual or cultural output; it’s a power center. And while Israel’s center-right produces both intellectuals and artists, not only has it failed to mobilize these resources to pose any real challenge to the left’s cultural dominance, but for the most part, it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it makes do with whining about the leftist elites’ lock on intellectual and cultural power centers, from universities to the legal establishment to the media to the Israel Prizes.
Last week brought a classic example of this willful refusal to contest control over such power centers: Prof. Asher Cohen’s ouster as head of a professional advisory committee on the school civics curriculum because he ran in Bayit Yehudi’s party primary.
Leftists have always understood that control over the civics curriculum is vital, because it shapes students’ views on critical questions like whether Zionism is essentially just or inherently unjust, whether a “Jewish and democratic” state is a reasonable goal or an oxymoron. Consequently, they have made great efforts to influence this curriculum. Thus, for instance, Cohen’s predecessor, Adar Cohen, approved a civics textbook which not only termed the Law of Return a violation of civil rights (the law exemplifies “a clash between civil liberties … and Israel’s purpose as a Jewish state”), but even claimed that Judaism was originally only a religion, not a nationality (a blatant contradiction of Judaism’s formative text, the Bible, which refers to the Jews repeatedly as “the nation of Israel”).
Former Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, one of the few rightists who do understand the importance of cultural power centers, consequently braved a storm of opposition to replace Adar Cohen with Asher Cohen in 2012. That put the latter in a unique position to shape the views of generations of schoolchildren. But instead, he threw it away for a chance to enter the Knesset, where his influence on future generations would have been incomparably smaller even had he not fared so poorly enough in the primary that he certainly won’t get in.
For another example, consider columnist Emily Amrousi’s extended whine about the New Israel Fund in Israel Hayom last month. Inter alia, she complained, the NIF is “actively trying to insert its own people into government — just look at the success of the New Israel Fund’s law fellowship, which has been operating for three decades with the express aim of ‘cultivating legal leadership to promote human and civil rights and social justice.’ Dozens of the fellowship’s alumni have gone on to serve in the State Prosecutor’s Office and the Justice Ministry. Some have them have been appointed judges and as such, proven their commitment to the spirit of the New Israel Fund in their legal work.”
My reaction on reading this was, “What a brilliant idea. Why hasn’t the right created legal fellowships to groom its people for influential positions in the legal establishment?” After all, whoever controls the legal establishment controls a major power center. The NIF understands this, which is why it puts money and effort into these fellowships. But not only has the center-right created nothing equivalent, it has done nothing whatsoever to contest the left’s legal dominance.
Thus, for instance, successive center-right governments have consistently quashed bills to alter the way Supreme Court justices are chosen, even though changing the selection process is crucial to ending the left’s hammerlock on the court. Similarly, right-leaning members of the Bar Association frequently back left-wing candidates for the Judicial Appointments Committee in exchange for getting “their” candidates on the panel that appoints religious court judges, not understanding that the former – which chooses the Supreme Court – ultimately has far more impact on Israel’s Jewish character than the latter.
The picture is identical in the media. Rightists complain bitterly that the left dominates radio and television, but during decades in power, center-right governments have repeatedly refused to enact legislation opening the airwaves to competition. Thus the two state-owned radio stations (Army Radio and Kol Yisrael) continue to monopolize the national news agenda, because no other station can legally broadcast a nationwide news program.
Incredibly, center-right governments have even rushed to rescue failing left-wing broadcasters instead of letting them collapse. For instance, the left-leaning Channel 10 television has repeatedly been on the verge of losing its license in recent years because it hasn’t met its financial commitments. Yet instead of letting it fail and auctioning its license to someone else, Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly bailed it out.
Even in the world of print media, Israeli rightists correctly complained for years about the left-wing slant of Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, but made no serious effort to launch a rival paper with a different editorial viewpoint. It took an American Jew, Sheldon Adelson, to finally step up to the plate and do it for them by founding Israel Hayom.
It’s true that the left exploits its control of Israel’s cultural power centers to systematically exclude people of the wrong political persuasion. But leftists didn’t achieve their dominance of these power centers by divine decree; they achieved it through decades of intensive effort. So if the right wants to contest left-wing domination of the intellectual and cultural elite, it needs to invest equivalent effort. If it just keeps waiting for the left to share this power of its own accord, it will be waiting until the Messiah comes.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 16, 2015
The Obama administration’s inexplicable denial that last month’s attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris could possibly be anti-Semitic overshadowed yesterday’s other interesting tidbit from the anti-Semitism front: German Jewish organizations are furious because a blue-ribbon panel set up by the German government to advise it on fighting anti-Semitism doesn’t include a single Jew. It’s hard to imagine that a panel on, say, prejudice against Muslims or blacks would exclude representatives of the targeted community. But the more serious concern is that a panel without Jews will ignore one of the main manifestations of modern anti-Semitism, as exemplified by another German decision just last week: a judicial ruling that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about torching a synagogue to protest Israeli actions in Gaza.
The case involved two German-Palestinian adults who threw Molotov cocktails at the Wuppertal synagogue in July, causing 800 euros worth of damage. The court decided the attack wasn’t anti-Semitic and therefore let them off with suspended jail sentences and community service. And why wasn’t it anti-Semitic? Because, said the court, the perpetrators were simply trying to bring “attention to the Gaza conflict” then raging between Hamas and Israel. And of course there’s nothing anti-Semitic about attacking Jews in one country to “bring attention” to acts by other Jews in another country; they’re all Jews, aren’t they? Doubtless the court would be equally understanding if Israelis torched a German church to “bring attention to” this abhorrent ruling.
Nor is the ruling an aberration; it’s quite representative of elite German thought. Last year, Prof. Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University of Berlin published a study that analyzed 10 years’ worth of hate mail sent to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin. To her surprise, only 3 percent came from right-wing extremists, while over 60 percent came from educated members of “the social mainstream.” And these letters weren’t mere “Israel criticism”; they contained classic anti-Semitic statements like “It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition” or “For the last 2,000 years, you’ve been stealing land and committing genocide.”
Needless to say, educated elites in other European countries aren’t much better. Last month, for instance, a BCC reporter drew fire for implying that the kosher supermarket attack in Paris was somehow justified because “Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.” And just last week, Britain’s Sky News “apologized” for showing footage from the Gaza war above a strip saying “Auschwitz remembered” during a Holocaust Memorial Day interview with Britain’s chief rabbi; the “apology” defended the original decision as “logical” even while admitting that in retrospect, it was “unfortunate.” After all, what could be more logical than implicitly comparing a war that killed some 2,100 Palestinians (and 72 Israelis) to the deliberate extermination of six million Jews?
Indeed, this comparison is so “logical” to many educated Westerners that during the Gaza war, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum felt the need to publish a special FAQs section on its website explaining why the war wasn’t comparable to the Holocaust, why Palestinians aren’t victims of genocide, and why Gaza isn’t a ghetto. You’d think this would be self-evident, but in a world where 35 percent of Germans say Israel treats Palestinians just like the Nazis treated Jews, and where Britons loathe Israel more than any other country except North Korea, it clearly isn’t.
In short, modern anti-Semitism can’t be fought without addressing a problem that too many members of Europe’s educated elites refuse to see: The propagators of today’s anti-Semitism come primarily from their own Israel-obsessed ranks, not from the far-right fringes. And one can’t help wondering whether Jews were left off Germany’s blue-ribbon panel precisely because they might have the temerity to point this out.
Originally published in Commentary on February 11, 2015
The Egyptian president’s war on terror in Sinai is a daily reminder of why Israel shouldn’t leave the West Bank
On January 31, Egypt became the first Arab country to declare Hamas’s armed wing a terrorist organization. In so doing, Egypt aligned itself with America and the European Union, both of which have long deemed Hamas a terrorist group (the EU is currently appealing a December court ruling overturning its designation). Cairo is also fully engaged in the West’s battle against the Islamic State, though it’s focusing on the group’s Sinai-based affiliate, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. All this begs an obvious question: Why does Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi seem to be the West’s least favorite Arab leader?
Granted, he’s an autocrat who brutally suppresses dissent, but so is every other Arab leader – and the West seems prepared to overlook their repression as long as it deems them sufficiently opposed to Islamist terror. Thus Western leaders flocked to Saudi King Abdullah’s funeral last month, though Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most repressive countries, where women are forbidden to drive and bloggers can be sentenced to 1,000 lashes. And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is feted in every Western capital, though he’s now in the eleventh year of his four-year term and his security forces routinely arrest and intimidate journalists.
Sisi, in contrast, has long received a cold shoulder. Congress froze American aid to Egypt after he took power in2013, finally lifting this ban only two months ago; thus he’s had to rely on the Gulf States and Russia for desperately needed military and financial aid. He has yet to visit Washington, though he did meet President Barack Obama at the UN in New York in September; in contrast, the State Department recently hosted officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, Sisi’s bitterest opponent. And his European trip in November didn’t include the key European capitals of Berlin and London.
So here’s my theory: The West dislikes Sisi’s war on terror because, unlike that of other Arab countries, it threatens the logic of one of the West’s most cherished policy goals – an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
Hamas has abetted Sinai jihadists since long before Sisi took power; after a deadly attack in August 2012, for instance, Cairo accused three Hamas members of involvement and demanded their extradition from Gaza. But Sisi escalated the battle against Gaza-based terror dramatically. Last March, an Egyptian court banned Hamas activities in Egypt; in October, Egypt began razing hundreds of houses along the Gaza border to create a buffer zone to stem cross-border traffic in weapons and terrorists; and now, it has declared Hamas a terrorist organization.
Yet while Western countries also ostensibly oppose Hamas, Sisi’s war poses two problems for them. First, it refutes their fond fantasy that Palestinian terrorists are merely anti-Israel, and would abandon terror if Israel just “ended the occupation.” A group that’s been exporting mayhem to a neighboring Arab country for years won’t stop just because Israel cedes more territory.
More importantly, however, it refutes the very idea that further Israeli withdrawals would promote Mideast stability – because in fact, Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza was the direct cause of Sinai’s radicalization.
Until 2005, Israeli troops controlled the Gaza-Egypt border, limiting contact between Hamas and Sinai. But when the IDF left, that restraining influence disappeared. And the impact, as journalist Ehud Yaari noted in a 2012 study, was devastating:
As Bedouin political activist Ashraf al-Anani put it, “a fireball started rolling into the peninsula.” Illegal trade and arms smuggling volumes rose to new records, and ever-larger sectors of the northern Sinai population became linked to Gaza and fell under the political and ideological influence of Hamas and its ilk … In short, despite then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s quiet hope that Cairo would assume unofficial responsibility for Gaza affairs, the Israeli withdrawal instead allowed Hamas to export its influence into Egyptian territory.
Facilitated by the dramatic increase in the number of tunnels … the expansion of Hamas and other Palestinian activities in the Sinai was unprecedented. In fact, the arms flow was often reversed, with weapons going from Gaza to the Sinai. During the [Egyptian] revolution, for example, observers noted a huge demand for firearms in the peninsula…
Today, a significant number of Hamas military operatives are permanently stationed in the Sinai, serving as recruiters, couriers, and propagators of the Hamas platform. A solid network of the group’s contact men, safe houses, and armories covers much of the peninsula … In addition, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other factions have been moving some of their explosives workshops—which produce homemade missiles, rockets, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and so forth—from Gaza to the Sinai in recent months.
Nor was it just arms and ideology that Gaza exported to Sinai: According to Israeli intelligence, Palestinian terrorists also trained their Sinai counterparts – and jihadists from other countries as well.
“We thought Sinai was the source of all evil for Gaza, but it turned out that things were exactly the opposite,” a senior intelligence official told Haaretz in 2013. “We thought experienced global jihad operatives from Afghanistan and Iraq would come to Sinai, and from there to Gaza, but in practice, the operatives from Gaza are the ones who taught the operatives in Sinai everything they know.”
It doesn’t take an Einstein to realize that just as Israel’s departure from Gaza allowed Hamas free rein to destabilize neighboring Sinai, Israel’s departure from the West Bank would give it free rein to destabilize neighboring Jordan. True, the West Bank is currently controlled by Abbas, not Hamas. But so was Gaza when Israel left – until Hamas staged a military coup two years later. Would anyone seriously bet against a similar coup in the West Bank once the IDF, the main force keeping Hamas in check, was gone?
Thus Sisi’s war on both the Sinai jihadists and Hamas is a constant and none-too-subtle reminder that far from being stabilizing, an Israeli pullout from the West Bank would be deeply destabilizing. Yet after years of declaring such a pullout to be a top foreign policy priority, Western leaders don’t want to face this unpleasant truth. So instead, they’ve taken the easier route: simply shunning the man whose policies keep bringing it to mind.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 9, 2015
Bloomberg released its annual Global Innovation Index this week, and Israel was ranked fifth worldwide. Given Israel’s reputation as the “start-up nation,” that may not seem surprising (in fact, it should, but that’s a topic for another post). Yet “start-up nation” has become such a cliché that it often obscures one of the most important–and admirable–qualities behind Israel’s tech successes: a consistent determination to turn lemons into lemonade.
This is true in many walks of Israeli life. Back in 2007, for instance, I wrote a column about the astounding fact that after losing a child in a war or terror attack, Israeli parents had repeatedly responded not with a desire for revenge, but with a desire to commemorate their child by doing something to make the world a better place. Consequently, bereaved parents in Israel have set up everything from public parks to foundations that help families care for special-needs children.
In the high-tech field, this same quality has led Israel to respond to a horrendous security environment by creating products that not only serve immediate defense needs, but have the potential to benefit humanity as a whole. And this response has played a major role in fueling its tech boom.
Take, for instance, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which was born of the grim need to deal with nonstop rocket fire from Hamas-run Gaza. Though the system proved spectacularly successful during last summer’s war, it initially seemed to have limited application; few other countries routinely suffer rocket attacks from their neighbors.
Now, however, an Israeli-Canadian partnership is busy turning the technology behind Iron Dome into a system for smart electrical grid management. As the Jerusalem Post reported last month, “The same algorithms that help Iron Dome respond to complex inputs quickly and efficiently were applied to monitoring and controlling the electric grid,” which will both save energy and help reduce blackouts. The new technology “has the potential to change grid management in North America and beyond,” according to Henri Rothschild, president of the Canada-Israel Industrial R&D Foundation, which helped broker the joint venture.
Another example is a start-up that literally makes potable water out of thin air. Founder Arye Kohavi, whom Foreign Policy named as one of its 100 leading global thinkers last year, said he first began mulling this issue during his compulsory military service, when he discovered that supplying water to frontline troops in Lebanon or Gaza was a major logistical problem. Thus his original idea was a portable kit that soldiers could take into the field with them, enabling them to generate their own water supply with no input other than air–an idea he successfully pitched to Israel’s Defense Ministry, which enthusiastically backed the venture.
But with growing areas of the globe increasingly threatened by shortages of fresh water, Kohavi’s invention clearly has uses far beyond the military. After the Philippines suffered a severe earthquake in 2013, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces used one of his Water-Gen company’s devices on its disaster-relief mission there. Kohavi is currently working on other civilian applications for his product.
And there are numerous other examples. Just last week, for instance, Reuters ran a story about Israeli tech firms that had designed products to help disabled veterans and are now adapting them to the civilian market.
Israel isn’t the only country in the world that has been at war for decades. But few other countries have taken this obvious drawback and leveraged it into a spate of high-tech development that is benefiting people all over the globe. That determination to turn lemons into lemonade is a major source of Israel’s success–and not just in high-tech.
Originally published in Commentary on February 5, 2015
That depends on how you define democracy – which is why the ‘Jewish vs. democratic’ debate has become so fraught
In response to my column last month on the false choice between Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters, a reader asked a logical question: You yourself argued that Israel has no raison d’etre if it isn’t a Jewish state; being just another Western democracy isn’t enough. So why do you think “Jewish” and “democratic” deserve equal weight, instead of prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character?
Answering that requires defining “democracy,” because in recent years, two almost antithetical concepts have been sloppily – or perhaps maliciously – subsumed under this term. One of these concepts is frequently at odds with Israel’s Jewish character. But the other is as vital to the Jewish state’s continued existence as the body is to the soul.
Democracy’s original meaning, which today is sometimes called “thin” or “procedural” democracy, was a system of government in which governing requires the consent of the governed (though for practical reasons, such consent is usually granted via elected representatives). Consequently, its requirements are limited to those necessary to achieve this purpose, such as regular elections, checks and balances among different branches of government, and certain rights essential to enabling the democratic process to function, like freedom of expression or the right to due process.
Most democracies also grant rights that go beyond the bare essentials. But these additional rights acquire their validity only through the consent of the governed, granted via legislation or, more commonly, via democratically adopted constitutions. Procedural democracy doesn’t mandate the conferral of nonpolitical rights like, say, a “right to marry”; it mandates only those rights essential for democracy to function.
The newer version of democracy is sometimes called “thick” or “substantive” or “liberal” democracy. But despite that deceptive word “democracy,” this version is in many ways less a system of government than a religion.
Like any religion, it contains both positive and negative commandments that govern not only political, but also moral and social, life; the only difference is that these commandments are called “rights” instead. Thus, for instance, legalizing gay marriage is obligatory, because there’s a “right to marry,” but restricting abortion is forbidden, because a woman has a “right to control her own body.” These positions have nothing to do with the mechanisms of government and everything to do with dictating social and moral norms.
And like any religion, “substantive democracy” derives its commandments (aka “rights”) not from the decisions of the people’s elected representatives, but from a higher authority that trumps such decisions. In traditional religions, this higher authority is God, whose commandments are revealed in holy writ like the Bible or Koran. The origin of substantive democracy’s commandments is less clear: Sometimes, adherents simply assert that these are “fundamental human rights” known to and obligatory on everyone, however hotly contested they are. Other times, they cite the amorphous holy writ known as “international law,” which consists largely of pronouncements by unelected officials in UN agencies or organizations like the Red Cross, whose decisions were never approved by any elected government.
But whatever the source, disciples of substantive democracy clearly believe such a higher law exists. That’s why the High Court of Justice could rule in 2004, for instance, that people have a constitutional “right” to a “minimal dignified existence” guaranteed by welfare payments, with the court being authorized to decide whether existing welfare payments meet this standard. The fact that the only body in Israel actually authorized to enact constitutional legislation – the Knesset – had rejected proposed Basic Laws guaranteeing this and other “social rights” no fewer than 15 times was irrelevant.
The problem with treating democracy as a religion, however, is that no two religions are ever wholly compatible. One cannot, for instance, simultaneously be a practicing Jew and a practicing Muslim, because Jewish and Islamic law sometimes clash. So, too, do the commandments of Judaism and substantive democracy, and when that happens, many Jews will naturally prefer their own religion to the rival one. So if you believe that democracy can only mean “substantive democracy” – i.e., a rival religion – then prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one would make sense.
But procedural democracy isn’t a competing religion; it’s a system of government. And this particular system of government is essential to the Jewish state’s survival, for one simple reason: Any Jewish state, whatever else it is or isn’t, must be one where large numbers of Jews with often contradictory opinions and values – religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, socialists and capitalists – can somehow live together. And no system of government is better at enabling people with wildly different opinions to coexist than democracy.
First, this is because democracy offers everyone the hope of ultimate victory – the possibility of persuading others to enact your ideas into law. In reality, achieving anything usually requires compromising. But the very existence of this hope is enough to keep most people working within the system instead of leaving in despair or turning to violence to impose their views.
Second, democracy excels at finding the kinds of messy compromises which, despite satisfying nobody, give each side enough that neither finds it intolerable. The current state of gay rights is a classic example. Liberal democrats consider gay marriage a fundamental right that the state must grant. Orthodox Jews consider homosexuality a serious religious offense that the state mustn’t endorse. The compromise is that Israel doesn’t permit gay marriage, but effectively grants gay couples the same rights as married couples. And since both sides get something (the de facto benefits of marriage for gays, no official sanctioning of religiously prohibited behavior for Orthodox Jews), both can live with it, even though neither is happy.
This brings us back to the body-and-soul analogy I began with. Judaism is Israel’s soul. As I argued last month, if Israel ever ceased to be a Jewish state, it would soon cease to exist at all. But democracy is Israel’s body – the framework that enables millions of contentious Jews to live together despite their disagreements, and without which the state would soon implode.
Like any living creature, the Jewish state needs both soul and body to survive. On its own, neither is enough.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 4, 2015