Monthly Archives: October 2015
It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.
For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.
Clearly, this is terrible for Jewish-Arab relations, and the Arab community suffers doubly: Not only do their MKs spend most of their time and effort promoting such libels rather than trying to solve their community’s real problems, the antagonism they generate among the Jewish majority actively hinders solutions. First, it’s hard to lobby the government for, say, better bus service while simultaneously accusing it of apartheid and genocide. Even worse, such rhetoric encourages many Jews to view all Israeli Arabs as enemies to be shunned: After all, Israeli Arabs have overwhelmingly voted to reelect these same MKs for decades, giving this conclusion an obvious logic.
But in recent years, this logic has increasingly been contradicted by other polling data, like the figures I cited in the first paragraph. Particularly telling was a poll published in February regarding Arab attitudes toward their own MKs. It showed that 70 percent wanted their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems instead of the Palestinian cause. Additionally, 61 percent wanted their MKs to join the government, where they would have more influence over such issues, and almost half that figure favored joining regardless of who became prime minister (the Joint Arab List, by contrast, vowed before the election not to join any government). Unsurprisingly, therefore, almost half the respondents weren’t happy with their own MKs.
So why do they keep reelecting them? It’s classic minority identity politics. Whereas the well-integrated Druze vote for, and serve as MKs from, parties across the political spectrum, Israeli Arab integration is still nascent. Consequently, however much they loathe their own MKs, most Arabs don’t feel comfortable voting for a non-Arab party; they’re skeptical that Jews could understand or really care about their community’s special problems.
What’s desperately needed, therefore, is home-grown Arab leadership that not only wants to represent the sane Arab majority and advance its integration, but also has the guts and the political power to take on the existing Arab parties. And despite a growing cadre of local leaders who indeed favor coexistence over confrontation, none had been willing to publicly challenge the national leadership – until Nazareth Mayor Ali Salem erupted on the stage this week.
Last March, Salem ousted Nazareth’s long-time mayor in a landslide, winning 61.5 percent of the vote in an election with record turnout of 83.8 percent. The former mayor, a Christian, belonged to the abovementioned Ayman Odeh’s party and toed its anti-Israel line. Salem, a Muslim, also began his political career in that party, but later quit in disgust and ran for mayor as an independent. The fact that he was both willing and able to challenge the Arab political establishment proved a harbinger of things to come.
This week, when Odeh visited Nazareth, Salem confronted his inflammatory behavior head-on – and on live TV. “Get out of here! Go back to Haifa, and stop destroying our city,” Salem yelled. “Jews don’t come here anymore because of you! … You’re burning the world down. … Shut up and get out!”
When Odeh, embarrassed, demanded that the television crew stop filming, Salem promptly demanded the opposite; he wanted his remarks to be widely heard. And lest there be any doubt, he gave several follow-up interviews reiterating his views.
“I blame the [Israeli Arab] leaders,” he told Army Radio. “They are destroying our future, they are destroying coexistence. We need to find a way to live together. We cannot fight like this. We are damaging ourselves.”
And in a conversation with reporters, he explained, “It infuriates me that Arab politicians come here, incite violence, and leave us to clean up their mess … We invest a great deal in coexistence and tourism. We want to develop our city. I want peace and quiet. … We used to have thousands of Jews and tourists visit Nazareth over the weekends. They don’t visit anymore. This seriously hurts our image and our livelihood, and we won’t allow it.”
Other prominent Arab Israelis are also speaking out. Television presenter Lucy Aharish, for instance, gave a must-see interview with Channel 2 television in which she demolished the idea that the terror had any conceivable justification and accused Israeli Arab political and religious leaders of fanning the flames: “You are inciting thousands of young people to go the streets. You are destroying their future with your own hands!” She and other Israeli Arab notables have also signed a petition denouncing terror and promoting coexistence.
But a real turnabout in Jewish-Arab relations will require a different Israeli Arab political leadership. And Salem offers hope that such a leadership might finally be emerging.
Originally published in Commentary on October 16, 2015
John Kerry’s speech at Harvard University on Wednesday and the State Department’s subsequent series of walk-backs left me with one clear conclusion: Israel ought to start building massively in the settlements and change the status quo on the Temple Mount. Because if it’s going to be blamed for doing both even when it is, in fact, doing neither, it should at least get the very real benefits that taking those steps would entail.
First, a word on those benefits: On the Mount, the status quo grossly violates Jewish rights. Jews are forbidden to pray at Judaism’s holiest site, and even acts as simple as shedding a tear are deemed “praying.” They also suffer nonstop harassment when visiting without praying. That the Jewish state discriminates against Jews in this way is simply a travesty.
As for settlement construction, Israel is suffering a severe housing crisis; an average apartment currently costs 146 average monthly salaries, up from just 43 in 2008. The primary shortages are in greater Tel Aviv, where little land is available for new housing, and Jerusalem, whose main land reserves are in the eastern section. Indeed, the capital loses about 18,000 Jews every year, and those leaving cite the housing shortage as their primary reason. But the settlement blocs that would remain Israeli under any conceivable agreement are all within reasonable commute of either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem; hence massive building in those blocs, along with Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, could significantly alleviate the housing crisis. Moreover, given the international community’s refusal to support Israel’s claims to any area not so heavily populated that evacuation is impractical, bolstering the population of areas Israel wants to keep would strengthen its position in future negotiations.
Thus unless restricting settlement construction and maintaining the status quo on the Mount genuinely contribute to Israel’s security or international support, there’s no upside to doing either. Which brings us to Kerry.
In his Harvard address, Kerry said, “there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years, and now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” The statement would be outrageous even had this “massive increase” actually occurred, given the implication that building houses in contested areas is sufficient justification for a spree of Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians. And someone at State evidently realized that, because spokesman John Kirby quickly tried to retract it.
“The secretary wasn’t saying, well now you have the settlement activity as the cause for the effect we’re seeing,” he asserted. “Is it a source of frustration for Palestinians? You bet it is, and the secretary observed that. But this isn’t about affixing blame on either side here for the violence.”
Yet Kirby didn’t retract Kerry’s claim of “massive” settlement activity, which is a blatant lie. As I detailed here last year, settlement construction under Benjamin Netanyahu has been lower than under any previous prime minister. And the very day of Kerry’s speech, the far-left Israeli daily Haaretz – not a paper suspected of any sympathy for the settlements – published a news report confirming this fact.
“Since Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, there has been less construction activity in the settlements than under any other prime minister since 1995,” Haaretz declared, and then gave the figures to prove it: From 2009-2014, an average of 1,554 homes a year were built in the settlements, compared to 1,774 under Ehud Olmert, 1,881 under Ariel Sharon, about 5,000 under Ehud Barak, and almost 3,000 during Netanyahu’s first term in 1996-9. In fact, Haaretz reported, fully 74 percent of the growth in the number of settlers under Netanyahu stemmed solely from natural increase (births minus deaths). The only way to stop that would be to institute a Chinese-style forced abortion policy – presumably not something State would espouse.
But despite this restraint, which has outraged Netanyahu’s base, he is still routinely accused by mainstream media and governments worldwide of “massive” settlement construction that justifies Palestinian terror. And even Kirby’s attempted walk-back reinforced this message: Despite saying that settlement activity isn’t the “cause” of the violence, he still refused to blame “either side” for its eruption; the clear implication was that Palestinians can’t be blamed for stabbing sprees against Israelis because they suffer from justified “frustration” over settlement activity.
Then, as if this poor excuse for a retraction weren’t bad enough, Kirby introduced several new smears against Israel. Inter alia, he accused it of “what many would consider excessive use of force”; naturally, American police would never shoot a knife-wielding terrorist in mid-rampage. The most astounding, however, was his claim that Israel had violated the status quo on the Temple Mount.
“Certainly, the status quo has not been observed, which has led to a lot of the violence,” he said. In short, he endorsed the Palestinian narrative that the stabbings are due to justified grievance over Jewish “violations” of the status quo.
Later, he tweeted a “clarification from today’s briefing: I did not intend to suggest that status quo at Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif has been broken.” But the very fact that he initially said it makes it clear that many American officials buy this Palestinian narrative. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that Washington has never objected to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s propagation of this inflammatory falsehood, inter alia in his UN address last month and a speech Wednesday night.
Thus even though Israel has curtailed settlement construction and upheld the status quo on the Mount, much of the world – including the U.S. administration – is accusing it of doing the opposite, and then treating Palestinian terror as an understandable, justifiable response to these alleged crimes. In other words, Israel is reaping no diplomatic benefits for taking these steps. And in that case, why on earth should it continue incurring the costs?
Originally published in Commentary on October 15, 2015 under the headline “Israel’s Diminishing Returns”
While Palestinians were killing four Israelis in back-to-back terror attacks last week, I received an email lauding Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his vital role in fighting such terror. This email was parroting a very popular myth: that Abbas deserves the credit for the past several years of relative calm. Yet in reality, Abbas had nothing to do with producing this calm and little to do with maintaining it. And a simple year-by-year breakdown of the very numbers his cheerleaders cite to praise him is enough to prove it.
The myth relies on one completely true fact: Israeli fatalities have fallen dramatically since the height of the second intifada, from 452 in 2002 to 6 in 2013. But those who seek to credit Abbas for this development overlook two crucial details. First, almost three-quarters of this drop occurred even before Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat as PA president in November 2004. Israeli fatalities fell from their 2002 peak of 452 to 208 in 2003 and 117 in 2004; a cumulative decline of 74 percent. Yet during those years, Arafat was still in charge.
Second, the remaining drop happened during years when Abbas was indeed PA president but had zero control on the ground because the Israel Defense Forces retook control of the entire West Bank in March 2002. Only five years later did they begin gradually returning certain areas to PA control.
When the IDF reasserted control in 2002, it launched a massive, years-long operation to defang the terrorist organizations that until then had used the PA as their home base. That’s why Israeli fatalities fell by roughly 50 percent a year during the last two years of Arafat’s rule, and why they continued to fall by roughly 50 percent a year during the first three years of Abbas’s rule – from 117 in 2004 to 56 in 2005, 30 in 2006 to 13 in 2007.
Only in late 2007, once terror was already down by 97 percent from its 2002 peak, did Israel begin returning control of major West Bank cities to the PA, starting with Nablus in November 2007 and then Jenin in May 2008. Thus by the time Abbas actually assumed security control, West Bank terror was already at the same low level it would maintain for the next six years (Israeli fatalities actually spiked in 2008, but due to an upsurge in terror from Hamas-controlled Gaza, leading to the first Gaza war that December).
Moreover, in the one territory where Abbas did exert security control during those years – the Gaza Strip – he didn’t lift a finger against anti-Israel terror. The IDF unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, leaving Abbas’s forces in full control for almost two years until Hamas seized power in a week-long battle in June 2007. During those two years, Palestinians fired thousands of rockets at Israel from Gaza, including 1,123 in 2006 alone; yet Abbas took no action whatsoever against the rocket launchers, whom he deemed his “brothers.” By contrast, not one rocket was ever fired at Israel from the IDF-controlled West Bank.
Nor does Abbas deserve much credit for keeping the peace since 2007, because Israel learned from the mistake it made from 1995-2002 when the IDF’s scrupulous refusal to enter PA territory allowed terrorist groups to flourish. Since 2007, the IDF has conducted counterterrorism operations in the PA whenever it sees fit, sometimes almost nightly; and that’s the main reason terror has remained subdued. Indeed, the widespread view in the IDF is that were Israeli troops not present, Hamas would swiftly rout Abbas’s forces, just as it did in Gaza in 2007.
So given all of the above, why do IDF officers nevertheless routinely laud Abbas’s security coordination with Israel? Because the post-2007 Abbas does differ from both Arafat and his own pre-2007 self in one important respect: Following Hamas’s takeover of Gaza that summer, Abbas concluded that Hamas was a bigger threat to his own rule than to Israel, and since then, he has indeed cooperated in constraining Hamas in the West Bank. As noted, his role is strictly secondary. Moreover, the fact that he assumed it only after Hamas turned its guns on him shows that it stems not from any commitment in principle to fighting terror, but purely from self-interest. Nevertheless, a Palestinian leader who shares Israel’s interest in squelching Hamas is clearly better than one who doesn’t.
Yet even this benefit is largely offset by the fact that Abbas actively foments anti-Israel terror in other ways. Granted, he’s no Arafat; he doesn’t personally orchestrate terror attacks or smuggle arms. But he does engage in vicious, systematic incitement that encourages other Palestinians to kill Israelis, like accusing Israel of genocide (over a war whose casualties amounted to a mere 1 percent of those in Syria’s civil war), praising Palestinians who try to kill Jewish civilians as “martyrs,” or declaring that Jews who dare to set foot on Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount, “desecrate” it “with their filthy feet.”
Moreover, he makes terror a financially lucrative business by paying generous salaries – four to seven times higher than the average Palestinian wage – to all terrorists jailed in Israel, including Hamas terrorists responsible for killing dozens of Israelis each. Indeed, the payment scale actively incentivizes lethal attacks, because the longer the prison term, the higher the monthly salary. These salaries consume some $144 million of the PA’s annual budget.
Thus while Abbas is undeniably better than Arafat, he isn’t enough better that Israel should care if he quits. After all, credit for the calm of the past several years belongs primarily not to Abbas, but to the IDF. And the IDF will still be there once Abbas is gone.
Originally published in Commentary on October 7, 2015
Yesterday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN that the Palestinian situation is “unsustainable.” The day before, two ostensibly nonpartisan professional agencies provided data to back this claim – or at least they did if you ignore all the numbers in the World Bank and IMF reports and heed only the rhetoric. The World Bank, for instance, repeatedly used the word “unsustainable” to describe the PA economy. But the actual data paint a very different picture.
What first caught my eye was the poverty rate, which, according to the World Bank, stood at 16 percent in the West Bank last year. That drew my attention because it happens to be significantly lower than the official poverty rate in the West Bank’s wealthy next-door neighbor, Israel. Granted, this comparison is unfair, since Israel’s poverty rate (18.6 percent of families and 21.8 percent of individuals) is artificially inflated by a large community of the voluntarily impoverished; excluding the ultra-Orthodox, among whom the deliberate choice of full-time Torah study over work has produced an eye-popping poverty rate of 73 percent, the rate would be much lower. But it did prompt me to look at poverty levels in other countries, using the World Bank’s own handy chart. And it turns out the West Bank fares quite well by comparison.
EU members Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Estonia and Poland, for instance, all have higher poverty rates (22.4, 21.0, 19.5, 19.4, 18.6 and 17.3 percent, respectively). In Mexico, an OECD member, the poverty rate is a whopping 52.3 percent. In South America, even many relatively successful countries have higher poverty rates than the West Bank, like Colombia (30.6 percent) and Costa Rica (22.4 percent). And then there are the real global basket cases, like Haiti (58.5 percent), Congo (63.6 percent), Honduras (64.5 percent) or Zimbabwe (72.3 percent). Yet, somehow, you never hear world leaders declaring the situation in any of these countries “unsustainable.”
Or take GDP per capita. According to another handy World Bank chart, GDP per capita stands at $2,966 in the West Bank and Gaza combined; the figure for the West Bank alone would be higher, since it’s the economically stronger territory. This is obviously far below Western levels. But it’s almost double the figure for global powerhouse India ($1,596) and more than double the figure for Kenya, one of Africa’s strongest economies ($1,358). It edges out Vietnam ($2,052) and the Philippines ($2,871); it’s two to four times higher than numerous other African and Asian countries, including Bangladesh ($1,093), Ethiopia ($565), Nepal ($697), Pakistan ($1,334) and Rwanda ($696); and it’s eight to 10 times higher than the lowest earners, like Burundi ($286) and Central African Republic ($371). Yet somehow, you never hear world leaders declaring the situation in those countries “unsustainable.”
As for unemployment, the World Bank report put the West Bank jobless rate at 16 percent. That’s better than quite a few European countries were doing as of 2013, according to yet another World Bank chart; these include Macedonia, Greece, Spain, Croatia and Portugal (with rates of 29, 27.3, 26.6, 17.7 and 16.5 percent, respectively). It’s also markedly better than one of Africa’s strongest economies, South Africa (24.9 percent), not to mention poorer African countries like Swaziland or Lesotho (22.5 and 24.7 percent). Yet somehow, world leaders never declare those countries’ economies “unsustainable.”
I could keep going, but the point is clear: Far from being “unsustainable,” the West Bank’s economic situation is better than that of many countries worldwide. Indeed, it can be termed “unsustainable” only by the same illogic that drives so many world leaders to term the Israeli-Palestinian security situation “unsustainable” despite a death toll that’s downright minuscule compared to numerous other conflicts worldwide.
The economic situation in Hamas-run Gaza is admittedly much worse. Yet even there, the accepted wisdom that economic hardship will inevitably produce an explosion seems questionable.
After all, according to this accepted wisdom, last summer’s Hamas-Israel war erupted because of Israel’s “siege” on Gaza. But as journalist Khaled Abu Toameh pointed out last week, the one really besieging Gaza is Egypt, whose crackdown on cross-border smuggling tunnels, most recently by flooding them, has almost completely sealed the Gaza-Egypt border; in contrast, the Israeli border is Gaza’s lifeline, admitting up to 800 truckloads of goods every day. Yet in the two years since this tunnel crackdown began, Abu Toameh noted, Hamas hasn’t launched a single attack against Egypt.
In other words, Hamas chose to attack not the country that’s trying to strangle Gaza, but the one that’s keeping it from being strangled – which strongly suggests that its motive wasn’t Gaza’s economic distress, but rather its avowed desire to destroy Israel. And since that isn’t likely to change anytime soon, neither will the sustainability of Gaza’s economy: It won’t thrive, since Hamas’s hostility precludes lifting all Israeli restrictions, but neither will it die, because Israel will keep it on life support, just as it has throughout the eight years since Hamas seized power.
Thus the only thing truly unsustainable about the Palestinian situation is the overheated rhetoric of unsustainability – because as the World Bank’s own data shows, it simply doesn’t fit the facts.
Originally published in Commentary on October 1, 2015