Monthly Archives: July 2017
Ostensibly, winner Avi Gabbay and runner-up Amir Peretz couldn’t be more different. Peretz is a veteran hard-left activist, an early leader of the Peace Now movement, who was advocating Palestinian statehood back when most Israelis still considered the idea anathema. Gabbay is a moderate who once supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party and, more recently, co-founded the centrist Kulanu party. Yet they sounded almost indistinguishable when answering five questions posed by Haaretz (in Hebrew) before Monday’s run-off (an abbreviated English version is here).
Asked about the idea of unilaterally withdrawing from parts of the West Bank, for instance, both men rejected it. “I don’t believe in unilateral withdrawal,” Gabbay said bluntly. Peretz was wordier, but still quite clear. “We won’t continue to settle the territories, but at the same time, we mustn’t forget the lessons of the unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza (and also from other conflict areas around the world),” he said.
What makes this surprising is that several Labor-affiliated former senior-defense-officials-turned-activists have been pushing unilateral withdrawal. Among them are former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, the man slated to be Labor’s defense minister had it won the last election, and former Shin Bet security service chief Ami Ayalon, a one-time Labor Knesset member. Thus one might expect the idea to appeal to rank-and-file members.
But Peretz and Gabbay thought otherwise. Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza in 2005 resulted in three wars and 16,000 rockets on Israel (compared to zero from the Israeli-controlled West Bank), while its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 enabled Hezbollah to grow from a terrorist nuisance into a major strategic threat, whose arsenal of 150,000 rockets is larger than that of most national armies. Thus the candidates evidently concluded that even left-of-center Israelis no longer believe the activist “experts” who persist in denying that unilateral withdrawal endangers Israel’s security.
Moreover, both candidates promised to freeze settlement construction, but only outside the major settlement blocs. This is a sharp rejection of the line the Obama Administration spent eight years peddling—that construction anywhere beyond the 1949 armistice lines, even in areas everyone knows will remain Israeli under any agreement, is an obstacle to peace. It turns out even left-of-center Israelis consider it ludicrous for Israel to stop building in the settlement blocs and large Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem. They simply don’t buy the idea that construction in these areas, which will clearly remain Israeli, is a legitimate excuse for the Palestinians’ ongoing refusal to negotiate.
No less noteworthy was one glaring omission. Though both candidates promised immediate final-status negotiations with the Palestinians and deemed a peace deal essential, their only stated reason for this position was to keep Israel from becoming a binational state. Neither so much as mentioned the fear that Israel could face growing international isolation if it didn’t resolve the conflict. That claim has been a staple of left-wing advocacy for years. It was most famously expressed by former Labor chairman (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak who, in 2011, warned that Israel would face a “diplomatic tsunami” if the conflict continued.
This argument has been getting harder and harder to make in recent years, as Israel’s diplomatic reach has steadily expanded. But it would have sounded particularly fatuous coming just days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s historic visit to Israel, which caused many who had previously parroted Barak’s warning to throw in the towel. Typical headlines from center-left commentators included “Where’s the diplomatic isolation?” and “Modi visit shows Israel can improve foreign ties even without a peace process.” Judging by the fact that neither Peretz nor Gabbay mentioned this argument, they evidently think even Labor Party members will no longer buy it.
As an aside, it’s far from clear that diplomatic ties would continue expanding under a Labor government, because center-left governments typically view the Palestinian issue as their top priority, and therefore devote much less time and energy to expanding ties with the rest of the world. In contrast, since Netanyahu’s government believes a Palestinian deal is currently unobtainable, it has invested enormous effort in expanding Israel’s other diplomatic relationships. And that effort matters. As Kenya’s UN ambassador said last week, it’s only recently that “the lights have gone on” in Israel and it has started engaging. Previously, he spent years asking Israeli officials, “Why are you not engaged? Where is Israel?” But the possibility that Labor might choose to focus on the Palestinians instead doesn’t change the fact that Israel clearly can expand its diplomacy even without a peace process.
Finally, Peretz and Gabbay both rejected the increasingly popular argument among left-wing activists that fully integrating Israeli Arabs requires inviting elected Arab parties into the governing coalition, no matter how extreme those parties are. Inter alia, they include one parliamentarian doing jail time for smuggling cell phones to imprisoned terrorists, another who calls Arab policemen “traitors,” and a third who canceled a meeting with American Jewish leaders because he “cannot in good conscience” enter a building that houses a Zionist organization. Gabbay, typically blunt, said the Arab parties’ Joint List “includes anti-Zionist elements … so we can’t cooperate with this composition.” Peretz concurred: “Incidents that have occurred in the Joint List undoubtedly make it very hard to add them to any future coalition. Effectively, the difficulty is so great as to make this impossible.”
In short, both men upheld the traditional view that integration requires bolstering Arab moderates rather than bolstering radical politicians who support terrorists and/or want to abolish the Jewish state. Evidently, they believed any other position would repel Labor voters.
The bottom line is that, even among mainstream left-of-center voters, many ideas pushed by left-wing journalists and activists remain toxic. It’s a point worth remembering for all those foreigners who get much of their information from these very same sources.
Originally published in Commentary on July 14, 2017
I supported the compromise, though as an Orthodox Jew, my reasons were different from those of most American Jews. Nevertheless, I feel the government’s decision to scrap the deal was defensible, but not for any reason involving American Jewish attitudes toward Israel.
One crucial fact underlies both halves of my position. Many of the American Jews who care most about the Kotel compromise and were most hurt by its cancelation are among the most genuinely pro-Israel members of America’s non-Orthodox community. These are people who tirelessly work to bolster support for Israel worldwide and donate generously to Israeli hospitals, schools, ambulance services, and more from which Israelis benefit.
Most anti-Israel American Jews (and that includes some who like to call themselves “pro-Israel”) don’t care much about the Kotel compromise. See, for example, Simone Zimmerman of IfNotNow, who termed it “obscene” that American Jews are upset about the Kotel when, in her view, they should be focusing on “the occupation.” The growing ranks of the indifferent also don’t care; they’ll probably never visit Israel anyway.
So who does care? People like David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, who issued a statement last week “decrying” the decision to freeze the compromise. This week, nine UN ambassadors toured Israel on a trip organized by the AJC. Among other things, they visited the City of David to gain an understanding of the Jews’ deep roots in Jerusalem—an obviously timely effort given the recurring Palestinian efforts to pass UN resolutions denying these roots.
Or take Lynn Schusterman, one of 65 American Jewish philanthropists who signed a newspaper ad last week protesting the cancellation of the compromise. This week, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation is hosting a group of university professors in Israel for a training program to help them combat anti-Israel agitation on campus. The foundation also supports numerous Israeli charitable endeavors, like the Jerusalem Season of Culture, which has brought new life to the capital.
Granted, backers of the compromise also include a nontrivial number of people who show their “love” for Israel mainly by badmouthing it and supporting anti-Israel organizations. But many of the people most deeply hurt by the decision are people like Harris and Schusterman, who work indefatigably both to promote Israel’s cause abroad and to make life better for Israelis at home.
That brings us to my specifically Orthodox reason for supporting the compromise—the importance of hakarat hatov, or gratitude. I think American Jews should help Israel, because Israel is vital to the Jewish world and because all Jews are family. But familial relations are a two-way street, and even within a family, it’s important to show gratitude for assistance rendered when possible.
Often, it isn’t possible, because American Jews want many things Israel can’t afford to give. Israel can’t make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians just to please American Jews, nor can it magically fight wars with no civilian casualties. Concessions on conversion—another hot-button issue for non-Orthodox Jews—are also difficult. As long as converting to Judaism confers an automatic right of Israeli citizenship, the state must retain some control over the conversion process to retain control over immigration.
But since the Kotel was a rare issue on which Israel could afford to give American Jews something they wanted, it should have seized the opportunity. Even if you believe, as I do, that Orthodoxy has a much better track record than Conservative and Reform Judaism at preserving the Jewish people over time, the compromise sacrificed no vital interests.
The Kotel isn’t and never was a synagogue—in Jewish tradition, worship belongs on the Wall’s other side, aka the Temple Mount—so there’s no compelling religious argument for insisting that the entire plaza be under Orthodox supervision. Indeed, that’s why both the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties and the Kotel’s rabbi initially approved the compromise before backtracking under pressure from Haredi zealots.
Nevertheless, I feel that canceling the compromise was defensible, due to another value I hold dear: democracy. By definition, democracy involves messy compromises among groups with very different interests, and often, these compromises are made through political horse-trading. Each group concedes on issues it cares less about to obtain support for those it cares more about.
That’s exactly what happened in this case. The Haredi parties have little interest in nonreligious issues, but they cared greatly about killing the Kotel compromise. So they threatened to quit the government—thereby depriving it of the majority it needed to continue its foreign, economic, and defense policies—unless the government scrapped the Kotel compromise. Since the non-Haredi parties all care more about foreign affairs, defense, and economics, they made the deal the Haredim demanded. The Kotel isn’t most Israelis’ top policy priority.
American Jews talk a lot about the importance of democracy, but, if you value democracy, then you have to accept democratic decisions even when you don’t like them. And you have to accept the fundamental democratic principle that numbers matter. People who live and vote in Israel in large numbers, as the Haredim do, will always have more clout in Israel’s democratic process than people who don’t, like Reform and Conservative Jews.
But whatever clout American Jews do have is diminished when Israelis perceive them as turning away from Israel, because if their support seems to be slipping away in any case for reasons beyond Israel’s control, then any government has less incentive to accede to their demands. And that’s not my personal opinion; it’s simply a fact.
Originally published in Commentary on July 5, 2017