Wrap for the week of November 9 through 15
Barkat's agenda
Fiorello LaGuardia, the legendary New York City mayor between the Great Depression and World War II, seldom disappointed reporters for a quote.
"It makes no difference if I burn my bridges behind me - I never retreat," he declared.
In truth, the big-hearted LaGuardia figuratively built more bridges than he burned. Which is probably a good example for incoming Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. Not only should Barkat avoid burning his political bridges, he shouldn't tear down the concrete one that's already up.
At a post-election news conference, Barkat hinted he'd consider dismantling Santiago Calatrava's "Bridge of Strings," designed to allow the light railway to glide over traffic at the entrance of town. Whatever the result of his promised reexamination of the entire over-budget, overdue and under-planned train, he should certainly resist the temptation to demolish the bridge.
Why not, instead, hold an all-Jerusalem contest to come up with ideas on how best to put the bridge to use? Let's find a way to give purpose to "the bridge to nowhere."
BARKAT'S stunning 52-43 percent victory over Meir Porush is being acclaimed by everyone who sees Jerusalem as the epicenter of Jewish civilization and the focal point of Zionist aspirations, as well as a "normal" city where real people - Jews, Muslims and Christians of all stripes - live and work.
He comes to power just as the global economic crisis is being felt in Jerusalem - already the poorest city in Israel. So it is essential that he focus on the issues that matter most: jobs, housing and transportation.
Barkat should declare a tax moratorium on arnona payments for enterprises willing to open their doors in Jerusalem and provide employment for eight or more workers. He needs to discourage luxury development aimed at non-residents while promoting affordable housing for the middle class. Barkat should revive plans to build a new sports and convention arena near Teddy Stadium.
Most urgently, the new mayor needs to rapidly untangle the downtown traffic mess which is killing business.
CERTAINLY for his first 100 days - though we'd like it to be longer than that - Barkat should avoid the meta-issues candidates for Jerusalem mayor relish debating and which, in fact, fall far out of their purview.
While mayoral powers are limited, Barkat should use the prominence that comes with the job to be Jerusalem's voice. He needs to press the national government for more money to subsidize housing, jobs, education and transportation. He'll need to forcefully advocate for the fast train between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Linking the capital to Ben-Gurion Airport and the coastal metropolis would give this newspaper's hometown economy a tremendous boost.
He will be Jerusalem's face to the Diaspora. So much of what is aesthetically and culturally appealing here is made possible by the philanthropy of people who live overseas. Support from abroad also bolsters Jerusalem's hospitals, yeshivot, non-Orthodox religious institutions and the Hebrew University.
Barkat now becomes our ambassador to the world. Let Teddy Kollek be his model.
THE NEW mayor must be a healer. He's made a good start by trying to form an all-inclusive city council bringing together parties ranging from the haredi to the devoutly secular. Let him also find an informal way, outside the limelight, of routinely consulting with Arab leaders.
This city is comprised of a complex mosaic of communities. All communal leaders owe it to their constituencies to help Barkat do his job.
Barkat, for his part, must bring greater transparency to city government. He should encourage HOT and YES to offer live broadcasts of city council sessions and most committee meetings (a la America's C-SPAN).
With hard times ahead, the new mayor needs to challenge citizens to pitch in. Let City Hall create a volunteer corps so that seniors and young people can give of their time to make this a safer, cleaner, healthier and more welcoming town. He might turn to outgoing mayor Uri Lupolianski to head such an endeavor which, perhaps, could involve elements of the haredi population.
To paraphrase LaGuardia, there's no right-wing or left-wing, religious or secular, Jewish or Arab or Christian way of picking up the garbage or reducing the wait for a bus.
Mr. Barkat, get the job done - and do it fairly, efficiently and inclusively.
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The Gaza 'siege'
Here's what anyone who follows events in the Gaza Strip - cursorily - might reasonably conclude: An Israeli "siege" periodically leaves 1.5 million people hungry and in darkness. Innocents are "collectively punished" while the IDF capriciously "raids" Gaza killing Palestinians.
Yesterday, the UN agency which for the past 60 years has been charged with providing Palestinian Arabs with direct relief (though forbidden to permanently resettle them) warned that its Gaza operations could run out of wheat, meat, powdered milk and cooking oil by the weekend.
THE TRUTH is that Gaza's misfortunes are largely self-inflicted. Hamas has made battling Israel its highest priority regardless of the damage this causes Palestinian society - its founding charter calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state. Paradoxically, Hamas remains immensely popular. In fact, some Israeli policymakers argue that it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population is Hamas.
But Hamas cares about how the West perceives it. Its spokesmen have resurrected an offer of a 10-year truce. The cost? Total Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines, release of all Palestinian prisoners, creation of a militarized Palestinian state, and flooding Israel with millions of Palestinian refugees.
Israel disengaged from Gaza in the summer of 2005 and the Palestinian Authority could have theoretically begun turning the area into a Singapore on the Mediterranean, making it a prototype of what a Palestinian state could look like. Instead, the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas squandered the opportunity.
When Hamas ousted Abbas, taking control of Gaza in June 2007, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak pursued a strategy aimed at turning Gaza's population against Hamas, isolating the Islamists within the international community and preventing them from overthrowing Abbas in the West Bank. Only the latter goal has been unequivocally achieved and only because the IDF remains stationed in Judea and Samaria.
With Hamas in control of Gaza, Israel imposed a limited embargo on the hostile territory. Nevertheless, on any given day dozens of trucks carrying food, fuel and medicine are allowed in.
The shekel continues to be Gaza's currency. The US and EU spend millions of dollars trying to help ordinary Palestinians, and Abbas continues to pay the salaries of most government workers.
ISRAEL AND Hamas accepted an Egyptian brokered six-month truce in June giving respite to the people of Sderot.
But lately, Hamas has been setting the stage for the next round. On November 4, the IDF destroyed a tunnel that Israeli intelligence believed was going to be used - at any moment - to infiltrate into Israel for the purpose of kidnaping soldiers. Since then Hamas has fired 60 Kassams and 20 mortars at southern Israel. Wednesday's fighting is a continuation of Hamas aggression near the border.
With Hamas shooting, Israel temporarily closed the crossing points used to deliver humanitarian goods and fuel. Hamas then cynically ordered Gaza's only power plant closed, plunging Gaza City into darkness, and brought thousands of children into the streets for a candlelight protest.
The plant, in fact, provides just a quarter of the Strip's electricity. Israel provides 70% via 10 high-power lines, Egypt supplies the rest - none of it interrupted.
PLAINLY, Israel's Gaza strategy isn't working. Olmert himself thinks "a collision with Hamas is inevitable."
Hamas has used the truce to further enhance its sophisticated subterranean supply lines. Advanced weaponry is brought in; so too, is everything from tobacco and sheep to car parts - all taxed by Hamas's "tunnels administration." So much diesel fuel has been flowing through pipelines under the Philadelphi Corridor that a glut on the market has reportedly been created. Only cement and iron can't easily be smuggled.
What now? Israeli defense officials do not want the cease-fire to fall apart. At the same time, Jerusalem is not willing to allow a creeping escalation of Hamas violence. If the Islamists end the cease-fire, the cost must be a relentless pursuit of their leaders so as to diminish the capacity of Hamas to govern.
Over the long haul, Israel simply can't tolerate an Islamist regime anywhere between the Mediterranean and the Jordan that is dedicated to its destruction.
Those concerned about the well-being of the people of Gaza should put the pressure where it belongs - and tell Hamas to stop the violence.
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Olmert as oracle
Ehud Olmert spoke so earnestly in favor of an Israeli withdrawal "with minor corrections" to the 1949 armistice lines, at the state memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin on Monday, that the audience could be forgiven for forgetting that he was elected to implement a significant West Bank pullback - and failed.
With Olmert at the helm, Kadima received 29 Knesset seats in March 2006 based on the now forgotten "convergence" platform. He promised to establish "permanent borders" after disengaging from most of the West Bank and consolidating the settler population into blocs on the Israeli side of the security barrier.
It was a unilateralism intended to force statehood on the Palestinians, even in the absence of a peace agreement.
Someone should tell Olmert that what distinguished Kadima as a centrist party was its opposition to the near-total pullback supported by the Left, as well as the do-nothing or dig-in policies of the Right. The speech Olmert on Monday gave was - in tone and substance - one that Yossi Beilin could have given. Kadima's new leader, Tzipi Livni, is trying to disassociate herself from Olmert's remarks. It won't be easy unless she tells Israelis explicitly where she and Olmert part company.
The centrist position opposes a pullback to the 1949 armistice lines; expects the Palestinians to abandon their claim for a "right of return" to Israel proper; wants a Palestinian state to be demilitarized; and insists on retaining strategic settlement blocs. Israelis also understand that no deal is possible while Hamas controls Gaza and may be poised to take over the West Bank.
CONVERGENCE was not to be. Within a month of Olmert's election, Hamas took Gilad Schalit prisoner, and Hizbullah launched the Second Lebanon War.
By the time Gaza fell to Hamas in June 2007, the Kassams were smashing into Sderot and the Winograd Committee was exposing Olmert's inept handling of the war.
Of course, another reason why Olmert couldn't pursue convergence was that he allowed himself to become politically impotent. For the better part of his tenure, he's been under police investigation over allegations he failed to quickly dispel - money-stuffed envelopes from a man named Morris Talansky; claims of double-dipping on travel expenses; reported conflict of interest at the Ministry of Trade and Industry; and suggestions that he bought a home for below market value in return for political favors.
With all this, Olmert went to Annapolis (in November 2007) to relaunch bilateral talks with the Palestinian Authority. And he's been negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas for the past year with little to show for it.
Yet, bizarrely, Olmert spoke as if he was the leader of the opposition, not the sitting prime minister. He - of all people - would speak truth to power about Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem?
He would point out that "the decision [to withdraw] has to be made now, without hesitation" and that "the moment of truth has arrived"?
He would lash out against settler extremists, as if he wasn't the ultimate law enforcement authority in the land?
Then, perhaps catching himself, Olmert made a new promise: "I will not let this continue."
In truth, having failed to implement the centrist platform upon which he was elected, clinging futility to power despite the Winograd findings, and failing to stop spiraling lawlessness in the West Bank, he really should not presume to lecture Israelis on the need for a two-state solution.
YET THE most egregious aspect of Olmert's speech was how he managed to inoculate the Palestinians from their peacemaking responsibilities.
On Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death, PLO chairman and PA president Abbas urged the Palestinian polity to "cherish" the path of the "shahids" - Arafat, Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), George Habash and Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin. Abbas then urged Palestinians to pursue Arafat's "peace of the brave" - whatever that means post-second intifada.
In his final weeks, as a caretaker prime minister, it is too late now for Olmert to do much more than talk. But instead of lecturing Israelis, he could more constructively spend the remainder of his administration demanding that the Palestinians meet Israel half-way and enable his successor to proceed toward an agreement that would give Palestinians independence and Israel abiding security.
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Our town
From Pisgat Ze'ev and Sanhedria to Emek Refa'im and Har Nof, voters in Jerusalem - and scores of other municipalities - go to the polls today to elect a new mayor and city council.
The capital's mayoral candidates are Nir Barkat, Meir Porush, Arkadi Gaydamak and Dan Birron. If none receives 40 percent of the vote, there will be a run-off.
Thirteen parties are competing for 31 places on the council, including Barkat's Jerusalem Shall Succeed, Porush's United Torah Judaism, Gaydamak's Social Justice and Birron's Green Leaf. A coalition of modern Orthodox and secular good-government types running as Wake Up Jerusalemites say they'll back Barkat if elected.
Before casting their ballot for mayor, voters should ask themselves:
Who will best manage the department chiefs tasked with the day-to-day running of the city?
Which man best embodies Jerusalem's role as the capital of the state and heart of the Zionist enterprise?
FOR PEOPLE to whom Jerusalem is more than a symbol, but also home, the prosaic does matter: By making driving into the city center - day or night - a nightmare, incumbent Mayor Uri Lupolianski has discouraged people from patronizing shops and restaurants in the King George/Jaffa Street/Ben Yehuda vicinity. Which candidate is most likely to reverse the strangulation of downtown?
On a range of issues - the boondoggle light rail construction project, dirty streets, long waits for buses, the red tape involved in doing business in Jerusalem - who is most likely to come up with innovative solutions?
Who will really remedy the neglect in the city's Arab neighborhoods and make it easier for east Jerusalem tax-payers to obtain building permits? Most Arab residents will boycott the elections and disenfranchise themselves. Yet the city has an obligation to provide equal services to every sector of the population because Jewish sovereignty - not as a slogan, but in practice - comes with responsibility.
Who will work to make the bureaucracy more responsive? Ask the right questions? Be smart and fair in allocating the city's budgetary resources? Who will best encourage the private sector to create jobs?
Who is most likely not to see the mayoralty as an opportunity to dispense patronage?
Who will trouble himself to master the intricacies of what the city does and how it does it - from sanitation and social-welfare, to youth services and culture? For a mayor can't supervise what he doesn't understand.
BUT THE second criteria, no less important, is who can best embody the ethos of Jerusalem as the political and spiritual center of the Zionist enterprise?
Who best understands that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people? Who embraces the centrality of the State of Israel - and Jerusalem - in the life of the nation? Who best appreciates the need for mutual respect among Jews? Who best understands the multi-faceted nature of the Jewish people in the Diaspora?
Jerusalem's current non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox mayor is an affable politician. He has tried to navigate between the demands of his insular haredi constituency, who see modernity as mostly threatening and coercion as a sometimes necessary tool, and his public role as chief executive of a city that is home to a non-haredi majority: modern Orthodox, national religious, traditional as well as secular.
In June, City Hall spent NIS 2 million for a ceremony to inaugurate the light rail Bridge of Strings (really a bridge to nowhere) at the entrance to town. In what's become known as the Taliban affair, officiating haredim insisted that a group of school girls about to perform a dance don ski caps and cloaks so as not to appear "promiscuous." And so it was.
Today voters get to decide what sort of Judaism they want people to think of when they think of Jerusalem - inviting and Zionistic, or coercive and parochial?
Voters need also to choose wisely in selecting a slate to work with the next mayor. Tens of thousands of votes in the last election were squandered on parties that failed to clear the threshold.
Today's Jerusalem election will not just determine whether city services are fairly and efficiently delivered. It will determine whether mainstream Zionism still holds sway in Zion.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Jerusalem has a new mayor, The Gaza 'siege', Olmert the Oracle, Our Town,
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Obama's Agenda, Mazal Tov, Obama, Rabin + 13, America Decides, Meretz
Below is a 'wrap' for the week of Nov. 2-7
Obama's agenda
The challenges facing President-elect Barack Obama are formidable. He will inherit a $1 trillion budget deficit on top of a $10.5 trillion national debt, plus responsibility for steering America through the global economic crisis.
He becomes commander-in-chief with the US at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has pledged to wind down Operation Iraqi Freedom within 16 months while intensifying Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
There will, moreover, be frayed relations with the EU to repair; a resurgent Russia to contend with, and Guantanamo Bay to shut down. He'll also need to cajole China toward being a more responsible international citizen and grapple with endemic violence and instability in Sudan, Congo and Zimbabwe.
Obama has promised as well to take a fresh look at what more America could be doing on climate change. And, neither last nor least, he will need to verify that North Korea really is shutting down its nuclear weapons program.
At home, the challenges are no less daunting. Obama will have to oversee the rescue of a sick economy which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs; and he'll need to prevent millions of people who are defaulting on their mortgages from losing their homes, with unemployment levels hovering around 6.3% and forecast to rise.
EVEN WITH so much on his plate, there's no avoiding the Middle East - either because some flare-up will demand his attention, or because of the alluring temptation to go down in history as the president who finally - finally - brokered the deal that gave the Palestinian Arabs a state and delivered Israel from decades of terrorism.
Obama's secretary of state may feel drawn to fast-track the Israel-Syria peace negotiations, seeing a deal there as low-hanging fruit.
But we think Obama can be smarter than his predecessors by homing in on this harsh Middle East peacemaking reality: As long as the Islamic Republic of Iran remains on the ascendant, there will be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians, no way to bolster Palestinian moderates by chipping away at the rejectionists, no treaty with Syria, and no prospect of saving Lebanon.
So rather than going down the fruitless path taken by many of his predecessors, Obama might want to begin with a different set of assumptions:
Since 1979, the chief obstacle to peace in the Middle East has been Iran. Break its stranglehold, and you pave the way toward progress on all peace-making fronts.
No one need convince Israel that peace with the Palestinians is in its interest. Yet a deal that does not allow Israel to retain strategic settlement blocs will come back to haunt the friends of peace. The Obama administration thus needs to embrace President George W. Bush's 2004 letter to premier Ariel Sharon acknowledging that changes on the ground have made returning to the pre-1967 armistice lines unrealistic.
YET THIS is not an argument against talking to Iran. What matters is what America talks to Iran about and the environment in which "unconditional" talks take place.
The talks need to be aimed at persuading Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. But talking is not an end itself. Absent real leverage, US negotiators will not get the regime's undivided attention. We know this because the EU - with American support - has been negotiating with Iran for years, to no avail. Bilateral talks between Washington and Teheran need to be accompanied by draconian sanctions led by the US and EU; and the threat of the military option if all else fails must be more than perfunctory.
Even without weapons of mass destruction, Iran is an intimidating and destabilizing force, sowing havoc from Beirut to Buenos Aires. It provides the financial and military wherewithal and diplomatic cover that enable Hamas's continued control over Gaza and Hizbullah's domination of Lebanon.
Clearly, Barack Obama is too smart, too pragmatic to genuinely expect that talk alone will convince a bellicose, fanatical and messianic regime with imperial ambitions beyond our region to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Whatever his game plan, if he wants to help foster the normalized relations Israel seeks with its Arab neighbors his administration will first have to sideline the region's number-one obstacle to peace.
Mazal tov, Obama
Just as the people of the United States were electing Barack Hussein Obama as their next president, Hamas was putting the finishing touches on a plot to abduct Israeli soldiers and break the relative cease-fire which has prevailed for the past five months.
Its engineers constructed a 250-meter tunnel from Gaza into Israel. IDF
intelligence assessed that the preparations posed an immediate danger and special forces were sent in to conduct a pinpoint operation to demolish the tunnel. Six Palestinian Arab gunmen were killed; six of our soldiers were wounded.
Hamas responded to Israel's preemptive strike by launching dozens of mortars and rockets into southern Israel hitting, among other targets, downtown Ashkelon.
Prior to the clash, and out of the blue, Mohammed Deif, Hamas's chief bombmaker "emeritus" had warned of a strike against the "Zionist enemy."
Even as Hamas-controlled Gaza, fueled by religious fanaticism and mired in the culture of victimization, pursued its predictable violent trajectory - 6,000 miles away, the splendor of peaceful change, representative democracy and political civility was on display for all to see.
FORTY YEARS after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, the United States of America elected a black man as president. For many of his supporters, the biracial Obama embodies an 21st century ideal: post-racial, post ideological and post-cynical.
John McCain's loss was not hard to foresee. Hampered by having to campaign as the standard-bearer of a GOP whose incumbent president remains profoundly unpopular, his campaign was just picking up steam when the global financial meltdown struck. It was also his bad luck to face an extraordinarily appealing opponent whose personal story and charisma proved insurmountable.
Israelis can learn from how Obama and McCain reacted to the election results. In a gracious concession speech, McCain remarked that, "A century ago, president Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters... America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time."
He continued: "Senator Obama and I have had, and argued, our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face."
Earlier, Obama received a friendly congratulatory phone call from President George W. Bush.
Such classy behavior stands in sharp contrast to the deportment of many an Israeli politician who, confronted by defeat, goes off and sulks. Granted, Israel's proportional system does not foster absolute winners. Still, where is it written that competing politicians should treat each other with unrelenting disdain?
OBAMA garnered roughly 52% of the popular vote (with a projected 338 electoral college votes) against McCain's tally of 47% (and 161 in the electoral college). Obama also helped propel his party to victory in the House of Representatives where, with some races still outstanding, Democrats picked up 18 seats giving them at least a 252-173 majority.
With most senate races decided, Democrats have captured five places and appear to hold a 56-seat majority.
Exit polls show that Obama garnered 43% of the Caucasian vote, plus a majority of African American (95%), Asian (62%) and Hispanic (66%) voters. He lost Protestants (45%), but carried Catholics (53%) and Jews overwhelmingly (78%).
In claiming victory before tens of thousands of supporters, some of them teary-eyed, Obama praised McCain's devotion to America and took cognizance of the challenges the country faces: Two wars, a planet in environmental peril, the global economic crisis, terrorists - whom he pledged to defeat - and frayed alliances.
Then he called for sacrifice and patriotism, concluding: "And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too."
THOSE in our part of the world dedicated to rejectionism, violence and terror will soon discover anew that the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is above partisanship. And the members of the new administration will see with their own eyes that no one wants peace more than Israel. No one.
Congratulations President-elect Obama on a historic victory. Godspeed.
13 years unhealed
Thirteen years after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, both the Left and the Right have embraced a single corrosive motto: "Never forget, never forgive." If they persist, our Zionist enterprise is at risk.
The Left appropriated Rabin's memory, distanced it from the nation as a whole, and exploited it for partisan ends. Rabin's murder was held over the heads of everyone who opposed Oslo.
The Right closed its mind to the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, even if unintentionally, its leaders said things that contributed to the atmosphere which set the stage for the killing.
Time has not healed our nations wounds. Instead, we've spent the past 13 years locked into "never forget, never forgive."
In the time leading up to the murder, Israel was riven by political strife and buffeted by Arab violence. Who remembers that just days before he was killed, Rabin declared that any final deal with the PLO would have to include settlement blocs? Who recalls that it was president Ezer Weizman who challenged the legitimacy of the Oslo II accords, telling Israel Radio: "This is not an agreement. It was passed by one-vote majority. And if that vote hadn't received a Mitsubishi there would not be an agreement."
If only we could turn back the clock. If only Yigal Amir had been apprehended on the night of November 4, 1995, before Rabin finished his address to 100,000 supporters at what was then called Kikar Malchei Yisrael.
It was not to be.
On the morning after the assassination, this newspaper carried a front-page editorial: "The shock is universal. No Israeli, no Jew, no decent human being anywhere can help being shaken to the core, shattered to the depth of his and her soul by the news...
"If the Jewish nation is again unlucky, Rabin's death ...may well be remembered as a blow from which Israel has not recovered... But if the nation is more fortunate ... and reason prevails, the assassination will serve as a reminder that internal violence in the most dangerous enemy...."
We cannot say that reason has prevailed, though it could have. On the day of Rabin's funeral, Rabbi Avraham Shapira, a guiding authority of Gush Emunim, called Amir a murderer lacking in Jewish morality.
Yigal Amir's mother disowned him. The Council of Jewish settlements in Judea Samaria and Gaza rejected him and those who embraced him. Most of Rabin's opponents were genuinely stunned, even broken-hearted.
Yet, from the start, a minority of extremists termed the killing "heavenly retribution."
Exacerbating tensions, his grieving widow blamed not only the killer, but all opponents of Oslo. "There definitely was incitement which was strongly absorbed and found itself a murderer, who did this because he felt he had the support of a broad public with an extremist approach..."
THAT THE Left lacked magnanimity in no way absolves the Right today from excommunicating those fanatics - a small minority of the pro-settler universe - who practice violence or preach perfidy.
A process of demonization is taking place before our eyes. The government - whatever its many faults - and our army are denigrated as "un-Jewish." We watched in shock as Kiryat Arba rabbi Dov Lior compared the actions of the IDF in dismantling the Federman home to the behavior of Nazi soldiers in occupied Poland.
Who on the Right will denounce the rabbi's words?
In recent weeks, masked, rock-throwing, Jewish youths have fought with our soldiers. Who on the Right will denounce this despicable behavior?
We hear that radical parents are teaching their children that IDF soldiers sent to take down illegal structures aren't "real" Jews. Extremists have launched "revenge attacks" against Arabs. Others have prayed for IDF soldiers to be captured, defeated, even killed. Mercifully, at least this has been condemned.
Let no one on the Right wince when security officials warn that an atmosphere is being created that makes another political murder possible.
No matter how passionately Israelis disagree, no matter how high the stakes, we absolutely must contend with one another exclusively within the political arena.
Those determined to wage war on a different plain - imbued by the delusion that they are the last of the Jews - must be socially, politically and religiously isolated first and foremost by supporters of the settlement enterprise.
America decides
The power of an American president, the late political historian Richard E. Neustadt wrote, is not the power to command, but the power to persuade.
As American voters go to the polls Tuesday to elect their country's 44th president, they may want to consider the temperament, character and emotional intelligence of the candidates. How well would either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain persuade average citizens, the Congress, media, as well as America's friends abroad, to follow where he leads.
The presidency, as Theodore Roosevelt noted, is a "bully pulpit" - a superb platform from which to advocate an agenda, but not for a president who loses popularity or lacks credibility. Such a president will get little done, notwithstanding his constitutional powers.
That said, there are substantive differences between the candidates. Voters will be galvanized more by the economy and a range of domestic issues than foreign policy.
For instance, Obama would appoint justices to the Supreme Court committed to upholding Roe v. Wade, which essentially decriminalized abortion. McCain promises to work to overturn the 1973 landmark decision. And Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin opposes abortion in all cases including rape and incest, except when a mother's life is in danger.
Obama opposes gay marriage, but also a California proposition to ban it; McCain opposes gay marriage but supports the California effort. On taxes, Obama favors tax cuts for the middle-class workers and would increases taxes for higher earners. McCain pledges to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25%.
On foreign policy, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq and the surge. McCain championed both. Obama pledges to "end the Iraq war responsibly." McCain says US forces have dealt "devastating blows to al-Qaida in Iraq" and would pursue victory. Both would send more troops to Afghanistan.
On Iran, Obama views the regime as a threat to the US and would employ direct diplomacy to persuade Teheran to change its policies. If that didn't work, he says, all options are on the table.
McCain promises to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, has pushed for restricting Teheran's ability to import refined petroleum, and pledges not to talk to the regime without pre-conditions. He's criticized Obama for his willingness to enter into unconditional negotiations.
With regard to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Obama would take an activist approach to help reach an agreement, but would not dictate the terms of peace. He says Israel must emerge with secure borders, but has refused to explicitly support the 1967-plus formula which would have Israel retain strategic settlement blocs. Obama says Jerusalem should not be divided and urges the Palestinians to "reinterpret" the "right of return" so that "Israel's identity as Jewish state" is preserved. He supports the security fence.
McCain, like Obama, supports the creation of a Palestinian state. He says he would never force Israel into concessions with anyone that seeks its destruction. He has made no statement on the 1967-plus formula. He's promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
OPINION surveys show Obama leading roughly 52%-46%. Obama could win 291 electoral votes to McCain's 163. To turn the situation around, McCain will need to win every state George W. Bush won in 2004 - plus one.
To his everlasting credit, McCain steadfastly refused to play the race card (though, unauthorized, some of his supporters have).
Meanwhile, Americans will also be electing the entire 435-seat House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. Democrats hold 235 seats and Republicans 199. (One place is vacant.) Thirty-eight races are tossups and could go to the Democrats.
Over in the Senate, both parties hold 49 seats. (Two independents, Joseph Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, caucus with the Democrats.) Democrats are anticipating an outcome that will give them a majority of 56 - or more.
AMERICANS now decide whether to vote "Country First" or "Change We Need." Those who would factor Israel into their decision understand that our preeminent strategic concern is the Iranian threat.
The "best president for Israel" is the man who can best internalize the scale of the Iranian menace, and most effectively persuade Americans - and responsible players in the international community - to stop the mullahs before it's too late.
A place for Meretz
Are we to draw any lessons about the state of Israel's Zionist Left from the back-to-back announcements by former Meretz leader Yossi Beilin and veteran party stalwart Ran Cohen that they are retiring?
Meretz is unlikely to make gains in the February elections over the five seats it currently holds. Never a large party, Meretz held 12 seats in 1992. It's been downhill since.
The party is comprised of the (Marxist Zionist) Mapam - itself an amalgamation of leftist factions - and Shulamit Aloni's Ratz, founded in 1973, to champion civil liberties and dovish policies toward the Arabs. Meretz's forebears also include remnants of a number of radical splinters such as the Communist Party, Haolam Hazeh, Moked, Tchelet Adom and Shelli. A newcomer was Beilin's own Shahar, which he set up after quitting Labor. Finally, two defectors from Yisrael Ba'aliya entered as a faction dubbed the Democratic Choice.
Meretz has been more influential than its numbers alone would suggest because its core ideas were echoed by elements in academia and the media. Its long-standing opposition to a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and its anti-settlement oratory have been at least partly mainstreamed. Meretz once stood alone in promoting negotiations with the PLO, a withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines, the dismantlement of West Bank settlements and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Some see the distinctions nowadays between the major parties and Meretz as merely ones of rhetoric. Yet Likud and Kadima arrived at their yet-to-be-explicitly-defined land-for-peace positions as a result of changes on the ground. These were wrought by Oslo and the second intifada. Labor is moving toward the Likud and Kadima by shedding some of its illusions about the nature of a Palestinian polity, and in a common determination to nail-down details of any deal with the Palestinians rather than rely on mutual good-will.
So Meretz's inability to internalize the lessons of the second intifada sets it apart from the Zionist mainstream.
IN THE 2006 elections the party's poor showing undercut Beilin's political stock, forcing him last March to abandon plans to vie again for the leadership. Mild-mannered, stolid, but immovable, Beilin, at 60, caps 20 years as a Knesset member. In interviews over the weekend he cited his greatest accomplishments: "I was one of the first people who formed a lobby to leave Lebanon. I led Oslo and launched the Geneva Initiative."
We do not expect Beilin to agree with us that Oslo was a strategic failure; that the way the IDF pulled out for Lebanon may have set the stage for the Second Lebanon War; and that fears over the EU-funded Geneva Initiative may have impelled Ariel Sharon to move faster on Gaza disengagement then he might have wanted to.
Ran Cohen twice sought the Meretz leadership but was defeated, first by Beilin and then by current party head Haim Oron. At age 69, with 24 years in the Knesset, Cohen can claim a number of bipartisan achievements: he helped pass the law that allows residents in public housing to purchase their apartments, and led the battle for a liveable minimum wage.
Meretz is gearing up for its grueling primary to choose a slate of Knesset candidates. Given its electoral prospects, there are few safe slots up for grabs.
Moreover, the threshold it has set up for MKs who have served for eight years or more is excruciatingly high: They must win the support of at least 60% of the convention delegates.
This criteria forced then-Meretz leader Yossi Sarid to bow out in December 2005 after 32 years of political activism. Beilin and Cohen are victims of this system (which Beilin himself initiated); facing the prospect of being unable to clear the 60% hurdle, both have opted out rather than cap their careers in humiliating defeat.
WHATEVER ITS internal machinations, we believe that Israel's body-politic would be best served with fewer, and less ideologically strident, parties. Were Meretz to join forces with Labor, the smaller party could reinvigorate the latter's social-democratic credentials while Labor could rein in Meretz's more immoderate security positions.
Together, they could present a center-Left alternative favoring religious tolerance, pluralism, civil liberties and a passionate concern for the downtrodden.
Obama's agenda
The challenges facing President-elect Barack Obama are formidable. He will inherit a $1 trillion budget deficit on top of a $10.5 trillion national debt, plus responsibility for steering America through the global economic crisis.
He becomes commander-in-chief with the US at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has pledged to wind down Operation Iraqi Freedom within 16 months while intensifying Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
There will, moreover, be frayed relations with the EU to repair; a resurgent Russia to contend with, and Guantanamo Bay to shut down. He'll also need to cajole China toward being a more responsible international citizen and grapple with endemic violence and instability in Sudan, Congo and Zimbabwe.
Obama has promised as well to take a fresh look at what more America could be doing on climate change. And, neither last nor least, he will need to verify that North Korea really is shutting down its nuclear weapons program.
At home, the challenges are no less daunting. Obama will have to oversee the rescue of a sick economy which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs; and he'll need to prevent millions of people who are defaulting on their mortgages from losing their homes, with unemployment levels hovering around 6.3% and forecast to rise.
EVEN WITH so much on his plate, there's no avoiding the Middle East - either because some flare-up will demand his attention, or because of the alluring temptation to go down in history as the president who finally - finally - brokered the deal that gave the Palestinian Arabs a state and delivered Israel from decades of terrorism.
Obama's secretary of state may feel drawn to fast-track the Israel-Syria peace negotiations, seeing a deal there as low-hanging fruit.
But we think Obama can be smarter than his predecessors by homing in on this harsh Middle East peacemaking reality: As long as the Islamic Republic of Iran remains on the ascendant, there will be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians, no way to bolster Palestinian moderates by chipping away at the rejectionists, no treaty with Syria, and no prospect of saving Lebanon.
So rather than going down the fruitless path taken by many of his predecessors, Obama might want to begin with a different set of assumptions:
Since 1979, the chief obstacle to peace in the Middle East has been Iran. Break its stranglehold, and you pave the way toward progress on all peace-making fronts.
No one need convince Israel that peace with the Palestinians is in its interest. Yet a deal that does not allow Israel to retain strategic settlement blocs will come back to haunt the friends of peace. The Obama administration thus needs to embrace President George W. Bush's 2004 letter to premier Ariel Sharon acknowledging that changes on the ground have made returning to the pre-1967 armistice lines unrealistic.
YET THIS is not an argument against talking to Iran. What matters is what America talks to Iran about and the environment in which "unconditional" talks take place.
The talks need to be aimed at persuading Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. But talking is not an end itself. Absent real leverage, US negotiators will not get the regime's undivided attention. We know this because the EU - with American support - has been negotiating with Iran for years, to no avail. Bilateral talks between Washington and Teheran need to be accompanied by draconian sanctions led by the US and EU; and the threat of the military option if all else fails must be more than perfunctory.
Even without weapons of mass destruction, Iran is an intimidating and destabilizing force, sowing havoc from Beirut to Buenos Aires. It provides the financial and military wherewithal and diplomatic cover that enable Hamas's continued control over Gaza and Hizbullah's domination of Lebanon.
Clearly, Barack Obama is too smart, too pragmatic to genuinely expect that talk alone will convince a bellicose, fanatical and messianic regime with imperial ambitions beyond our region to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Whatever his game plan, if he wants to help foster the normalized relations Israel seeks with its Arab neighbors his administration will first have to sideline the region's number-one obstacle to peace.
Mazal tov, Obama
Just as the people of the United States were electing Barack Hussein Obama as their next president, Hamas was putting the finishing touches on a plot to abduct Israeli soldiers and break the relative cease-fire which has prevailed for the past five months.
Its engineers constructed a 250-meter tunnel from Gaza into Israel. IDF
intelligence assessed that the preparations posed an immediate danger and special forces were sent in to conduct a pinpoint operation to demolish the tunnel. Six Palestinian Arab gunmen were killed; six of our soldiers were wounded.
Hamas responded to Israel's preemptive strike by launching dozens of mortars and rockets into southern Israel hitting, among other targets, downtown Ashkelon.
Prior to the clash, and out of the blue, Mohammed Deif, Hamas's chief bombmaker "emeritus" had warned of a strike against the "Zionist enemy."
Even as Hamas-controlled Gaza, fueled by religious fanaticism and mired in the culture of victimization, pursued its predictable violent trajectory - 6,000 miles away, the splendor of peaceful change, representative democracy and political civility was on display for all to see.
FORTY YEARS after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, the United States of America elected a black man as president. For many of his supporters, the biracial Obama embodies an 21st century ideal: post-racial, post ideological and post-cynical.
John McCain's loss was not hard to foresee. Hampered by having to campaign as the standard-bearer of a GOP whose incumbent president remains profoundly unpopular, his campaign was just picking up steam when the global financial meltdown struck. It was also his bad luck to face an extraordinarily appealing opponent whose personal story and charisma proved insurmountable.
Israelis can learn from how Obama and McCain reacted to the election results. In a gracious concession speech, McCain remarked that, "A century ago, president Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters... America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time."
He continued: "Senator Obama and I have had, and argued, our differences, and he has prevailed. No doubt many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face."
Earlier, Obama received a friendly congratulatory phone call from President George W. Bush.
Such classy behavior stands in sharp contrast to the deportment of many an Israeli politician who, confronted by defeat, goes off and sulks. Granted, Israel's proportional system does not foster absolute winners. Still, where is it written that competing politicians should treat each other with unrelenting disdain?
OBAMA garnered roughly 52% of the popular vote (with a projected 338 electoral college votes) against McCain's tally of 47% (and 161 in the electoral college). Obama also helped propel his party to victory in the House of Representatives where, with some races still outstanding, Democrats picked up 18 seats giving them at least a 252-173 majority.
With most senate races decided, Democrats have captured five places and appear to hold a 56-seat majority.
Exit polls show that Obama garnered 43% of the Caucasian vote, plus a majority of African American (95%), Asian (62%) and Hispanic (66%) voters. He lost Protestants (45%), but carried Catholics (53%) and Jews overwhelmingly (78%).
In claiming victory before tens of thousands of supporters, some of them teary-eyed, Obama praised McCain's devotion to America and took cognizance of the challenges the country faces: Two wars, a planet in environmental peril, the global economic crisis, terrorists - whom he pledged to defeat - and frayed alliances.
Then he called for sacrifice and patriotism, concluding: "And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too."
THOSE in our part of the world dedicated to rejectionism, violence and terror will soon discover anew that the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is above partisanship. And the members of the new administration will see with their own eyes that no one wants peace more than Israel. No one.
Congratulations President-elect Obama on a historic victory. Godspeed.
13 years unhealed
Thirteen years after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, both the Left and the Right have embraced a single corrosive motto: "Never forget, never forgive." If they persist, our Zionist enterprise is at risk.
The Left appropriated Rabin's memory, distanced it from the nation as a whole, and exploited it for partisan ends. Rabin's murder was held over the heads of everyone who opposed Oslo.
The Right closed its mind to the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, even if unintentionally, its leaders said things that contributed to the atmosphere which set the stage for the killing.
Time has not healed our nations wounds. Instead, we've spent the past 13 years locked into "never forget, never forgive."
In the time leading up to the murder, Israel was riven by political strife and buffeted by Arab violence. Who remembers that just days before he was killed, Rabin declared that any final deal with the PLO would have to include settlement blocs? Who recalls that it was president Ezer Weizman who challenged the legitimacy of the Oslo II accords, telling Israel Radio: "This is not an agreement. It was passed by one-vote majority. And if that vote hadn't received a Mitsubishi there would not be an agreement."
If only we could turn back the clock. If only Yigal Amir had been apprehended on the night of November 4, 1995, before Rabin finished his address to 100,000 supporters at what was then called Kikar Malchei Yisrael.
It was not to be.
On the morning after the assassination, this newspaper carried a front-page editorial: "The shock is universal. No Israeli, no Jew, no decent human being anywhere can help being shaken to the core, shattered to the depth of his and her soul by the news...
"If the Jewish nation is again unlucky, Rabin's death ...may well be remembered as a blow from which Israel has not recovered... But if the nation is more fortunate ... and reason prevails, the assassination will serve as a reminder that internal violence in the most dangerous enemy...."
We cannot say that reason has prevailed, though it could have. On the day of Rabin's funeral, Rabbi Avraham Shapira, a guiding authority of Gush Emunim, called Amir a murderer lacking in Jewish morality.
Yigal Amir's mother disowned him. The Council of Jewish settlements in Judea Samaria and Gaza rejected him and those who embraced him. Most of Rabin's opponents were genuinely stunned, even broken-hearted.
Yet, from the start, a minority of extremists termed the killing "heavenly retribution."
Exacerbating tensions, his grieving widow blamed not only the killer, but all opponents of Oslo. "There definitely was incitement which was strongly absorbed and found itself a murderer, who did this because he felt he had the support of a broad public with an extremist approach..."
THAT THE Left lacked magnanimity in no way absolves the Right today from excommunicating those fanatics - a small minority of the pro-settler universe - who practice violence or preach perfidy.
A process of demonization is taking place before our eyes. The government - whatever its many faults - and our army are denigrated as "un-Jewish." We watched in shock as Kiryat Arba rabbi Dov Lior compared the actions of the IDF in dismantling the Federman home to the behavior of Nazi soldiers in occupied Poland.
Who on the Right will denounce the rabbi's words?
In recent weeks, masked, rock-throwing, Jewish youths have fought with our soldiers. Who on the Right will denounce this despicable behavior?
We hear that radical parents are teaching their children that IDF soldiers sent to take down illegal structures aren't "real" Jews. Extremists have launched "revenge attacks" against Arabs. Others have prayed for IDF soldiers to be captured, defeated, even killed. Mercifully, at least this has been condemned.
Let no one on the Right wince when security officials warn that an atmosphere is being created that makes another political murder possible.
No matter how passionately Israelis disagree, no matter how high the stakes, we absolutely must contend with one another exclusively within the political arena.
Those determined to wage war on a different plain - imbued by the delusion that they are the last of the Jews - must be socially, politically and religiously isolated first and foremost by supporters of the settlement enterprise.
America decides
The power of an American president, the late political historian Richard E. Neustadt wrote, is not the power to command, but the power to persuade.
As American voters go to the polls Tuesday to elect their country's 44th president, they may want to consider the temperament, character and emotional intelligence of the candidates. How well would either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain persuade average citizens, the Congress, media, as well as America's friends abroad, to follow where he leads.
The presidency, as Theodore Roosevelt noted, is a "bully pulpit" - a superb platform from which to advocate an agenda, but not for a president who loses popularity or lacks credibility. Such a president will get little done, notwithstanding his constitutional powers.
That said, there are substantive differences between the candidates. Voters will be galvanized more by the economy and a range of domestic issues than foreign policy.
For instance, Obama would appoint justices to the Supreme Court committed to upholding Roe v. Wade, which essentially decriminalized abortion. McCain promises to work to overturn the 1973 landmark decision. And Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin opposes abortion in all cases including rape and incest, except when a mother's life is in danger.
Obama opposes gay marriage, but also a California proposition to ban it; McCain opposes gay marriage but supports the California effort. On taxes, Obama favors tax cuts for the middle-class workers and would increases taxes for higher earners. McCain pledges to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25%.
On foreign policy, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq and the surge. McCain championed both. Obama pledges to "end the Iraq war responsibly." McCain says US forces have dealt "devastating blows to al-Qaida in Iraq" and would pursue victory. Both would send more troops to Afghanistan.
On Iran, Obama views the regime as a threat to the US and would employ direct diplomacy to persuade Teheran to change its policies. If that didn't work, he says, all options are on the table.
McCain promises to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, has pushed for restricting Teheran's ability to import refined petroleum, and pledges not to talk to the regime without pre-conditions. He's criticized Obama for his willingness to enter into unconditional negotiations.
With regard to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Obama would take an activist approach to help reach an agreement, but would not dictate the terms of peace. He says Israel must emerge with secure borders, but has refused to explicitly support the 1967-plus formula which would have Israel retain strategic settlement blocs. Obama says Jerusalem should not be divided and urges the Palestinians to "reinterpret" the "right of return" so that "Israel's identity as Jewish state" is preserved. He supports the security fence.
McCain, like Obama, supports the creation of a Palestinian state. He says he would never force Israel into concessions with anyone that seeks its destruction. He has made no statement on the 1967-plus formula. He's promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
OPINION surveys show Obama leading roughly 52%-46%. Obama could win 291 electoral votes to McCain's 163. To turn the situation around, McCain will need to win every state George W. Bush won in 2004 - plus one.
To his everlasting credit, McCain steadfastly refused to play the race card (though, unauthorized, some of his supporters have).
Meanwhile, Americans will also be electing the entire 435-seat House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. Democrats hold 235 seats and Republicans 199. (One place is vacant.) Thirty-eight races are tossups and could go to the Democrats.
Over in the Senate, both parties hold 49 seats. (Two independents, Joseph Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, caucus with the Democrats.) Democrats are anticipating an outcome that will give them a majority of 56 - or more.
AMERICANS now decide whether to vote "Country First" or "Change We Need." Those who would factor Israel into their decision understand that our preeminent strategic concern is the Iranian threat.
The "best president for Israel" is the man who can best internalize the scale of the Iranian menace, and most effectively persuade Americans - and responsible players in the international community - to stop the mullahs before it's too late.
A place for Meretz
Are we to draw any lessons about the state of Israel's Zionist Left from the back-to-back announcements by former Meretz leader Yossi Beilin and veteran party stalwart Ran Cohen that they are retiring?
Meretz is unlikely to make gains in the February elections over the five seats it currently holds. Never a large party, Meretz held 12 seats in 1992. It's been downhill since.
The party is comprised of the (Marxist Zionist) Mapam - itself an amalgamation of leftist factions - and Shulamit Aloni's Ratz, founded in 1973, to champion civil liberties and dovish policies toward the Arabs. Meretz's forebears also include remnants of a number of radical splinters such as the Communist Party, Haolam Hazeh, Moked, Tchelet Adom and Shelli. A newcomer was Beilin's own Shahar, which he set up after quitting Labor. Finally, two defectors from Yisrael Ba'aliya entered as a faction dubbed the Democratic Choice.
Meretz has been more influential than its numbers alone would suggest because its core ideas were echoed by elements in academia and the media. Its long-standing opposition to a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and its anti-settlement oratory have been at least partly mainstreamed. Meretz once stood alone in promoting negotiations with the PLO, a withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines, the dismantlement of West Bank settlements and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Some see the distinctions nowadays between the major parties and Meretz as merely ones of rhetoric. Yet Likud and Kadima arrived at their yet-to-be-explicitly-defined land-for-peace positions as a result of changes on the ground. These were wrought by Oslo and the second intifada. Labor is moving toward the Likud and Kadima by shedding some of its illusions about the nature of a Palestinian polity, and in a common determination to nail-down details of any deal with the Palestinians rather than rely on mutual good-will.
So Meretz's inability to internalize the lessons of the second intifada sets it apart from the Zionist mainstream.
IN THE 2006 elections the party's poor showing undercut Beilin's political stock, forcing him last March to abandon plans to vie again for the leadership. Mild-mannered, stolid, but immovable, Beilin, at 60, caps 20 years as a Knesset member. In interviews over the weekend he cited his greatest accomplishments: "I was one of the first people who formed a lobby to leave Lebanon. I led Oslo and launched the Geneva Initiative."
We do not expect Beilin to agree with us that Oslo was a strategic failure; that the way the IDF pulled out for Lebanon may have set the stage for the Second Lebanon War; and that fears over the EU-funded Geneva Initiative may have impelled Ariel Sharon to move faster on Gaza disengagement then he might have wanted to.
Ran Cohen twice sought the Meretz leadership but was defeated, first by Beilin and then by current party head Haim Oron. At age 69, with 24 years in the Knesset, Cohen can claim a number of bipartisan achievements: he helped pass the law that allows residents in public housing to purchase their apartments, and led the battle for a liveable minimum wage.
Meretz is gearing up for its grueling primary to choose a slate of Knesset candidates. Given its electoral prospects, there are few safe slots up for grabs.
Moreover, the threshold it has set up for MKs who have served for eight years or more is excruciatingly high: They must win the support of at least 60% of the convention delegates.
This criteria forced then-Meretz leader Yossi Sarid to bow out in December 2005 after 32 years of political activism. Beilin and Cohen are victims of this system (which Beilin himself initiated); facing the prospect of being unable to clear the 60% hurdle, both have opted out rather than cap their careers in humiliating defeat.
WHATEVER ITS internal machinations, we believe that Israel's body-politic would be best served with fewer, and less ideologically strident, parties. Were Meretz to join forces with Labor, the smaller party could reinvigorate the latter's social-democratic credentials while Labor could rein in Meretz's more immoderate security positions.
Together, they could present a center-Left alternative favoring religious tolerance, pluralism, civil liberties and a passionate concern for the downtrodden.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Israel's Brain Drain; The plight of newspapers; Barak opposes 'piggish' capitalism; Livni says no to Shas
BELOW IS A 'WRAP' covering Sunday, Oct 26 thru Friday, Oct. Oct 31
Bold on brainpower
A threatened strike this Sunday at Israeli universities which would have delayed the start of the winter semester was averted thanks to the belated intervention of the prime minister, who largely sided with the university presidents and the education minister over the finance minister and Treasury officials.
Ehud Olmert ordered the Treasury to release NIS 465 million in supplementary funding to the universities. He even promised another NIS 50 million for "development."
Education Minister Yuli Tamir was ecstatic: Finally, there will be money to hire young faculty, invest in research, improve infrastructure and subsidize tuition.
This is all good news. Of course, had the state not cut higher education funding six years in a row and not done away with the municipal tax abatements once enjoyed by universities, they might have had a bit more cash on hand.
A new complicating factor is that university financial portfolios have lost hundreds of millions of shekels in value due to the global economic downturn. Moreover, no one yet knows how the recession will affect donations from "friends" organizations abroad. The Technion, for instance, raises some $80 million a year that way.
MUCH NOW depends on how the Treasury implements the premier's order. Will the universities be able to spend the promised monies at their discretion - on everything from salvaging their humanities departments to paying for pensions - or will their expenditures be micro-managed?
The Finance Ministry had been insisting that any additional monies be funneled to programs promoting the Shochat Committee's vision. That's the body tasked with rethinking how Israeli higher education should be funded and administered. As part of its package of recommendations, Shochat called for investing NIS 2.4 billion in the universities over five years. The aim? To reverse the country's dramatic brain-drain, which has seen too many of our best and brightest emigrating because they can't find work in their fields here.
Shochat also advocated investing in young scholars. Universities want to do that, but they're under internal pressure to support established academics. They are also saddled with huge personnel and pension costs - the annual budget bite at Hebrew University, for example, is 64 percent.
Shochat advocated a merit-based pay-scale, but how are universities to reconcile that with their obligations to the tenured? It recommended that students pay more: At Hebrew University, for instance, tuition fees comprise only 11 percent of income. The government provides another 43%. Yet how much more can students realistically afford? Many are in their early 20s when they reach campus, having done army or national service, and already work part-time. Means-testing might be an equitable way to determine how much individual students should pay. Some private universities in the US have eliminated tuition altogether for students whose family income falls below a certain level.
WE'RE GRATIFIED that the threat of a university strike appears to have been removed. And we urge all sides to work together in good faith to implement the premier's instructions.
But let's not lose sight of the bigger challenge. If we do not invest more and better in education - from elementary school through post-graduate studies - our pool of educational talent will simply dry up. It's already beginning to happen.
We spend roughly 6.9% of our GDP in education - on a par with the US and UK - yet a recent OECD survey suggested we're not getting a sufficient return on this investment. Israeli teachers are underpaid, our classrooms are overcrowded and our students no longer excel in math and science.
Israel's economy is a technologically advanced one. Even those who run our farms, dairies and agricultural enterprises use state-of-the-art equipment. When people think of Israeli industry, they think of our hi-tech exports in such fields as aviation, communications, software design, medical electronics, fiber optics and pharmaceuticals. All this takes brainpower.
We need to press our politicians, civil servants and university presidents - as well as the heads of all teachers unions - to make the courageous strategic choices that will allow Israel to sharpen its intellectual qualitative edge for the 21st century. When it comes to nurturing our nation's brainpower, our ambition must exceed the Shochat recommendations.
Hug your newspaper
These are tough times for those of us who are passionate about newspapers. Yediot Aharonot, the biggest Hebrew-language tabloid, is reportedly planning to cut its budget. The circulation of Ma'ariv has fallen below that of Yisrael Hayom, a free handout. Ma'ariv's management is said to be planning yet another round of cuts.
Overseas, The New York Sun has ceased publication. The Star-Ledger of New Jersey plans to cut its newsroom staff by a staggering 40 percent. The Los Angeles Times is cutting 75 newsroom jobs. The Gannet chain, which owns 85 newspapers, has announced more layoffs (in addition to 1,000 jobs cut over the summer). Even The New York Times has instituted a partial hiring-freeze.
The combined weekday circulation of America's top 500 newspapers now averages 38 million - 4.6% below last year.
Apart from USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, whose readership numbers are flat, all of America's leading newspapers - including the Times, Washington Post, New York Daily News, New York Post and Los Angeles Times - lost readers in the past year.
Newspaper advertisement revenues worldwide are declining; Web site income has generally failed to make up the difference. Virtually all newspapers have spent years economizing. Some have been cut to the bone.
Now comes news that the well-regarded Christian Science Monitor will be suspending daily publication in April 2009 and, instead, emailing paid subscribers its paper in PDF form.
The news is no better in the UK. For instance, five years ago The Independent was selling 218,567 copies daily; today, revamped as a tabloid, it sells roughly 144,050. Similarly, paid circulation is down at The Times, which also went tabloid, and at The Guardian, which moved to a "Berliner" size, somewhere between broadsheet and tabloid. The Daily Telegraph, which maintained its broadsheet format, has also lost readers. Even the give-away Metro, distributed in 16 cities across Britain, is laying off staff.
THE DARK clouds hanging over the "old media," however, give way to a bright future for "new media." Google this week announced a "historic" arrangement, the outcome of a court settlement between the search engine and representatives of publishers and authors that will allow readers - so far only in the US - to purchase full digital access to millions of copyrighted books. The deal protects intellectual property while dramatically expanding Web access to the printed word.
Perhaps the biggest clue about where the future may be headed comes from Amazon.com, which is marketing a wireless reading device - again for use in the US only - known as Kindle, which it insists "looks and reads like real paper." The gadget makes it possible to purchase books or newspapers and have them auto-delivered wirelessly (without the use of a computer or telephone line) in less than one minute.
Even before 1450, when German inventor Johannes Gutenberg introduced the movable-type printing press, mankind had sought to improve how the written word was disseminated. Over five centuries later, we're well into an epoch which will see paper and ink largely disappear, replaced by digitized "content."
Some insist that readers of traditional newspapers absorb more of what passes before their eyes than those who rely on click- and-scroll. Perhaps. What is certain is that quality journalism is being underfunded as advertising revenue falls in the shift to cyberspace.
Still, you won't find Luddites here at The Jerusalem Post. In fact, www.jpost.com was the first Web site to provide news and comment from Israel, and it remains the most-read English site in Israel. Fortunately, we are also blessed with a strong and faithful readership in hard-copy.
As we survey the changes affecting our industry worldwide, we can't help but feel a twinge of sadness at the thought that one day the thump! of a newspaper being delivered will be forgotten, as will the smell of newsprint. The hope is that disciplined, carefully prioritized content and elegant, efficient presentation of traditional newspapers will live on in the PDF format. At the very least, there will be no one to complain of smudged fingers...
Ours is perhaps the luckiest of generations. We can relish the traditional newspaper, even as we reconcile ourselves to the technologies that are replacing it.
Barak, social democrat?
Kicking off the Labor Party's campaign for the 18th Knesset on Monday, party chair Ehud Barak denounced "piggish capitalism."
"We differ from other parties because we understand that it's time to do away with the capitalistic greed that the Right has been a proponent of, while offering solidarity, sensitivity and social responsibility."
Playing to the proletariat has worked for Barak in the past. In the 1999 campaign, which saw him defeat the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu, the Labor leader predicted that Netanyahu's government "will fall because of the trampled honor of the unemployed, because of one child's crying into his pillow at night, and another child, and another child, and another child..."
It's an approach that may not work now.
Ten years on, Labor aspires to represent the working man and woman; it maintains its membership in the Socialist International. Yet the party is so closely identified in the public mind with many of Israel's top entrepreneurs, industrialists and moguls as to make an anti-greed electoral strategy problematic.
Over the years, for instance, Labor has raised money abroad from the Bronfman family, from Swiss industrialists Nissim Gaon and Bruce Rappaport, from Slim-Fast diet company founder S. Daniel Abraham and the late Swiss-British billionaire Octav Botnar. Local benefactors have included Gad Ze'evi, Muzi Wertheim and Stef Wertheimer.
These supporters may see themselves as progressives, but could voters reasonably think of them as enemies of "capitalist greed"?
As for the party leader himself, it's true that Barak was raised on a kibbutz - Mishmar Hasharon - but he has since graduated to an entirely different life-style, exemplified by his spacious home on the 31st floor of Alfred Akirov's Tel Aviv tower. It's an apartment purchased for $2.5 million in 2006, which Barak is now trying to sell for $11 million. Plainly, the Labor leader has engaged in capitalist enterprise (serving on corporate boards and the like).
We do not begrudge him his comfortable lifestyle. He would do well, however, to explain to Israelis where enterprise ends and greed begins.
Labor's origins are traceable to the Zionist socialism of the Mapai Party, which dominated our politics and our economics first through the pre-state Jewish Agency, and then in government.
Today's Labor Party encompasses the remnants of the neo-Marxist Achdut Avoda Party as well as David Ben-Gurion's splinter Rafi Party. The factions merged in 1968, though the Labor Party as we know it now emerged only in 1991. Ever since, it has struggled to refine its identity. In 2003, several of its more dovish luminaries quit to join Meretz; and in 2006 others who in the wake of the second intifada saw themselves as centrist or pragmatists quit to join Kadima.
WHERE DOES all this leave Labor now? Polls show the party garnering 11 Knesset seats, compared to the 20 it holds now. The global economic crisis notwithstanding, voters are telling pollsters that security tops the economy as the issue that most animates their preferences. Assuming Shaul Mofaz plays a critical role in Kadima's campaign and Moshe Ya'alon - another general - runs with Likud, Barak's appeal to voters on security grounds is diminished.
The ethnic and working-class vote is likely to go to Shas; sincere neo-Marxists troubled by "capitalistic greed" will probably be more comfortable voting Meretz. Thus Barak's "capitalist greed" rhetoric is unlikely to be Labor's salvation.
Britain's Labor Party spent its "wilderness years" (1979-1997) - while Margaret Thatcher and her successors kept the Conservatives in power - reinventing itself as New Labor. The Israel Labor Party never gave itself much time for that. When it wasn't ruling the country for 29 consecutive years, it was, for roughly 17 years, a coalition partner. Arguably, the party became little more than a vehicle for seeking office.
At this stage, it's far from obvious that even a spell in the opposition could rebrand Labor as Israel's "social democratic party." In its post-Amir Peretz incarnation, it is outflanked on its economic left by Meretz and Shas, while the center is held by Kadima.
Should Kadima flourish under Tzipi Livni - championing, moreover, a centrist approach to negotiation with the Palestinian Arabs - many will wonder whether Labor, led by Ehud Barak, has any future at all.
Bye-bye, bazaar?
The Knesset's winter session opens today, but there will be no keynote address by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who announced Sunday that, under "the current circumstances," he would not press for a legislative agenda.
Following her election five weeks ago as Kadima's new chair, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni struggled to pull together a Knesset majority so that she could replace Olmert without going to the polls. Yesterday, on live television, Livni told President Shimon Peres: I can't do it.
She started out with Kadima's 29 mandates. To this, Ehud Barak added Labor's 20. But for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, Livni still needed Shas's 12 mandates. She also wanted the Gil Pensioners Party's seven seats for a more comfortable, 68-seat majority. But the old-timers backtracked.
The Sephardi Shas Party demanded budget-busting allocations for child allowances; it fancies itself the champion of the working poor. More accurately, however, it mainly champions patronage to its own institutions.
Livni refused to play by the old rules. Nor would she pledge, as Shas demanded, not to negotiate with the Palestinian Arabs on what to do about Jerusalem in the context of Israel's commitment to a "shelf agreement."
Now what? Peres could, over the next several days, try to use the prestige of his office to bring Shas and Kadima together. He could even give opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu three weeks to try his hand at building a governing coalition. Opinion surveys show the Likud - which has only 12 seats - as now being the most popular party.
But the most likely scenario is that Peres will call for new elections, which could take place as early as February 17.
Then the cycle of haggling to form a government begins anew.
OLMERT, who still faces possible indictment, remains in place as Israel's caretaker premier.
There are those on the Right who worry that he will use the coming months to cut a bad deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (himself under pressure to step down when his term expires in January). Critics worry that Olmert will do anything not to be remembered chiefly for the collection of scandals which led to his resignation, and for his inept handling of the Second Lebanon War. He wants to be remembered for his commitment to peace.
He's lately gone on record as breaking with the Israeli consensus by essentially calling for a withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
Post diplomatic reporter Herb Keinon has pointed out, however, that Olmert's ability to reach a deal with the Palestinians or the Syrians is severely constrained. Any accord would need cabinet and Knesset approval - something he's unlikely to get. Moreover, Olmert's Arab partners are unlikely to publicly commit to what for them would be "concessions," fearing that a new government might reject these as insufficient.
On the other hand, Israel cannot freeze its diplomatic and security agenda. Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran can be expected to exploit the perception of an Israeli leadership vacuum. The global economic crisis isn't going away. Neither is the growing lawlessness among extremist elements in the settler movement.
We would like to think that Olmert will rise to the occasion and navigate the country with wisdom until his successor can finally take over. During this period, he needs to work as much as possible in concert with Livni, Netanyahu and Barak on any decision that would bind the next government.
It would be entirely appropriate for him to travel to Washington after America's November 4 election to meet with the president-elect; and to maintain open channels with our Arab interlocutors.
LIVNI is being criticized for mishandling the negotiations by those who say that a more skilled bargainer could have cajoled Shas into joining a coalition.
This misses the point. Whatever the details of the 17th Knesset's premature demise, the more substantive lesson to be learned is that our political system needs reforming. The stranglehold sectarian parties have over the allocation of resources must be broken. We applaud Livni for saying that she refuses "to pawn Israel's future for the prime minister's seat."
The new Kadima leader might just have steered the country in the direction of representative democracy, and away from "government by bazaar."
Bold on brainpower
A threatened strike this Sunday at Israeli universities which would have delayed the start of the winter semester was averted thanks to the belated intervention of the prime minister, who largely sided with the university presidents and the education minister over the finance minister and Treasury officials.
Ehud Olmert ordered the Treasury to release NIS 465 million in supplementary funding to the universities. He even promised another NIS 50 million for "development."
Education Minister Yuli Tamir was ecstatic: Finally, there will be money to hire young faculty, invest in research, improve infrastructure and subsidize tuition.
This is all good news. Of course, had the state not cut higher education funding six years in a row and not done away with the municipal tax abatements once enjoyed by universities, they might have had a bit more cash on hand.
A new complicating factor is that university financial portfolios have lost hundreds of millions of shekels in value due to the global economic downturn. Moreover, no one yet knows how the recession will affect donations from "friends" organizations abroad. The Technion, for instance, raises some $80 million a year that way.
MUCH NOW depends on how the Treasury implements the premier's order. Will the universities be able to spend the promised monies at their discretion - on everything from salvaging their humanities departments to paying for pensions - or will their expenditures be micro-managed?
The Finance Ministry had been insisting that any additional monies be funneled to programs promoting the Shochat Committee's vision. That's the body tasked with rethinking how Israeli higher education should be funded and administered. As part of its package of recommendations, Shochat called for investing NIS 2.4 billion in the universities over five years. The aim? To reverse the country's dramatic brain-drain, which has seen too many of our best and brightest emigrating because they can't find work in their fields here.
Shochat also advocated investing in young scholars. Universities want to do that, but they're under internal pressure to support established academics. They are also saddled with huge personnel and pension costs - the annual budget bite at Hebrew University, for example, is 64 percent.
Shochat advocated a merit-based pay-scale, but how are universities to reconcile that with their obligations to the tenured? It recommended that students pay more: At Hebrew University, for instance, tuition fees comprise only 11 percent of income. The government provides another 43%. Yet how much more can students realistically afford? Many are in their early 20s when they reach campus, having done army or national service, and already work part-time. Means-testing might be an equitable way to determine how much individual students should pay. Some private universities in the US have eliminated tuition altogether for students whose family income falls below a certain level.
WE'RE GRATIFIED that the threat of a university strike appears to have been removed. And we urge all sides to work together in good faith to implement the premier's instructions.
But let's not lose sight of the bigger challenge. If we do not invest more and better in education - from elementary school through post-graduate studies - our pool of educational talent will simply dry up. It's already beginning to happen.
We spend roughly 6.9% of our GDP in education - on a par with the US and UK - yet a recent OECD survey suggested we're not getting a sufficient return on this investment. Israeli teachers are underpaid, our classrooms are overcrowded and our students no longer excel in math and science.
Israel's economy is a technologically advanced one. Even those who run our farms, dairies and agricultural enterprises use state-of-the-art equipment. When people think of Israeli industry, they think of our hi-tech exports in such fields as aviation, communications, software design, medical electronics, fiber optics and pharmaceuticals. All this takes brainpower.
We need to press our politicians, civil servants and university presidents - as well as the heads of all teachers unions - to make the courageous strategic choices that will allow Israel to sharpen its intellectual qualitative edge for the 21st century. When it comes to nurturing our nation's brainpower, our ambition must exceed the Shochat recommendations.
Hug your newspaper
These are tough times for those of us who are passionate about newspapers. Yediot Aharonot, the biggest Hebrew-language tabloid, is reportedly planning to cut its budget. The circulation of Ma'ariv has fallen below that of Yisrael Hayom, a free handout. Ma'ariv's management is said to be planning yet another round of cuts.
Overseas, The New York Sun has ceased publication. The Star-Ledger of New Jersey plans to cut its newsroom staff by a staggering 40 percent. The Los Angeles Times is cutting 75 newsroom jobs. The Gannet chain, which owns 85 newspapers, has announced more layoffs (in addition to 1,000 jobs cut over the summer). Even The New York Times has instituted a partial hiring-freeze.
The combined weekday circulation of America's top 500 newspapers now averages 38 million - 4.6% below last year.
Apart from USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, whose readership numbers are flat, all of America's leading newspapers - including the Times, Washington Post, New York Daily News, New York Post and Los Angeles Times - lost readers in the past year.
Newspaper advertisement revenues worldwide are declining; Web site income has generally failed to make up the difference. Virtually all newspapers have spent years economizing. Some have been cut to the bone.
Now comes news that the well-regarded Christian Science Monitor will be suspending daily publication in April 2009 and, instead, emailing paid subscribers its paper in PDF form.
The news is no better in the UK. For instance, five years ago The Independent was selling 218,567 copies daily; today, revamped as a tabloid, it sells roughly 144,050. Similarly, paid circulation is down at The Times, which also went tabloid, and at The Guardian, which moved to a "Berliner" size, somewhere between broadsheet and tabloid. The Daily Telegraph, which maintained its broadsheet format, has also lost readers. Even the give-away Metro, distributed in 16 cities across Britain, is laying off staff.
THE DARK clouds hanging over the "old media," however, give way to a bright future for "new media." Google this week announced a "historic" arrangement, the outcome of a court settlement between the search engine and representatives of publishers and authors that will allow readers - so far only in the US - to purchase full digital access to millions of copyrighted books. The deal protects intellectual property while dramatically expanding Web access to the printed word.
Perhaps the biggest clue about where the future may be headed comes from Amazon.com, which is marketing a wireless reading device - again for use in the US only - known as Kindle, which it insists "looks and reads like real paper." The gadget makes it possible to purchase books or newspapers and have them auto-delivered wirelessly (without the use of a computer or telephone line) in less than one minute.
Even before 1450, when German inventor Johannes Gutenberg introduced the movable-type printing press, mankind had sought to improve how the written word was disseminated. Over five centuries later, we're well into an epoch which will see paper and ink largely disappear, replaced by digitized "content."
Some insist that readers of traditional newspapers absorb more of what passes before their eyes than those who rely on click- and-scroll. Perhaps. What is certain is that quality journalism is being underfunded as advertising revenue falls in the shift to cyberspace.
Still, you won't find Luddites here at The Jerusalem Post. In fact, www.jpost.com was the first Web site to provide news and comment from Israel, and it remains the most-read English site in Israel. Fortunately, we are also blessed with a strong and faithful readership in hard-copy.
As we survey the changes affecting our industry worldwide, we can't help but feel a twinge of sadness at the thought that one day the thump! of a newspaper being delivered will be forgotten, as will the smell of newsprint. The hope is that disciplined, carefully prioritized content and elegant, efficient presentation of traditional newspapers will live on in the PDF format. At the very least, there will be no one to complain of smudged fingers...
Ours is perhaps the luckiest of generations. We can relish the traditional newspaper, even as we reconcile ourselves to the technologies that are replacing it.
Barak, social democrat?
Kicking off the Labor Party's campaign for the 18th Knesset on Monday, party chair Ehud Barak denounced "piggish capitalism."
"We differ from other parties because we understand that it's time to do away with the capitalistic greed that the Right has been a proponent of, while offering solidarity, sensitivity and social responsibility."
Playing to the proletariat has worked for Barak in the past. In the 1999 campaign, which saw him defeat the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu, the Labor leader predicted that Netanyahu's government "will fall because of the trampled honor of the unemployed, because of one child's crying into his pillow at night, and another child, and another child, and another child..."
It's an approach that may not work now.
Ten years on, Labor aspires to represent the working man and woman; it maintains its membership in the Socialist International. Yet the party is so closely identified in the public mind with many of Israel's top entrepreneurs, industrialists and moguls as to make an anti-greed electoral strategy problematic.
Over the years, for instance, Labor has raised money abroad from the Bronfman family, from Swiss industrialists Nissim Gaon and Bruce Rappaport, from Slim-Fast diet company founder S. Daniel Abraham and the late Swiss-British billionaire Octav Botnar. Local benefactors have included Gad Ze'evi, Muzi Wertheim and Stef Wertheimer.
These supporters may see themselves as progressives, but could voters reasonably think of them as enemies of "capitalist greed"?
As for the party leader himself, it's true that Barak was raised on a kibbutz - Mishmar Hasharon - but he has since graduated to an entirely different life-style, exemplified by his spacious home on the 31st floor of Alfred Akirov's Tel Aviv tower. It's an apartment purchased for $2.5 million in 2006, which Barak is now trying to sell for $11 million. Plainly, the Labor leader has engaged in capitalist enterprise (serving on corporate boards and the like).
We do not begrudge him his comfortable lifestyle. He would do well, however, to explain to Israelis where enterprise ends and greed begins.
Labor's origins are traceable to the Zionist socialism of the Mapai Party, which dominated our politics and our economics first through the pre-state Jewish Agency, and then in government.
Today's Labor Party encompasses the remnants of the neo-Marxist Achdut Avoda Party as well as David Ben-Gurion's splinter Rafi Party. The factions merged in 1968, though the Labor Party as we know it now emerged only in 1991. Ever since, it has struggled to refine its identity. In 2003, several of its more dovish luminaries quit to join Meretz; and in 2006 others who in the wake of the second intifada saw themselves as centrist or pragmatists quit to join Kadima.
WHERE DOES all this leave Labor now? Polls show the party garnering 11 Knesset seats, compared to the 20 it holds now. The global economic crisis notwithstanding, voters are telling pollsters that security tops the economy as the issue that most animates their preferences. Assuming Shaul Mofaz plays a critical role in Kadima's campaign and Moshe Ya'alon - another general - runs with Likud, Barak's appeal to voters on security grounds is diminished.
The ethnic and working-class vote is likely to go to Shas; sincere neo-Marxists troubled by "capitalistic greed" will probably be more comfortable voting Meretz. Thus Barak's "capitalist greed" rhetoric is unlikely to be Labor's salvation.
Britain's Labor Party spent its "wilderness years" (1979-1997) - while Margaret Thatcher and her successors kept the Conservatives in power - reinventing itself as New Labor. The Israel Labor Party never gave itself much time for that. When it wasn't ruling the country for 29 consecutive years, it was, for roughly 17 years, a coalition partner. Arguably, the party became little more than a vehicle for seeking office.
At this stage, it's far from obvious that even a spell in the opposition could rebrand Labor as Israel's "social democratic party." In its post-Amir Peretz incarnation, it is outflanked on its economic left by Meretz and Shas, while the center is held by Kadima.
Should Kadima flourish under Tzipi Livni - championing, moreover, a centrist approach to negotiation with the Palestinian Arabs - many will wonder whether Labor, led by Ehud Barak, has any future at all.
Bye-bye, bazaar?
The Knesset's winter session opens today, but there will be no keynote address by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who announced Sunday that, under "the current circumstances," he would not press for a legislative agenda.
Following her election five weeks ago as Kadima's new chair, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni struggled to pull together a Knesset majority so that she could replace Olmert without going to the polls. Yesterday, on live television, Livni told President Shimon Peres: I can't do it.
She started out with Kadima's 29 mandates. To this, Ehud Barak added Labor's 20. But for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, Livni still needed Shas's 12 mandates. She also wanted the Gil Pensioners Party's seven seats for a more comfortable, 68-seat majority. But the old-timers backtracked.
The Sephardi Shas Party demanded budget-busting allocations for child allowances; it fancies itself the champion of the working poor. More accurately, however, it mainly champions patronage to its own institutions.
Livni refused to play by the old rules. Nor would she pledge, as Shas demanded, not to negotiate with the Palestinian Arabs on what to do about Jerusalem in the context of Israel's commitment to a "shelf agreement."
Now what? Peres could, over the next several days, try to use the prestige of his office to bring Shas and Kadima together. He could even give opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu three weeks to try his hand at building a governing coalition. Opinion surveys show the Likud - which has only 12 seats - as now being the most popular party.
But the most likely scenario is that Peres will call for new elections, which could take place as early as February 17.
Then the cycle of haggling to form a government begins anew.
OLMERT, who still faces possible indictment, remains in place as Israel's caretaker premier.
There are those on the Right who worry that he will use the coming months to cut a bad deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (himself under pressure to step down when his term expires in January). Critics worry that Olmert will do anything not to be remembered chiefly for the collection of scandals which led to his resignation, and for his inept handling of the Second Lebanon War. He wants to be remembered for his commitment to peace.
He's lately gone on record as breaking with the Israeli consensus by essentially calling for a withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
Post diplomatic reporter Herb Keinon has pointed out, however, that Olmert's ability to reach a deal with the Palestinians or the Syrians is severely constrained. Any accord would need cabinet and Knesset approval - something he's unlikely to get. Moreover, Olmert's Arab partners are unlikely to publicly commit to what for them would be "concessions," fearing that a new government might reject these as insufficient.
On the other hand, Israel cannot freeze its diplomatic and security agenda. Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran can be expected to exploit the perception of an Israeli leadership vacuum. The global economic crisis isn't going away. Neither is the growing lawlessness among extremist elements in the settler movement.
We would like to think that Olmert will rise to the occasion and navigate the country with wisdom until his successor can finally take over. During this period, he needs to work as much as possible in concert with Livni, Netanyahu and Barak on any decision that would bind the next government.
It would be entirely appropriate for him to travel to Washington after America's November 4 election to meet with the president-elect; and to maintain open channels with our Arab interlocutors.
LIVNI is being criticized for mishandling the negotiations by those who say that a more skilled bargainer could have cajoled Shas into joining a coalition.
This misses the point. Whatever the details of the 17th Knesset's premature demise, the more substantive lesson to be learned is that our political system needs reforming. The stranglehold sectarian parties have over the allocation of resources must be broken. We applaud Livni for saying that she refuses "to pawn Israel's future for the prime minister's seat."
The new Kadima leader might just have steered the country in the direction of representative democracy, and away from "government by bazaar."
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Wrap: Settlers, Beirut, 1983, Saint Pius?, Gilad Schalit, Joe the P., Iran, and economic panic
Herzl vs Hobbes
On Sunday, the Associated Press disseminated worldwide a photo of "a Jewish settler" confronting unseen Palestinians in northern Samaria. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what to make of this: a bare-chested, pipe-wielding teen, ski-mask drawn over his face, goth T-shirt tied to a belt holding up camouflage trousers.
Move over, Peace Now. You've met your match. No group could better undermine the case for Jewish rights in the West Bank than settler radicals. In a world predisposed to see all of Judea and Samaria, and east Jerusalem, as Palestinian; at a time when our government, such as it is, remains incapable of articulating where our boundaries should be drawn - Israel can ill afford settlers behaving badly.
The phenomenon is nothing new; but lately it has spiked, serving to close minds and harden hearts to Israel's legitimate security concerns and historic civilizational tie to the West Bank. This behavior bolsters the notion that peace can be achieved only by a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines.
TAKE WHAT happened outside Otniel, south of Hebron, on Wednesday, when Palestinian Arabs came to harvest their olives in coordination with the IDF. Suddenly, a group of 10 masked far-right youths appeared and instigated a confrontation. One soldier was hit on the head with a club. Another rowdy tried to grab a soldier's weapon, and was himself injured.
Or take what happened Saturday in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. Four Jewish youths were captured on camera - in footage broadcast incessantly on Arab stations - beating Abed Hashalmoun, a news agency photographer, as well as a foreign volunteer who had come to help local Palestinians pick olives.
The olive pickers had made no effort to liaison with the authorities, even though they were operating near a Jewish enclave, on Shabbat, in the heart of a tinderbox. It doesn't take a suspicious mind to surmise that their presence was something of a set-up, and that the settlers should have had the wisdom to stay away. The confrontation will now no doubt join other voluminous footage of "settlers behaving badly" already flooding the Web.
Also this week, radicals, many of them minors, protested outside the home of OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Gadi Shamni. The message was explicit: "You try bringing your law to our turf, and we'll make you miserable."
Some settler leaders - think of them as "adult hilltop youth" - have been sending another not-so-subtle message: The more proponents of a deal with the Palestinians push their policies, the more settlers will react with violence on the ground. It's a tactic as brilliant as it is indefensible. Because we do not live in a Hobbesian state of nature.
Let's be clear. Only a small number of Israelis living over the Green Line are extremists. And in some areas, olive harvests really do pose a genuine security dilemma - with trees growing in proximity to schools, for instance. The possibility of terrorists exploiting the harvest season to infiltrate a settlement is not far-fetched; nor that farmers might pass on settlement security information.
Also, while kindhearted Israelis with pure motives have aided Palestinian harvesting, not a few foreign and Israeli "peace activists" have come on the scene to exacerbate tensions and provoke confrontation.
SETTLER leaders recently launched an advertising campaign to tell Israelis why we should feel connected to Judea and Samaria. But radicals running wild in the hills of Judea and Samaria achieve the opposite. How sad that a relatively small group of fanatics has been able to divert the spotlight onto their misbehavior.
As he helped pick olives north of Ramallah on Wednesday, reporters in tow, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad declared, in a sly juxtaposition: "The settlers being here [in the West Bank] is in itself illegitimate. And, on top of that, they engage in acts of violence..."
Meanwhile, in its long tradition of loaded questions, last week's Economist wondered: "Will the settlers stymie a two-state solution?"
Of course it is Palestinian intransigence that is torpedoing such a solution. But with everyone focused on settlers behaving badly, the Palestinians are getting a free ride.
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Iwo Jima redux
At dawn 25 years ago today, a lumbering, yellow Mercedes truck smashed into US Marine headquarters near Beirut airport, detonating a gargantuan bomb that killed 241 peace-keepers. It was the Marines' biggest single-battle death toll since Iwo Jima.
A short while later, a car-bomb killed 74 French peace-keepers not far away.
Imagine this anniversary being celebrated by Iran's Supreme "spiritual" leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, in the company of Revolutionary Guard commandant Mohammad Ali Jafari and intelligence chief Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ejei. Khameni might make a toast - non-alcoholic - to the memory of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; Jafari might boast that their predecessors pulled off the killings in secrecy. Mohseni-Ejei, in all his vainglory, might remark that the entire operation was accomplished when the regime was but six years old.
Today will surely also not go unmarked by Hizbullah, founded by Iran in summer 1982 to propagate Khomeini's ideas among Lebanon's Arab Shi'ites.
Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, now in his 70s, is said to have blessed the truck and car bombers. Will he get an anniversary call from Hassan Nasrallah? Will they recall Abbas Musawi, Nasrallah's immediate predecessor as Hizbullah chief, who supervised the attacks? He was liquidated by the IDF in 1992.
There would also have to be warm thoughts for Imad Mughniyeh, once Fadlallah's bodyguard, later Nasrallah's operations chief. Mughniyeh, who was secretly indicted for the Marine bombing and also plotted the 1996 Khobar Towers atrocity in Saudi Arabia, was himself mysteriously removed from the scene in a February 2008 Damascus car-bombing.
One need not be predisposed to gloominess to raise the concern of Iran-Hizbullah selecting today as an auspicious occasion to attack an Israeli or Jewish target.
Extra vigilance is called for.
THE MARINES were sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peace-keeping force after the IDF expelled the PLO leadership from Lebanon on August 30, 1982, and Christian militias massacred scores of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps on September 17.
President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines not to engage in combat; they were to be a stabilizing influence.
Iran and Hizbullah, however, wanted to promote anarchy, not stability. They carried out scores of attacks on IDF forces in 1982 - two of them particularly horrendous, killing 36 in Sidon on November 4, and 75 in Tyre, November 11.
Local Shi'ites first welcomed Israel's bid to rid Lebanon of the PLO. Then, egged on by Iran, they violently opposed the newly-created IDF security zone in the South.
Next it was America's turn. On April 18, 1983, Iran ordered Hizbullah to car-bomb the US embassy in Beirut: 61 lives were lost. "Shadowy" Muslim extremists were blamed. Reagan declared that America would not be deterred.
Then came the simultaneous attacks this day 25 years ago. Reagan again declared that the US would not cut and run. Four months later, he pulled US forces out.
And still, Iran and Hizbullah, working as the "Islamic Jihad" or the "Revolutionary Justice Organization," kept up the pressure. The US embassy annex in Beirut was bombed on September 9, 1984. Next, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked; Western clergymen, academics and journalists were kidnaped. The world waited to see what America would do.
On October 5, 1984, The New York Times reported that the administration had decided: "A retaliatory strike against the Party of God or Iran would only produce an escalation in terrorist attacks against the United States."
IN THE intervening quarter-century, America, and especially Europe, have sought to avoid an unpleasant, even painful confrontation with Iran. And anyway, there was business to be done. There was, moreover, the delusion that the mullahs, once "engaged," could be cajoled into being good world citizens.
Consequently, both Iran and Hizbullah have grown ever more assertive. One works to build nuclear weapons; the other dominates Lebanon's polity.
Offstage, meanwhile, a little-known Sunni fanatic, Osama bin Laden, watched America's feeble response to Iranian and Hizbullah aggression. In a telling interview three years before September 11, 2001, he observed that, clearly, America had lost the will to fight.
It has since costs thousands of American lives to disabuse him of this notion. Would it not have been better to do so from the start?
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Cui bono?
For having failed to speak out against the Nazis during World War II, the moniker "Hitler's Pope" has stuck to Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII. Yet every pope since he died, 50 years ago this month, has been a champion of his reputation and "sanctity."
Factions within the Church are pushing hard to have Pacelli beatified, a process that would lead to canonization - retroactively acknowledging him as a saint.
This momentum, however, has been temporarily halted, and the Vatican has asked those supporting and opposing the beatification to stop pressuring Pope Benedict XVI on the issue.
JEWS CANNOT help but think of Pius as a fatally flawed figure who managed to safeguard the Church's political and worldly interests from the Nazis, but only at the steepest of moral costs.
It was Pacelli, who as secretary of state in 1933, signed the Vatican Concordat with Germany. Hitler interpreted this treaty to mean that he had won the Church's approval "in the developing struggle against international Jewry."
On January 17, 1941, with the war against the Jews well under way, Berlin's Bishop Konrad Preysing - whose moral compass remained intact - wrote Pacelli, by then Pius XII, asking "whether the Holy See couldn't do something… issue an appeal in favor of these unfortunate [Jewish] people?"
No answer ever came.
At the height of the killing, in a letter dated June 22, 1943, the pope's representative reportedly wrote to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning against the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Even in October 1944, when the Jews of Rome were rounded up under his very window and sent to the gas chambers, the pope said nothing.
WHO BENEFITS, cui bono, from identifying Pius as a saint?
Perhaps those who want to quash the indictment, once and for all, that the Church's behavior during the Shoah was sinful. Perhaps it is simply Catholic traditionalists who want to honor Pius for strengthening the Church by having centralized ecclesiastical and political power within the Vatican at the expense of dioceses around the world.
His defenders argue, not unreasonably, that even if the pope had openly condemned the Nazis for their atrocities, they would have carried on anyway.
Far less convincingly, they say Pius feared the Germans would have retaliated against Jewish converts to Christianity; or even occupied the Vatican and expropriated its wealth. They say Pius was working "secretly" to help the Jews.
One thing is clear: Pius feared Bolshevism - which he may have associated with Jewry - as a menace even greater than Hitlerism.
Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander describes Pius as "distant, autocratic, and imbued with a sense of his own intellectual and spiritual superiority."
His measured assessment of Pacelli: "There is no specific indication that the pope was anti-Semitic or that his decisions during the war stemmed, be it in part, from some particular hostility toward Jews."
NO ONE benefits, however, from heightening enmity between Catholics and Jews.
Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit priest and Pacelli-canonization activist, has been exacerbating tensions by demanding that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, "revise" its exhibit, which accurately depicts Pius's failure to rescue. Gumpel threatens that not doing so will keep Pope Benedict from visiting the Jewish state.
But another Vatican spokesman, backtracking from Gumpel's hard line, says that the row with Yad Vashem will not be "the deciding factor" in any papal visit.
We claim no standing in telling Catholics whom to honor as a saint. For us, however, and for many Catholics as well, the undeniable legacy of Eugenio Pacelli is moral failure - his deafening silence as millions of Jews were persecuted, brutalized and finally murdered on an industrial scale.
If the Church wants historians to reevaluate pope Pius XII's wartime record, let it open the Vatican's archives to outside historians.
Let us recall the words spoken by Pope John Paul II in his March 2000 visit to Yad Vashem: "We remember, but not...as an incentive to hatred."
In recent days, President Shimon Peres extended an invitation to Pope Benedict to visit the Holy Land. We respectfully urge him to make the journey and to continue the work of improving Catholic-Jewish relations.
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The wrong target
Yesterday, scores of Israelis took part in a "Free Gilad Schalit" rally and motorcade near the Kerem Shalom crossing point, a porthole for Israeli-funneled humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
On Sunday afternoon, Israel Radio broadcast a new song which expressed the collective longing of all Israelis to see our soldier return home after some 850 days in captivity.
One rally organizer said that "Hamas's demands are well-known and firm," implying that Israeli decision-makers should be more forthcoming.
Since the start of the holidays here, a number of "free Gilad Schalit" events have been held; more are scheduled through November.
"We are all Gilad Schalit" has become the battle cry of those who seek to keep the issue of his captivity high on the public agenda. But paradoxically, if domestic pressure forces the government to make dangerous concessions, there are likely to be many more Gilad Schalits.
Our hearts go out to Schalit's parents. With their son's life on the line, we do not presume to tell them to focus on the collective good. But the rest of us have precisely that obligation.
To Hamas, Schalit is a commodity in a Levantine bazaar. And the more Israelis pressure their own government to "bring Gilad home," regardless of the price, the more valuable an article of "merchandise" he becomes, and the less likely Hamas will be to cut a "reasonable" deal.
Yesterday, however, some protesters burned tires and sought to block the delivery of goods from Israel into Gaza until Schalit is set free - suggesting that the campaigners are not a monolithic group. While some want Israel to be more forthcoming, others appreciate where the difficulty really lies: with Schalit's captors.
The Hamas line is that no amount of pressure - not even the complete closing of the crossing points - will sway it into releasing our soldier. It wants its prisoners let loose - including the terrorist masterminds and facilitators of some of the most heinous bloodbaths of the second intifada, the Dolphinarium, Sbarro and Netanya Seder massacres.
THE BIGGEST mistake the Free Gilad Schalit movement could make would be to continue directing its energies against the government. Our democratic society has responsibilities that go beyond the welfare of a single Israeli hostage. We cannot allow either emotional blackmail - no matter how understandable its source - or media frenzy amid a political leadership vacuum to stampede the country into a bad bargain.
The demonstrations could play a positive role if they called attention to the fact that the terrorists on Hamas's ransom list are allowed visitors, while Schalit is denied all contact with the outside world. Buses from Gaza transport family members regularly to Israeli penitentiaries. Naturally, the International Red Cross and other NGOs have routine access.
Schalit enjoys none of these, none of the protections guaranteed by international human rights law or accepted civilized behavior.
Complicating efforts to free Schalit is Israel's recent history of having released terrorists to Hizbullah, and other prisoners to Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas no doubt feels the need to show its constituency it can do even better. One concession invites the next, leading to ever more intransigent ransom demands.
ANY APPEARANCE of further weakness and indecisiveness on the part of the Israeli leadership will magnify the enemy's incentive to carry out more abductions. So it is essential that those who campaign for Schalit's freedom hone their message, directing it at Hamas and not at Israel.
The approach some of the protest leaders have taken - pressuring our decision-makers - actually distances the prospect of a compromise Israel can safely live with.
One argument voiced by those active in the Free Gilad movement is that they do not want to see a repeat of the drawn-out, emotionally draining Ron Arad affair. Of course, there is no evidence that ongoing demonstrations in Israel would have saved Arad. It is Iran and Hizbullah who remain culpable for his fate - not the Israeli government.
We all join together in insisting that Gilad Schalit be freed. But the target of our anger and frustration needs to be Hamas - where it belongs.
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In praise of Joe the plumber
The process of forming a new government in Israel is expected to take several more weeks - though success is hardly guaranteed. The United States, meanwhile, will be electing a new president and congress on November 4.
The contrast in how the two political systems choose their leaders underscores the need to reform the way Israel elects its representatives and to change the political culture of our campaigns.
In order to win, America's two parties vie for the middle ground because that's where most voters are. Israelis, by comparison, chose from over 30 mostly single-issue ideological parties in the February 2006 Knesset race. No party in history has ever achieved a majority which would enable it to pursue a coherent agenda. Kadima, which "won" the last elections with 29 seats, cobbled together yet another government of strange bedfellows.
No one would suggest that the American system is without fault. For one thing, electing a president takes too long and costs too much. Barack Obama declared his candidacy in February 2007; John McCain announced in April 2007. Together the campaigns have raised $1 billion.
America's system also has its quirks, as observers around the world discovered eight years ago when Al Gore won more popular votes (50,999,897) than George W. Bush (50,456,002), but lost the election because Bush captured the electoral college (271-266). The more people a state has, the more clout in the electoral college, but the paradoxical result is to dilute majority rule.
The US is a representative, not a "pure" democracy. Its constitutional framers created a system in which power was kept diffuse. Fearing tyranny above all else, they designed a system that does not permit power to be concentrated in any single body - not with the president, judiciary or congress (which they split in two).
Israel's founders, in contrast, fearing various groups would feel disenfranchised, created an unwieldily hyper-democratic system.
DESPITE being a nation of 300 million people, US voters can personally encounter presidential candidates with relative ease. Take Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher from Ohio. He's been thinking about expanding his business, but worries that Obama's tax plan would rob him of incentives to invest in his company. Joe challenged Obama face-to-face on the campaign trail: "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"
Obama readily acknowledged that he'd be raising Joe's taxes if he earned more than $250,000 a year. It was the equitable thing to do, Obama argued, to help people making less. In Israel, there's little chance "Yossi the instalator" would ever get close enough to a candidate for premier to engage in that kind of back-and-forth.
During the US campaign, voters have had ample opportunity to watch McCain and Obama and hear their views. The prospect that one of them would, upon election, pursue a totally unexpected policy on a fundamental issue is remote. For instance, Obama would never appoint a jurist to the Supreme Court pledged to overturning Roe v. Wade and re-criminalizing abortion.
In Israel, by contrast, any number of prime ministers have turned their backs on cardinal campaign promises.
America's two candidates have debated face-to-face. They met for a third and final time Wednesday and argued about the economy, negative campaign ads, judicial appointments character, abortion and taxes. In fact, Joe the Plumber's name came up - 26 times. "It's pretty surreal, man, my name being mentioned in a presidential campaign," Wurzelbacher told the AP.
In contrast, during Israel's last Knesset campaign, Kadima's Ehud Olmert simply refused to debate the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu and Labor's Amir Peretz.
WE CAN only look on, dejectedly, as Tzipi Livni now tries to build a coalition. So far she's had to promise Labor's Ehud Barak that he will be "senior deputy prime minister, second only to the prime minister." She's made an opening offer to the Shas Party of NIS 1 billion (for child allowances). She needs to woo the collection of bickering curmudgeons known as the Gil Pensioners Party. And she needs to mollify the 98 year-old godfather of the United Torah Judaism Party who doesn't want his followers serving in a government led by a woman.
America has had 230 years to perfect its electoral system. Israel doesn't have that kind of time.
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on Iran
Oct. 15, 2008
, THE JERUSALEM POST
In a September 26 editorial, this is how Britain's Guardian judged Israel's efforts to convince the world that Iran's nuclear program poses an existential threat to the Jewish state, and that military action might be the lesser of two evils: "Israel has lost the argument, and we should all breathe a sigh of relief [that] pragmatism... has prevailed."
Beyond its left-liberal readership, the newspaper's stance reflects a wide swath of Western thinking.
The problem is that this view confuses pragmatism with appeasement. It is a "pragmatism" that does not demand the kind of biting sanctions that would force the mullahs to their knees - precisely in order to obviate the need for a military strike.
It's a pragmatism that does not mean, for instance, cutting virtually all trade with the Islamic Republic; or ensuring that no Western airliner lands in Teheran. These "pragmatists" support engaging Iran because there is profit to be made under the cover of a diplomatic minuet that pays lip-service to sanctions.
They paint Israelis as unreasonably hawkish, seeing an existential threat where none exists.
Yet these pragmatists heard President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deliver the same September 23 speech to the UN General Assembly as we did.
Is it really pragmatic to look the other way as Ahmadinejad blames "underhanded Zionists" for stirring up trouble in Georgia and Ossetia? When he places responsibility for the global financial crisis on "a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists" who dominate "financial" and "political decision-making" worldwide?
Are not even these pragmatists discomfited to hear "Zionists" characterized as an "acquisitive and invasive people"?
Presumably, the pragmatists don't deny that Iran is scrambling to build nuclear weapons - even if one might quibble over precisely when Teheran will achieve its goals. Nor would they reasonably dispute that Iran is perfecting its capabilities to deliver nuclear warheads to Europe, and beyond.
They see, just as we do, that Iran fluctuates between denying the Holocaust outright, minimizing the number of Jews murdered, and cynically claiming that even - for argument's sake - if Hitler really killed six million Jews, the Palestinian Arabs should not have to pay for Europe's sins. In reality, of course, the sins the Palestinians are paying for are mostly self-inflicted: intransigence and bellicosity.
The pragmatists know, as we do, that Iranian diplomats have organized terrorist attacks against Western and Jewish targets; that Iranian intelligence co-directs Hizbullah; that Iran bankrolls Hamas and provides it with training, funds and diplomatic cover. And they well know that Hizbullah and Hamas are standard-bearers for anti-civilian warfare, fanaticism and an unalterable rejection of Israel's right to exist - within any boundaries.
IN FACT, there's nothing pragmatic about sweeping the Iranian problem under the rug. Just the opposite. By taking - for all intents and purposes - robust sanctions off the table, those who profess to being pragmatic are in fact being shortsighted. The unintended consequence of such false pragmatism is to bolster the most radical elements within Iran.
And of all the pragmatic countries in Europe talking sanctions while stoking the Iranian economy, none disappoints more than Germany. We could have sworn we heard Chancellor Angela Merkel tell the Knesset on March 18 that Berlin felt a special responsibility for Israel's security, and that it would be disastrous if Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons. And that "We have to prevent this."
Yet Germany remains Iran's main European trading partner.
Now comes the news that last month, the German ambassador to Iran, Herbert Honsowitz, in contravention of EU guidelines, sent his military attache to an Iranian military parade. Honsowitz, ever the pragmatist, is a strong booster of German-Iranian relations, including trade.
This newspaper takes at face value Ahmadinejad's October 26, 2005 pledge, before the ominously named World Without Zionism Conference, that "Israel must be wiped off the map."
We do not beat the drums of war. But if conflict comes, heaven forbid, the responsibility will fall on those who denigrated the dangers; removed the option of force from the international negotiating agenda, and undermined sanctions.
It will fall most heavily on those who fueled Iran's economy and were comfortable being spectators at the parade as the Shihab missiles rolled by.
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Panic vs self-interest
If only Israelis had the luxury of addressing one crisis at a time - the turmoil in Acre, for instance, or the failure to form a new government; or signs that Fatah and Hamas are burying the hatchet, or freeing Gilad Schalit. That's even harder to do when the worst worldwide financial crisis in generations insists on monopolizing the headlines.
Israel is not immune to the economic tremors shaking the rest of the world. After a four-day holiday weekend, the Tel Aviv Stock Market opened an hour late Sunday to give traders time to take a deep breath. Even so, the market still suffered its biggest drop since 1997. Though closing steeply down, it managed to stabilize during the day as sellers discovered - lo and behold! - that there were still buyers out there.
MUCH HAPPENED while our markets were closed over Yom Kippur. Stocks worldwide plunged, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 18 percent. Companies were hard-pressed to find lenders. Having expended its dwindling political capital on persuading a reluctant Congress to allocate $700 billion for the purchase of stocks tied to bad mortgages, the US Treasury seemed to radically revise its approach: The US government is now poised to, in effect, partially nationalize certain banks to "unfreeze" the credit markets.
Meanwhile, Iceland practically went bankrupt; its government said it would protect the deposits of its own citizens, but not those held by foreigners, including a number of local authorities in London which found themselves out in the cold.
While Israel enjoyed its trading hiatus, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England finally managed to coordinate an interest-rate cut. And British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose popularity is as low as the market itself, found himself widely applauded for producing a genuinely systematic plan to address the crisis. Basically, it promises to guarantee new loans, in addition to providing cash to British banks. This could serve as a model for other nations.
Speaking in the Rose Garden on Saturday as finance ministers and central bankers from the G-7 nations stood stony-faced behind him, President George W. Bush declared: "All of us recognize that this is a serious global crisis, [which] therefore requires a serious global response." Those gathered around him generally agreed to coordinate their efforts to find a way out of the crisis since actions taken unilaterally - a la Iceland's - will only make a bad situation worse.
With 20/20 hindsight, we can speculate that America's failure to bail out Lehman Brothers catalyzed the current crisis. Looking back further, a convincing argument is being made that the American financial establishment's love affair with the poorly understood and grossly under-regulated tools known as "derivatives" contributed to the meltdown.
AS TO the here and now, Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai wanted Sunday's cabinet meeting to consider creating an "economic kitchen cabinet" that would address how to guarantee the safety of savings in our banks and the need to raise yields on government bonds. But, ridiculously, Cabinet Secretary Ovad Yehezkel pointed to a rule that requires agenda items to be submitted three days in advance.
To be fair, the government has been effectively grappling with how to steer Israel through this crisis emanating from beyond our shores. And analysts agree our economy's exposure to mortgage-related debt and derivatives is minimal, and that the biggest dangers are psychological.
To that end, Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On reassured Israelis that his ministry and the Bank of Israel would intervene as necessary. They are reportedly indeed weighing plans to offer deposit insurance and, if necessary, inject capital into the banking system.
If anything makes people nervous, it is being told not to panic. And yet, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is quite correct to tell the public just that.
If, rather than letting fear prevail, Israelis adhere to the "buy low and sell high" mantra, chances are we will all emerge to trade again another day.
Authorities here are doing their utmost to stem panic by making it clear that if necessary, they stand ready to intervene in a timely fashion. The rest of us can help by not getting caught up in the hysteria swirling around us.
On Sunday, the Associated Press disseminated worldwide a photo of "a Jewish settler" confronting unseen Palestinians in northern Samaria. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what to make of this: a bare-chested, pipe-wielding teen, ski-mask drawn over his face, goth T-shirt tied to a belt holding up camouflage trousers.
Move over, Peace Now. You've met your match. No group could better undermine the case for Jewish rights in the West Bank than settler radicals. In a world predisposed to see all of Judea and Samaria, and east Jerusalem, as Palestinian; at a time when our government, such as it is, remains incapable of articulating where our boundaries should be drawn - Israel can ill afford settlers behaving badly.
The phenomenon is nothing new; but lately it has spiked, serving to close minds and harden hearts to Israel's legitimate security concerns and historic civilizational tie to the West Bank. This behavior bolsters the notion that peace can be achieved only by a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines.
TAKE WHAT happened outside Otniel, south of Hebron, on Wednesday, when Palestinian Arabs came to harvest their olives in coordination with the IDF. Suddenly, a group of 10 masked far-right youths appeared and instigated a confrontation. One soldier was hit on the head with a club. Another rowdy tried to grab a soldier's weapon, and was himself injured.
Or take what happened Saturday in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. Four Jewish youths were captured on camera - in footage broadcast incessantly on Arab stations - beating Abed Hashalmoun, a news agency photographer, as well as a foreign volunteer who had come to help local Palestinians pick olives.
The olive pickers had made no effort to liaison with the authorities, even though they were operating near a Jewish enclave, on Shabbat, in the heart of a tinderbox. It doesn't take a suspicious mind to surmise that their presence was something of a set-up, and that the settlers should have had the wisdom to stay away. The confrontation will now no doubt join other voluminous footage of "settlers behaving badly" already flooding the Web.
Also this week, radicals, many of them minors, protested outside the home of OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Gadi Shamni. The message was explicit: "You try bringing your law to our turf, and we'll make you miserable."
Some settler leaders - think of them as "adult hilltop youth" - have been sending another not-so-subtle message: The more proponents of a deal with the Palestinians push their policies, the more settlers will react with violence on the ground. It's a tactic as brilliant as it is indefensible. Because we do not live in a Hobbesian state of nature.
Let's be clear. Only a small number of Israelis living over the Green Line are extremists. And in some areas, olive harvests really do pose a genuine security dilemma - with trees growing in proximity to schools, for instance. The possibility of terrorists exploiting the harvest season to infiltrate a settlement is not far-fetched; nor that farmers might pass on settlement security information.
Also, while kindhearted Israelis with pure motives have aided Palestinian harvesting, not a few foreign and Israeli "peace activists" have come on the scene to exacerbate tensions and provoke confrontation.
SETTLER leaders recently launched an advertising campaign to tell Israelis why we should feel connected to Judea and Samaria. But radicals running wild in the hills of Judea and Samaria achieve the opposite. How sad that a relatively small group of fanatics has been able to divert the spotlight onto their misbehavior.
As he helped pick olives north of Ramallah on Wednesday, reporters in tow, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad declared, in a sly juxtaposition: "The settlers being here [in the West Bank] is in itself illegitimate. And, on top of that, they engage in acts of violence..."
Meanwhile, in its long tradition of loaded questions, last week's Economist wondered: "Will the settlers stymie a two-state solution?"
Of course it is Palestinian intransigence that is torpedoing such a solution. But with everyone focused on settlers behaving badly, the Palestinians are getting a free ride.
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Iwo Jima redux
At dawn 25 years ago today, a lumbering, yellow Mercedes truck smashed into US Marine headquarters near Beirut airport, detonating a gargantuan bomb that killed 241 peace-keepers. It was the Marines' biggest single-battle death toll since Iwo Jima.
A short while later, a car-bomb killed 74 French peace-keepers not far away.
Imagine this anniversary being celebrated by Iran's Supreme "spiritual" leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, in the company of Revolutionary Guard commandant Mohammad Ali Jafari and intelligence chief Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ejei. Khameni might make a toast - non-alcoholic - to the memory of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; Jafari might boast that their predecessors pulled off the killings in secrecy. Mohseni-Ejei, in all his vainglory, might remark that the entire operation was accomplished when the regime was but six years old.
Today will surely also not go unmarked by Hizbullah, founded by Iran in summer 1982 to propagate Khomeini's ideas among Lebanon's Arab Shi'ites.
Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, now in his 70s, is said to have blessed the truck and car bombers. Will he get an anniversary call from Hassan Nasrallah? Will they recall Abbas Musawi, Nasrallah's immediate predecessor as Hizbullah chief, who supervised the attacks? He was liquidated by the IDF in 1992.
There would also have to be warm thoughts for Imad Mughniyeh, once Fadlallah's bodyguard, later Nasrallah's operations chief. Mughniyeh, who was secretly indicted for the Marine bombing and also plotted the 1996 Khobar Towers atrocity in Saudi Arabia, was himself mysteriously removed from the scene in a February 2008 Damascus car-bombing.
One need not be predisposed to gloominess to raise the concern of Iran-Hizbullah selecting today as an auspicious occasion to attack an Israeli or Jewish target.
Extra vigilance is called for.
THE MARINES were sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peace-keeping force after the IDF expelled the PLO leadership from Lebanon on August 30, 1982, and Christian militias massacred scores of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps on September 17.
President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines not to engage in combat; they were to be a stabilizing influence.
Iran and Hizbullah, however, wanted to promote anarchy, not stability. They carried out scores of attacks on IDF forces in 1982 - two of them particularly horrendous, killing 36 in Sidon on November 4, and 75 in Tyre, November 11.
Local Shi'ites first welcomed Israel's bid to rid Lebanon of the PLO. Then, egged on by Iran, they violently opposed the newly-created IDF security zone in the South.
Next it was America's turn. On April 18, 1983, Iran ordered Hizbullah to car-bomb the US embassy in Beirut: 61 lives were lost. "Shadowy" Muslim extremists were blamed. Reagan declared that America would not be deterred.
Then came the simultaneous attacks this day 25 years ago. Reagan again declared that the US would not cut and run. Four months later, he pulled US forces out.
And still, Iran and Hizbullah, working as the "Islamic Jihad" or the "Revolutionary Justice Organization," kept up the pressure. The US embassy annex in Beirut was bombed on September 9, 1984. Next, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked; Western clergymen, academics and journalists were kidnaped. The world waited to see what America would do.
On October 5, 1984, The New York Times reported that the administration had decided: "A retaliatory strike against the Party of God or Iran would only produce an escalation in terrorist attacks against the United States."
IN THE intervening quarter-century, America, and especially Europe, have sought to avoid an unpleasant, even painful confrontation with Iran. And anyway, there was business to be done. There was, moreover, the delusion that the mullahs, once "engaged," could be cajoled into being good world citizens.
Consequently, both Iran and Hizbullah have grown ever more assertive. One works to build nuclear weapons; the other dominates Lebanon's polity.
Offstage, meanwhile, a little-known Sunni fanatic, Osama bin Laden, watched America's feeble response to Iranian and Hizbullah aggression. In a telling interview three years before September 11, 2001, he observed that, clearly, America had lost the will to fight.
It has since costs thousands of American lives to disabuse him of this notion. Would it not have been better to do so from the start?
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Cui bono?
For having failed to speak out against the Nazis during World War II, the moniker "Hitler's Pope" has stuck to Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII. Yet every pope since he died, 50 years ago this month, has been a champion of his reputation and "sanctity."
Factions within the Church are pushing hard to have Pacelli beatified, a process that would lead to canonization - retroactively acknowledging him as a saint.
This momentum, however, has been temporarily halted, and the Vatican has asked those supporting and opposing the beatification to stop pressuring Pope Benedict XVI on the issue.
JEWS CANNOT help but think of Pius as a fatally flawed figure who managed to safeguard the Church's political and worldly interests from the Nazis, but only at the steepest of moral costs.
It was Pacelli, who as secretary of state in 1933, signed the Vatican Concordat with Germany. Hitler interpreted this treaty to mean that he had won the Church's approval "in the developing struggle against international Jewry."
On January 17, 1941, with the war against the Jews well under way, Berlin's Bishop Konrad Preysing - whose moral compass remained intact - wrote Pacelli, by then Pius XII, asking "whether the Holy See couldn't do something… issue an appeal in favor of these unfortunate [Jewish] people?"
No answer ever came.
At the height of the killing, in a letter dated June 22, 1943, the pope's representative reportedly wrote to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning against the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Even in October 1944, when the Jews of Rome were rounded up under his very window and sent to the gas chambers, the pope said nothing.
WHO BENEFITS, cui bono, from identifying Pius as a saint?
Perhaps those who want to quash the indictment, once and for all, that the Church's behavior during the Shoah was sinful. Perhaps it is simply Catholic traditionalists who want to honor Pius for strengthening the Church by having centralized ecclesiastical and political power within the Vatican at the expense of dioceses around the world.
His defenders argue, not unreasonably, that even if the pope had openly condemned the Nazis for their atrocities, they would have carried on anyway.
Far less convincingly, they say Pius feared the Germans would have retaliated against Jewish converts to Christianity; or even occupied the Vatican and expropriated its wealth. They say Pius was working "secretly" to help the Jews.
One thing is clear: Pius feared Bolshevism - which he may have associated with Jewry - as a menace even greater than Hitlerism.
Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander describes Pius as "distant, autocratic, and imbued with a sense of his own intellectual and spiritual superiority."
His measured assessment of Pacelli: "There is no specific indication that the pope was anti-Semitic or that his decisions during the war stemmed, be it in part, from some particular hostility toward Jews."
NO ONE benefits, however, from heightening enmity between Catholics and Jews.
Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit priest and Pacelli-canonization activist, has been exacerbating tensions by demanding that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, "revise" its exhibit, which accurately depicts Pius's failure to rescue. Gumpel threatens that not doing so will keep Pope Benedict from visiting the Jewish state.
But another Vatican spokesman, backtracking from Gumpel's hard line, says that the row with Yad Vashem will not be "the deciding factor" in any papal visit.
We claim no standing in telling Catholics whom to honor as a saint. For us, however, and for many Catholics as well, the undeniable legacy of Eugenio Pacelli is moral failure - his deafening silence as millions of Jews were persecuted, brutalized and finally murdered on an industrial scale.
If the Church wants historians to reevaluate pope Pius XII's wartime record, let it open the Vatican's archives to outside historians.
Let us recall the words spoken by Pope John Paul II in his March 2000 visit to Yad Vashem: "We remember, but not...as an incentive to hatred."
In recent days, President Shimon Peres extended an invitation to Pope Benedict to visit the Holy Land. We respectfully urge him to make the journey and to continue the work of improving Catholic-Jewish relations.
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The wrong target
Yesterday, scores of Israelis took part in a "Free Gilad Schalit" rally and motorcade near the Kerem Shalom crossing point, a porthole for Israeli-funneled humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
On Sunday afternoon, Israel Radio broadcast a new song which expressed the collective longing of all Israelis to see our soldier return home after some 850 days in captivity.
One rally organizer said that "Hamas's demands are well-known and firm," implying that Israeli decision-makers should be more forthcoming.
Since the start of the holidays here, a number of "free Gilad Schalit" events have been held; more are scheduled through November.
"We are all Gilad Schalit" has become the battle cry of those who seek to keep the issue of his captivity high on the public agenda. But paradoxically, if domestic pressure forces the government to make dangerous concessions, there are likely to be many more Gilad Schalits.
Our hearts go out to Schalit's parents. With their son's life on the line, we do not presume to tell them to focus on the collective good. But the rest of us have precisely that obligation.
To Hamas, Schalit is a commodity in a Levantine bazaar. And the more Israelis pressure their own government to "bring Gilad home," regardless of the price, the more valuable an article of "merchandise" he becomes, and the less likely Hamas will be to cut a "reasonable" deal.
Yesterday, however, some protesters burned tires and sought to block the delivery of goods from Israel into Gaza until Schalit is set free - suggesting that the campaigners are not a monolithic group. While some want Israel to be more forthcoming, others appreciate where the difficulty really lies: with Schalit's captors.
The Hamas line is that no amount of pressure - not even the complete closing of the crossing points - will sway it into releasing our soldier. It wants its prisoners let loose - including the terrorist masterminds and facilitators of some of the most heinous bloodbaths of the second intifada, the Dolphinarium, Sbarro and Netanya Seder massacres.
THE BIGGEST mistake the Free Gilad Schalit movement could make would be to continue directing its energies against the government. Our democratic society has responsibilities that go beyond the welfare of a single Israeli hostage. We cannot allow either emotional blackmail - no matter how understandable its source - or media frenzy amid a political leadership vacuum to stampede the country into a bad bargain.
The demonstrations could play a positive role if they called attention to the fact that the terrorists on Hamas's ransom list are allowed visitors, while Schalit is denied all contact with the outside world. Buses from Gaza transport family members regularly to Israeli penitentiaries. Naturally, the International Red Cross and other NGOs have routine access.
Schalit enjoys none of these, none of the protections guaranteed by international human rights law or accepted civilized behavior.
Complicating efforts to free Schalit is Israel's recent history of having released terrorists to Hizbullah, and other prisoners to Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas no doubt feels the need to show its constituency it can do even better. One concession invites the next, leading to ever more intransigent ransom demands.
ANY APPEARANCE of further weakness and indecisiveness on the part of the Israeli leadership will magnify the enemy's incentive to carry out more abductions. So it is essential that those who campaign for Schalit's freedom hone their message, directing it at Hamas and not at Israel.
The approach some of the protest leaders have taken - pressuring our decision-makers - actually distances the prospect of a compromise Israel can safely live with.
One argument voiced by those active in the Free Gilad movement is that they do not want to see a repeat of the drawn-out, emotionally draining Ron Arad affair. Of course, there is no evidence that ongoing demonstrations in Israel would have saved Arad. It is Iran and Hizbullah who remain culpable for his fate - not the Israeli government.
We all join together in insisting that Gilad Schalit be freed. But the target of our anger and frustration needs to be Hamas - where it belongs.
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In praise of Joe the plumber
The process of forming a new government in Israel is expected to take several more weeks - though success is hardly guaranteed. The United States, meanwhile, will be electing a new president and congress on November 4.
The contrast in how the two political systems choose their leaders underscores the need to reform the way Israel elects its representatives and to change the political culture of our campaigns.
In order to win, America's two parties vie for the middle ground because that's where most voters are. Israelis, by comparison, chose from over 30 mostly single-issue ideological parties in the February 2006 Knesset race. No party in history has ever achieved a majority which would enable it to pursue a coherent agenda. Kadima, which "won" the last elections with 29 seats, cobbled together yet another government of strange bedfellows.
No one would suggest that the American system is without fault. For one thing, electing a president takes too long and costs too much. Barack Obama declared his candidacy in February 2007; John McCain announced in April 2007. Together the campaigns have raised $1 billion.
America's system also has its quirks, as observers around the world discovered eight years ago when Al Gore won more popular votes (50,999,897) than George W. Bush (50,456,002), but lost the election because Bush captured the electoral college (271-266). The more people a state has, the more clout in the electoral college, but the paradoxical result is to dilute majority rule.
The US is a representative, not a "pure" democracy. Its constitutional framers created a system in which power was kept diffuse. Fearing tyranny above all else, they designed a system that does not permit power to be concentrated in any single body - not with the president, judiciary or congress (which they split in two).
Israel's founders, in contrast, fearing various groups would feel disenfranchised, created an unwieldily hyper-democratic system.
DESPITE being a nation of 300 million people, US voters can personally encounter presidential candidates with relative ease. Take Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher from Ohio. He's been thinking about expanding his business, but worries that Obama's tax plan would rob him of incentives to invest in his company. Joe challenged Obama face-to-face on the campaign trail: "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?"
Obama readily acknowledged that he'd be raising Joe's taxes if he earned more than $250,000 a year. It was the equitable thing to do, Obama argued, to help people making less. In Israel, there's little chance "Yossi the instalator" would ever get close enough to a candidate for premier to engage in that kind of back-and-forth.
During the US campaign, voters have had ample opportunity to watch McCain and Obama and hear their views. The prospect that one of them would, upon election, pursue a totally unexpected policy on a fundamental issue is remote. For instance, Obama would never appoint a jurist to the Supreme Court pledged to overturning Roe v. Wade and re-criminalizing abortion.
In Israel, by contrast, any number of prime ministers have turned their backs on cardinal campaign promises.
America's two candidates have debated face-to-face. They met for a third and final time Wednesday and argued about the economy, negative campaign ads, judicial appointments character, abortion and taxes. In fact, Joe the Plumber's name came up - 26 times. "It's pretty surreal, man, my name being mentioned in a presidential campaign," Wurzelbacher told the AP.
In contrast, during Israel's last Knesset campaign, Kadima's Ehud Olmert simply refused to debate the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu and Labor's Amir Peretz.
WE CAN only look on, dejectedly, as Tzipi Livni now tries to build a coalition. So far she's had to promise Labor's Ehud Barak that he will be "senior deputy prime minister, second only to the prime minister." She's made an opening offer to the Shas Party of NIS 1 billion (for child allowances). She needs to woo the collection of bickering curmudgeons known as the Gil Pensioners Party. And she needs to mollify the 98 year-old godfather of the United Torah Judaism Party who doesn't want his followers serving in a government led by a woman.
America has had 230 years to perfect its electoral system. Israel doesn't have that kind of time.
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on Iran
Oct. 15, 2008
, THE JERUSALEM POST
In a September 26 editorial, this is how Britain's Guardian judged Israel's efforts to convince the world that Iran's nuclear program poses an existential threat to the Jewish state, and that military action might be the lesser of two evils: "Israel has lost the argument, and we should all breathe a sigh of relief [that] pragmatism... has prevailed."
Beyond its left-liberal readership, the newspaper's stance reflects a wide swath of Western thinking.
The problem is that this view confuses pragmatism with appeasement. It is a "pragmatism" that does not demand the kind of biting sanctions that would force the mullahs to their knees - precisely in order to obviate the need for a military strike.
It's a pragmatism that does not mean, for instance, cutting virtually all trade with the Islamic Republic; or ensuring that no Western airliner lands in Teheran. These "pragmatists" support engaging Iran because there is profit to be made under the cover of a diplomatic minuet that pays lip-service to sanctions.
They paint Israelis as unreasonably hawkish, seeing an existential threat where none exists.
Yet these pragmatists heard President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deliver the same September 23 speech to the UN General Assembly as we did.
Is it really pragmatic to look the other way as Ahmadinejad blames "underhanded Zionists" for stirring up trouble in Georgia and Ossetia? When he places responsibility for the global financial crisis on "a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists" who dominate "financial" and "political decision-making" worldwide?
Are not even these pragmatists discomfited to hear "Zionists" characterized as an "acquisitive and invasive people"?
Presumably, the pragmatists don't deny that Iran is scrambling to build nuclear weapons - even if one might quibble over precisely when Teheran will achieve its goals. Nor would they reasonably dispute that Iran is perfecting its capabilities to deliver nuclear warheads to Europe, and beyond.
They see, just as we do, that Iran fluctuates between denying the Holocaust outright, minimizing the number of Jews murdered, and cynically claiming that even - for argument's sake - if Hitler really killed six million Jews, the Palestinian Arabs should not have to pay for Europe's sins. In reality, of course, the sins the Palestinians are paying for are mostly self-inflicted: intransigence and bellicosity.
The pragmatists know, as we do, that Iranian diplomats have organized terrorist attacks against Western and Jewish targets; that Iranian intelligence co-directs Hizbullah; that Iran bankrolls Hamas and provides it with training, funds and diplomatic cover. And they well know that Hizbullah and Hamas are standard-bearers for anti-civilian warfare, fanaticism and an unalterable rejection of Israel's right to exist - within any boundaries.
IN FACT, there's nothing pragmatic about sweeping the Iranian problem under the rug. Just the opposite. By taking - for all intents and purposes - robust sanctions off the table, those who profess to being pragmatic are in fact being shortsighted. The unintended consequence of such false pragmatism is to bolster the most radical elements within Iran.
And of all the pragmatic countries in Europe talking sanctions while stoking the Iranian economy, none disappoints more than Germany. We could have sworn we heard Chancellor Angela Merkel tell the Knesset on March 18 that Berlin felt a special responsibility for Israel's security, and that it would be disastrous if Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons. And that "We have to prevent this."
Yet Germany remains Iran's main European trading partner.
Now comes the news that last month, the German ambassador to Iran, Herbert Honsowitz, in contravention of EU guidelines, sent his military attache to an Iranian military parade. Honsowitz, ever the pragmatist, is a strong booster of German-Iranian relations, including trade.
This newspaper takes at face value Ahmadinejad's October 26, 2005 pledge, before the ominously named World Without Zionism Conference, that "Israel must be wiped off the map."
We do not beat the drums of war. But if conflict comes, heaven forbid, the responsibility will fall on those who denigrated the dangers; removed the option of force from the international negotiating agenda, and undermined sanctions.
It will fall most heavily on those who fueled Iran's economy and were comfortable being spectators at the parade as the Shihab missiles rolled by.
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Panic vs self-interest
If only Israelis had the luxury of addressing one crisis at a time - the turmoil in Acre, for instance, or the failure to form a new government; or signs that Fatah and Hamas are burying the hatchet, or freeing Gilad Schalit. That's even harder to do when the worst worldwide financial crisis in generations insists on monopolizing the headlines.
Israel is not immune to the economic tremors shaking the rest of the world. After a four-day holiday weekend, the Tel Aviv Stock Market opened an hour late Sunday to give traders time to take a deep breath. Even so, the market still suffered its biggest drop since 1997. Though closing steeply down, it managed to stabilize during the day as sellers discovered - lo and behold! - that there were still buyers out there.
MUCH HAPPENED while our markets were closed over Yom Kippur. Stocks worldwide plunged, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 18 percent. Companies were hard-pressed to find lenders. Having expended its dwindling political capital on persuading a reluctant Congress to allocate $700 billion for the purchase of stocks tied to bad mortgages, the US Treasury seemed to radically revise its approach: The US government is now poised to, in effect, partially nationalize certain banks to "unfreeze" the credit markets.
Meanwhile, Iceland practically went bankrupt; its government said it would protect the deposits of its own citizens, but not those held by foreigners, including a number of local authorities in London which found themselves out in the cold.
While Israel enjoyed its trading hiatus, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England finally managed to coordinate an interest-rate cut. And British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose popularity is as low as the market itself, found himself widely applauded for producing a genuinely systematic plan to address the crisis. Basically, it promises to guarantee new loans, in addition to providing cash to British banks. This could serve as a model for other nations.
Speaking in the Rose Garden on Saturday as finance ministers and central bankers from the G-7 nations stood stony-faced behind him, President George W. Bush declared: "All of us recognize that this is a serious global crisis, [which] therefore requires a serious global response." Those gathered around him generally agreed to coordinate their efforts to find a way out of the crisis since actions taken unilaterally - a la Iceland's - will only make a bad situation worse.
With 20/20 hindsight, we can speculate that America's failure to bail out Lehman Brothers catalyzed the current crisis. Looking back further, a convincing argument is being made that the American financial establishment's love affair with the poorly understood and grossly under-regulated tools known as "derivatives" contributed to the meltdown.
AS TO the here and now, Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai wanted Sunday's cabinet meeting to consider creating an "economic kitchen cabinet" that would address how to guarantee the safety of savings in our banks and the need to raise yields on government bonds. But, ridiculously, Cabinet Secretary Ovad Yehezkel pointed to a rule that requires agenda items to be submitted three days in advance.
To be fair, the government has been effectively grappling with how to steer Israel through this crisis emanating from beyond our shores. And analysts agree our economy's exposure to mortgage-related debt and derivatives is minimal, and that the biggest dangers are psychological.
To that end, Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On reassured Israelis that his ministry and the Bank of Israel would intervene as necessary. They are reportedly indeed weighing plans to offer deposit insurance and, if necessary, inject capital into the banking system.
If anything makes people nervous, it is being told not to panic. And yet, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is quite correct to tell the public just that.
If, rather than letting fear prevail, Israelis adhere to the "buy low and sell high" mantra, chances are we will all emerge to trade again another day.
Authorities here are doing their utmost to stem panic by making it clear that if necessary, they stand ready to intervene in a timely fashion. The rest of us can help by not getting caught up in the hysteria swirling around us.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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