Netanyahu, Mitchell & the Settlement Freeze

'It's not enough'


With the patience of a taxi driver at a red light about to turn green, the Palestinian leadership responded to Wednesday's announcement of an Israeli moratorium on new settlement building with: "It's not enough!"

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's unprecedented moratorium is both substantive and symbolic - the appropriate response to a Palestinian settlement freeze demand that is both emblematic and a red-herring.

THE DISPUTE between Palestinians and Israelis is not about settlements. It hinges on whether the Arabs are willing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as the state of the Jewish people within any boundaries. Some find it convenient to imagine that the clash between the Zionist and Arab causes has transitioned to a non-zero sum game. That is hardly the dominant view in Israel.

In 1920, the international community gave Britain the responsibility of establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. But a year later London turned over eastern Palestine to Emir Abdullah and Transjordan was born. The Arab response? "It's not enough."

In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists consented. The Arabs... said no.

In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Again, the Jews agreed. The Arab response was: "It's not enough" and they tried to throttle the newborn Jewish state. Israel survived while the Arabs took the West Bank and Gaza. Did they then form a Palestinian state? Of course not, because these territories alone were "not enough."

In 1967, the Arabs failed to push an Israel living within the 1949 Armistice Lines into the sea and the West Bank came into Israeli possession. Magnanimous in victory, Israel offered peace. The Arab response? "No peace, no recognition, no negotiations."

In 1977, Egypt's Anwar Sadat courageously embarked on the path of peace. Israel withdrew from all territory claimed by Egypt, and Menachem Begin, moreover, offered the Palestinians something they had never enjoyed - autonomy. Israeli forces would have been re-deployed as a prelude to final status negotiations. The Arab response? "It's not enough."

As a result of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the PLO leadership was invited to return from Tunis and set up a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. But a double-dealing Yasser Arafat never genuinely embraced this historic opportunity for reconciliation. Hamas intensified its terror campaign which claimed dozens of Israeli lives (well before the Baruch Goldstein Hebron massacre in February 1994). Ehud Barak twice - at Camp David (July 2000) and at Taba (January 2001) - offered Arafat a Palestinian state accompanied by extraordinary territorial and political concessions. The Arab response? "It's not enough."

When Israel unilaterally pulled its settlers and soldiers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Arabs again said: "It's not enough."

In 2008, Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas 93 percent of the West Bank, plus additional territory from Israel proper. Abbas did not even deign to say "It's not enough" - he just walked away.

Then in June of this year Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, unequivocally accepted a demilitarized Palestinian state. The Arab response? "It's not enough."

Generation after generation, decade after decade, Israeli concession after concession, the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to say, "It's not enough."

SO now the question is what will America do? Special Envoy George Mitchell reacted with sparing approval to Netanyahu's moratorium. "It falls short of a full settlement freeze, but it is more than any Israeli government has done before…" He then diluted this faint praise by coldly reiterating: "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."

A slightly more positive reaction came from Secretary of State Clinton who acknowledged that "agreed swaps" should be part of negotiations based on the 1967 lines.

To take additional risks for peace, Israelis must feel secure that the Obama administration wholly backs the 1967-plus formula. Washington needs to cajole Mahmoud Abbas back to the table to bargain in good faith, and it should extract diplomatic gestures from its Arab allies in reciprocity for the premier's concessions.

Otherwise, the discouraging message that comes across to Israelis who want an agreement is that no matter what we do it will always "fall short" with this administration and never be "enough" for the Arabs.

Medicine, ethics and politics

Ministerial malpractice


In 1983, at age 23, Ron Houben was involved in a car accident that left him completely paralyzed and in a coma. The young Belgian had been a martial arts expert and engineering student; now doctors diagnosed his condition as persistent vegetative state. His eyes could move; he had periods of sleep and wakefulness, but he appeared unconscious; unable to reason or respond.

In reality, Houben knew what was happening around him but had no way of signaling he was a sentient being. He could not even blink an eyelid.

His mother's intuition led her to believe that her son was not a hopeless case, and over the years she took him to the United States five times for sophisticated tests.

She eventually connected with Dr. Steven Laureys of Belgium's Coma Science Group, who put Ron through a PET scan that detects energy given off by a radioactive element injected into the patient. The exam, which was not available when Houben was first diagnosed, showed that he probably could think and reason after all, even if he was immobile and uncommunicative.

This stunning discovery, made three years ago, has only now come to light. Laureys came up with a computer-assisted touch screen that allows Houben, now 46, to use the partial mobility he has in one finger of his right hand to type out his thoughts - with the help of an aide.

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me," he wrote afterward. "It was my second birth. I was shouting, but no one could hear me."

Houben now sits in a wheelchair, his body twisted to one side as if in suspended animation, but his eyes are open and he can now "speak" via computer. He wrote that he maintained his sanity by dreaming himself away. "I was only my consciousness and nothing else."

His mother insists he is not depressed, that he is an optimist and that he wants to get the most out of his life.

Laureys claims that "up to 43 percent of patients with disorders of consciousness are erroneously assigned a diagnosis of vegetative state."

Surely, this case will further sensitize medical ethicists, physicians and others involved in the care of similarly situated patients about when to end aggressive intervention and restrict treatment to palliative care alone until nature takes it course.

Medicine is both an art and a science. Physicians deal in probabilities. Sometimes they get it wrong; sometimes miracles happen.

Optimistically, Laureys's work may cause physicians to reevaluate the brain activity of patients who were diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state before PET became available. (The technology has long been available in Israel.) It's not apparent whether the failure to correct Houben's diagnosis any earlier can be attributed to medical malpractice.

WHAT'S EVEN worse than doctors getting a diagnosis wrong? Answer: A politician playing doctor.

Here at home, Deputy Health Minister Ya'acov Litzman has drawn a sharp rebuke from the head of the Israel Medical Association (IMA) for personally and repeatedly intervening in the care of a patient at Schneider Children's Medical Center.

Litzman ordered doctors to treat a lower-brain-dead baby with antibiotics. This patient's condition has nothing in common with being in a vegetative state or in a coma.

The standard protocol for lower-brain-dead cases, after evaluation by two physicians and with the approval of director-general of the Health Ministry, is to discontinue the respirator. Under Israeli law, however, the hospital must honor the wishes of the family if it insists that a lower-brain-dead patient continue to receive nourishment and stay on a respirator. But no one has a right to demand the patient receive antibiotics.

The Health portfolio is formally held by the premier. Litzman is a deputy minister because his United Torah Judaism Party is unwilling to assume responsibility for the actions of a Zionist cabinet, though it does consent to exercise governmental power.

The IMA declared that Litzman had "no right to intervene" in this case. We agree. Israel can't afford to have politicians or clergymen micro-managing medical cases any more than it can tolerate having transportation ministers supplant air-traffic controllers at Ben-Gurion Airport.

If Deputy Health Minister Litzman concludes that his fiduciary responsibilities to Israel's citizens cannot be reconciled with his deeply held religious convictions, let him draw the necessary conclusions.

On the 36th anniversary of David Ben-Gurion's death

Principle & pragmatism


Yesterday, according to the Hebrew calendar, marked David Ben-Gurion's 36th yahrzeit. A founding father of Israel and its first prime minister, he died on December 1, 1973 at 87.

In considering the lessons to be drawn from Ben-Gurion's life, one involves his quest for the right balance between ideology and pragmatism. His admirers argue that Ben-Gurion was wise to jettison ideological consistency in the name of creating and consolidating the Zionist enterprise.

He was a socialist, though Marxist dialectics took a back seat to his Zionist pragmatism: settling the land and promoting aliya. Doggedly single-minded, he acquiesced to majority rule, but was no pluralist. He ruled his party and saw to it that it ruled the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency and the government. Ben-Gurion expected absolute allegiance to the cause in the way that he defined it.

HIS CRITICS on the Zionist Right, followers of the classically liberal ideologue Ze'ev Jabotinsky, denounced Ben-Gurion's willingness, by 1937, to accept an independent Jewish state in a small part of Palestine, when by Divine right, historical association and international treaty the Jews deserved all of Eretz Yisrael. The Jabotinsky people did not understand how Ben-Gurion could cooperate with the British while their White Paper barred the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees. Nor could they forgive his June 1948 decision to sink the Irgun arms ship Altalena, carrying desperately needed weapons, to hammer home the point that the future state would have one unified command and he would be the commander-in-chief.

He was uncompromising not in his ideology, but in his pragmatism. He insisted on unity, seeing fragmentation as an obstacle to achieving Jewish independence. In a 1944 speech, he declared, "Anyone who questions the ultimate authority of the nation as a whole… undermines its dynamic potential." He personified that ultimate authority.

Ben-Gurion sought Arab assent for Zionism by holding talks with Mussa al-Alami, a pre-state Palestinian leader. He assured the Cambridge-educated Alami that his people would materially benefit by recognizing Jewish rights to Eretz Yisrael and agreeing to live in peace. But when Alami replied that the Arabs would rather see the country remain a wasteland for another 100 years than share it with the Jews, Ben-Gurion concluded that war was inevitable.

He speculated - somewhat optimistically, it turns out - that once the Arabs were decisively defeated and had witnessed the Jews developing the country, they might "possibly acquiesce in a Jewish Eretz Israel."

In the final analysis, Ben-Gurion believed that statecraft was the art of the possible, that ideology was something to be overcome if it stood in the way of pragmatism, that gradualism could deliver the very same outcomes as an all-or-nothing approach.

Where he also did not waver was in his philosophical commitment to the Zionist goal. He was faithful to a Jewish revolution "against destiny, against the unique destiny of a unique people." The Jews, he argued, were distinguished by their refusal - from Hadrian to Hitler - to surrender to historic destiny. For him, the meaning of Zionism was to teach the Jewish people that "non-surrender" was not enough: "We must master our fate; we must take our destiny into our own hands" by creating a state.

OF COURSE, if Ben-Gurion's legacy makes the case for setting aside the ideal for the practical, there is no shortage of contemporary politicians for whom "pragmatism" is nothing but a fig leaf for careerism, sloppy intellectual thinking, or even nefarious motives.

Take the particularly blatant example of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

He is supposedly a Christian ("I preach the word of Jesus Christ") and a leftist, but he has pretentiously embraced two Muslim religious reactionaries. His dalliance with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is well-known, but his defense of Ilich Ramirez - aka Carlos the Jackal, a convert to Islam and a believer in the path of Osama bin Laden - is only now getting attention. Chavez's favorite anti-Semitic newspaper, Vea, is lobbying to have Ramirez transferred from France, where he is serving a life term, to Venezuela.

Historians will argue about the legacy of principled leaders who chose pragmatism over ideological consistency. But we do not have to wait for history's judgment to label as "wicked" the demagogue who cobbles together an incoherent platform of Marxism, Jew-hatred, Israel-bashing and populism.

This could be the start of the third intifada...

What price Schalit?

Arab press reports, echoed in Israel, claim that Gilad Schalit's long ordeal in Hamas captivity may be nearing its end, perhaps even this weekend to coincide with Id al-Adha, the Muslim holiday marking the end of the Haj.

There are other hints something is afoot. Shimon Peres was in Cairo yesterday to see President Hosni Mubarak. Guido Westerwelle, the new German foreign minister, is here today to meet Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Germans are acting as brokers between Hamas and Israel. Lastly, perhaps to stabilize conditions pending a prisoner exchange, Hamas said it had reached agreements with the other Gaza terror groups not to attack Israel without coordination.

That news came after Kassams slammed into Sderot on Saturday. But the IAF's retaliation against weapons factories and a smuggling tunnel in Gaza prompted Hamas's own military wing to threaten further attacks. And Islamic Jihad denied it was party to any arrangement in the first place.

Since the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead in January, 270 rockets and mortars have been lobbed at Israel from the Strip.

WHEN IT comes to Schalit, it's hard to know where the spin ends and the news begins. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, Israel is poised to free hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians in exchange for our young soldier.

From the time he was taken in June 2006, Hamas has been holding firm to its demands that it will free Schalit only in exchange for 1,000 of its operatives held by Israel. The present haggling, Arab reports imply, is partly over whether, once at large, the masterminds of the Sbarro, Moment Cafe and Dolphinarium bloodbaths, and of the Netanya Pessah Seder massacre, will be required to seek asylum outside Gaza and the West Bank. Some reports have Israel refusing to release these men or east Jerusalem prisoners sought by Hamas. If true, that probably means no deal.

Plainly, Netanyahu is loath to have his
government approve a lop-sided prisoner exchange that requires setting free some of the most dangerous terrorists Israel has ever encountered. Yet he may be telling himself that any such deal would be the absolutely, positively, honest-to-goodness, very last time Israel capitulates to Hamas or Hizbullah.

Hamas begs to differ. It's already offering a $1 million bounty to any Arab citizen of Israel who abducts another Israeli soldier.

An ill-considered prisoner deal could also bring down Mahmoud Abbas's already tottering Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. That would set the stage for Hamas to fill the political vacuum. As it is, with Hamas breathing down his neck, Abbas is being more obstinate than ever, even hinting that he might pursue popular resistance instead of negotiations. Fatah "redeemer" Marwan Barghouti, incarcerated for orchestrating numerous murders, has put out the word that any future negotiations with Israel ought to be accompanied by terrorism. If Israel yields to Hamas, as an offset, Barghouti could be released to "help Abu Mazen."

TOO BAD Israelis can't look to Egypt to play a constructive role. For the sake of expediency Cairo is ready to disregard the principles set down by the Quartet as a prerequisite for Hamas participation in a Palestinian unity government.

Mubarak's regime is once again turning a blind eye to Palestinian arms smuggling beneath the Philadelphi Corridor which has now reached pre-Operation Cast Lead levels. Mubarak is also doing everything possible to harden Abbas's heart, telling the Egyptian parliament Saturday that Israel alone was to blame for the paralysis in the peace talks.

He insultingly called on Israel to stop "Judaizing" Jerusalem and demanded it reconcile itself to the Arabs' refusal to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state. With a straight face, Mubarak demanded that Israel end its blockade of the Strip - as if Cairo did not maintain an identical (surface) embargo between the Sinai and Gaza.

AS MUCH as we Israelis ache to see Gilad Schalit home with his family, the emotional blackmail of campaigners who say the country should do "anything" to achieve his release could unleash on our home front the very same sociopathic killers Israel's security forces worked so hard to capture in the first place.

We urge the premier to leave no stone unturned in trying to bring Gilad home, while placing the national interest above all.