See below for my election predictions
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Tuesday - Our broken system
Think of Israel's political system as a homeostatic device. When working properly, the country's temperature is, say, a comfortable 22.2 degrees (72°F). Some citizens might want it hotter, others cooler, but the apparatus is programmed to find most people's comfort level. However, when majorities consistently demand a change in temperature, yet the system is unresponsive - as if the thermostat was broken - you're looking at a dysfunctional political system.
Political scientist David Easton argued that a system is endowed with the capacity to gauge its own state of health. It senses public opinion swings, levels of voter participation, even violence, and takes corrective measures to restore equilibrium.
Israel's political system has been getting feedback that should have alerted it long ago that citizens are dissatisfied. Its homeostatic failure is worrisome.
The signs of discontent are blatant: Though over 30 parties are competing in today's election, many voters are saying, "There's no one to vote for." Few Israelis will wake up Wednesday morning feeling they'll have a real voice in the 18th Knesset.
Only 15 percent, according to the Israel Democracy Institute (IDC), trust political parties. The percentage of voters going to the polls plummeted from 87 percent in the 1949 Knesset elections to 63.5% in 2006. Those going to the polls today will be doing so with little zest. Perhaps 20-30% will be making up their minds at the last minute. Fewer and fewer strongly identify with any party.
In this environment of discontent the populist Israel Beiteinu seems poised to practically double its Knesset representation on the strength of a demagogic appeal to have those who are already citizens formally pledge allegiance.
Alienation, apathy and lack of participation extend well beyond electoral politics to encompass institutions such as the media and judiciary. The IDC's 2008 Democracy Index reported that only 35% consider the Supreme Court to be safeguarding our democracy. By these same criteria, the media receives a 37% rating. A staggering 90% of those surveyed believe the system is riddled with corruption.
WITH many Israelis relating to today's election with a combination of lethargy and cynicism, something clearly needs to be done to fix our dysfunctional system.
But what? To the extent that citizens feel their elected officials lack accountability, and that voters have no real representation in the corridors of power, part of the solution is electoral reform.
This newspaper has consistently championed, in broad outline, the Magidor Commission report, which recommended that the Knesset be elected by a hybrid method of district and proportional representation. The country is anyway administratively divided into 17 districts by the Interior Ministry. Key to reinvigorating the system with faith and legitimacy is giving people the sense that they have an "address" for their grievances - that they are someone's constituents.
No such reform, however, is possible so long as small parties with narrow parochial interests stand in the way. They are intent on blocking alterations to the system that gives them their disproportionate clout.
Yet the major parties, all of which ostensibly support electoral reform, can't afford to antagonize the smaller factions, whose support they need to cobble together a governing coalition majority. Only if these big parties collaborate could the threshold of votes required for Knesset entry be raised as a first step toward creating more stable governments, which are the prerequisite to fundamental electoral reform.
And yet most of us intuitively realize that fixing the way we select our elected officials alone is not enough. That to return faith and legitimacy to our politics - repairing the system's homeostatic capabilities - Israel's political, judicial, media, business and spiritual elites need to come to their senses and start acting responsibly. They need to approach power not as an end in itself, but as a means of fulfilling their fiduciary duties to the people.
Their failure to do so has paved the way for counter-elites like Avigdor Lieberman to exploit what American historian Richard Hofstadter described as a paranoid style of politics: overheated, over-suspicious, over-aggressive and grandiose.
Only a combination of structural reforms accompanied by elite responsibility and a renewed commitment to civic virtue can mend the system and give us elections that produce what Israel urgently needs: governments with a mandate and a capacity to lead.
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Here's what my gut tells me will happen. No statistical analysis was involved. This is not the outcome I want. Voting in my neighborhood of Talpiot in Jerusalem was very light.
Kadima - 26
Likud - 26
Yisroel Beiteinu - 19
Labor - 11
Shas - 11
UJC - 5
Meretz- 5
Habayit Hyahudi - 4
Meimad/Green - 2
National Union -2
Arabs - 9
===================== 120
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Today Israel Votes
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.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Compassion perverted: Shalit & a Gaza Cease-fire
Monday - Misguided compassion
This week's news cycle began with a flurry of rumors that a deal for the release of Gilad Schalit, a Hamas hostage for over 950 days, might shortly be wrapped up. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak held an unusual Saturday night meeting to discuss Schalit and a Gaza cease-fire.
The troika met again prior to Sunday's cabinet meeting. Afterwards Barak updated President Shimon Peres on the Schalit-cease-fire negotiations between Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad and Egypt's Omar Suleiman. Peres will need to grant 1,000 pardons to the imprisoned terrorists who are reportedly to be exchanged for Schalit.
The surprise appearance in Cairo Saturday of Mahmoud Zahar, a top Gaza-based Hamas leader, spurred rumors that Schalit's fate would be announced by Tuesday. Zahar is now in Damascus with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas "inside" and Hamas "outside" are at odds over the parameters of a cease-fire deal and conditions for Schalit's release. Even within Gaza, military wing head Ahmed Jabari has reportedly taken a comparatively harder line in the negotiations brokered by Suleiman.
Meanwhile, Olmert told the cabinet that he is the one in charge of efforts to free Schalit, and that those who leaked the rumors that generated Sunday's headlines both exaggerated the chances for progress and damaged the prospects of freeing our soldier.
SCHALIT RUMORS touch an emotional nerve in the Israeli psyche every time they come to the fore. Hamas has hardheartedly refused to allow the Red Cross to visit him, so no one can credibly guarantee that he is alive and well.
Knowing what we know about Hamas's malice, the idea that our young soldier has been their hostage for so long fills Israelis with dread. We shudder to think about his physical and psychological well-being. So when Israelis deliberate what blood ransom to pay for our soldier's freedom, the quarrel takes place within Clal Yisrael - the House of Israel - where no one has a monopoly on compassion for Gilad and his parents, Aviva and Noam.
Hamas is supposedly offering a one-and-a-half-year tahadiyeh, or temporary cease-fire, in return for a complete lifting of restrictions on what can go into Strip. The first phase of this arrangement would see a partial opening of the crossings and a cease-fire. Next, Schalit would be released in exchange for the terrorists.
The Rafah crossing into Egypt from Gaza would, reportedly, be staffed by Mahmoud Abbas's PA, in the presence of Hamas, and with EU monitors on the scene.
The Egyptian package also includes plans for talks between Fatah and Hamas to reestablish their unity government - like the one which existed before June 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza. In its quest for international acceptance Hamas needs Fatah, while a fast-fading Fatah is desperate for a rapprochement with Hamas.
How Israel would stop arms smuggling beneath the Philadelphi Corridor under the Egyptian-brokered deal is anyone's guess.
WE LACK confirmed specifics, granted, but how is this deal different from the one Israel has been rejecting since June 25, 2006 - the day Palestinian gunmen violated our border, killed the forgotten Lt. Hanan Barak and St.-Sgt Pavel Slutsker, and took Schalit captive? Why do Israeli politicians speak in code about the "painful" price to be paid if the deal goes ahead? Don't they have the moral fiber to name names?
Do Olmert, Livni and Barak really intend to free Hamas's top West Bank terrorists? The masterminds of the Hebrew University and Sbarro bombings? The engineer of the Pessah massacre in Netanya? What will they say to those who risked their lives to capture these fiends in the first place?
Moreover, the troika purportedly plan to parlay Israel's capitulation to Hamas into another gesture to "help Abu Mazen," this time by freeing one of the main arsonists of the second intifada, Marwan Barghouti, and wiping away his culpability for the slayings of dozens of Israelis.
We all want Gilad Schalit back home. The question is one of price and consequence. Is it truly in keeping with Jewish compassion to purchase the freedom of one beloved captive at the almost certain cost of unleashing fresh acts of terrorism on our buses, in our cafes and malls, and on our roads - violence that would send many more innocents to their deaths?
This week's news cycle began with a flurry of rumors that a deal for the release of Gilad Schalit, a Hamas hostage for over 950 days, might shortly be wrapped up. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak held an unusual Saturday night meeting to discuss Schalit and a Gaza cease-fire.
The troika met again prior to Sunday's cabinet meeting. Afterwards Barak updated President Shimon Peres on the Schalit-cease-fire negotiations between Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad and Egypt's Omar Suleiman. Peres will need to grant 1,000 pardons to the imprisoned terrorists who are reportedly to be exchanged for Schalit.
The surprise appearance in Cairo Saturday of Mahmoud Zahar, a top Gaza-based Hamas leader, spurred rumors that Schalit's fate would be announced by Tuesday. Zahar is now in Damascus with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas "inside" and Hamas "outside" are at odds over the parameters of a cease-fire deal and conditions for Schalit's release. Even within Gaza, military wing head Ahmed Jabari has reportedly taken a comparatively harder line in the negotiations brokered by Suleiman.
Meanwhile, Olmert told the cabinet that he is the one in charge of efforts to free Schalit, and that those who leaked the rumors that generated Sunday's headlines both exaggerated the chances for progress and damaged the prospects of freeing our soldier.
SCHALIT RUMORS touch an emotional nerve in the Israeli psyche every time they come to the fore. Hamas has hardheartedly refused to allow the Red Cross to visit him, so no one can credibly guarantee that he is alive and well.
Knowing what we know about Hamas's malice, the idea that our young soldier has been their hostage for so long fills Israelis with dread. We shudder to think about his physical and psychological well-being. So when Israelis deliberate what blood ransom to pay for our soldier's freedom, the quarrel takes place within Clal Yisrael - the House of Israel - where no one has a monopoly on compassion for Gilad and his parents, Aviva and Noam.
Hamas is supposedly offering a one-and-a-half-year tahadiyeh, or temporary cease-fire, in return for a complete lifting of restrictions on what can go into Strip. The first phase of this arrangement would see a partial opening of the crossings and a cease-fire. Next, Schalit would be released in exchange for the terrorists.
The Rafah crossing into Egypt from Gaza would, reportedly, be staffed by Mahmoud Abbas's PA, in the presence of Hamas, and with EU monitors on the scene.
The Egyptian package also includes plans for talks between Fatah and Hamas to reestablish their unity government - like the one which existed before June 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza. In its quest for international acceptance Hamas needs Fatah, while a fast-fading Fatah is desperate for a rapprochement with Hamas.
How Israel would stop arms smuggling beneath the Philadelphi Corridor under the Egyptian-brokered deal is anyone's guess.
WE LACK confirmed specifics, granted, but how is this deal different from the one Israel has been rejecting since June 25, 2006 - the day Palestinian gunmen violated our border, killed the forgotten Lt. Hanan Barak and St.-Sgt Pavel Slutsker, and took Schalit captive? Why do Israeli politicians speak in code about the "painful" price to be paid if the deal goes ahead? Don't they have the moral fiber to name names?
Do Olmert, Livni and Barak really intend to free Hamas's top West Bank terrorists? The masterminds of the Hebrew University and Sbarro bombings? The engineer of the Pessah massacre in Netanya? What will they say to those who risked their lives to capture these fiends in the first place?
Moreover, the troika purportedly plan to parlay Israel's capitulation to Hamas into another gesture to "help Abu Mazen," this time by freeing one of the main arsonists of the second intifada, Marwan Barghouti, and wiping away his culpability for the slayings of dozens of Israelis.
We all want Gilad Schalit back home. The question is one of price and consequence. Is it truly in keeping with Jewish compassion to purchase the freedom of one beloved captive at the almost certain cost of unleashing fresh acts of terrorism on our buses, in our cafes and malls, and on our roads - violence that would send many more innocents to their deaths?
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, February 06, 2009
Israel's elections -- Agenda for the next government
Friday - Red lines
Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry's Diplomatic-Security Bureau, told this week's Herzliya Conference that Israel should try for a peace treaty with Syria within "the parameters at which we have arrived, but with vital additions which constitute red lines." Gilad believes that Israel needs to make peace with Syria because the two countries are on a collision course.
Gilad shuttles between here and Cairo meeting with Egyptian Intelligence Chief Gen. Omar Suleiman about a Gaza cease-fire, freedom for Gilad Schalit and such sensitive issues as smuggling underneath the Philadelphi Corridor. When he speaks, people listen.
Syria has the capacity to rain deadly missiles on Tel Aviv, Gilad said. A peace treaty de-linking Damascus from Teheran would therefore reduce Syrian support for Hamas and Hizbullah and improve Israeli security dramatically. But if a treaty isn't signed, Bashar Assad may provoke a war. The ensuing Israeli retaliation could bring down his Alawite government, to be replaced by a less cuddly, radical Sunni regime.
This summation of the obvious notwithstanding, Gilad's fleeting reference to "red lines" deserves elucidation. Demarking such lines - the point beyond which Israeli policymakers cannot safely go - is essential, both in order to build a domestic consensus and to help Israel articulate a coherent position in the international arena.
Red lines can translate into tangible ones. An Israeli-Syrian peace agreement could place our border along (1) the 1923 boundary; (2) the 1949 Armistice Line; or (3) the June 4, 1967 line. Presumably, Israel balks at handing over the former demilitarized zone, or pulling back to the 1949 demarcation. Other Israeli red lines would surely include ironclad guarantees for a demilitarized Golan and the unobstructed flow of water.
Talking about Israel's safety, what guarantee do we have that once a Syria-Israel peace treaty was in place - and the Golan abandoned - Damascus-Teheran relations wouldn't revert to normal; that Syria wouldn't continue to give Hamas leaders safe haven; and that it wouldn't go on funneling Hizbullah weapons? Should these doubts prompt red lines?
When Israeli strategists like Gilad speak in shorthand, assuming that "everyone" knows Israel's sticking points, they do the country no favors. They need to do a better job of defining them.
Far better if they helped build a consensus about those pesky red lines. Should Israel insist, for instance, that Assad recognize Israel as a Jewish state? That he visit Jerusalem? Assad is holding out a cold peace. What about holding out for a "warm" one?
RED LINES also identify minimum needs. Israelis generally assume that statehood is the Palestinians' red line. But what if their true red line is the one enunciated in December 2000 by Saeb Erekat: "The whole peace process hinges on Israel's willingness to withdraw to the borders of June 4, 1967… and come to terms with the refugees' right to return…"
Mahmoud Abbas today is still demanding: a total pullback to the 1949 Armistice Lines; the redivision of Jerusalem, and the "return" of millions of refugees, and their descendants, to Israel proper.
How are these red lines, representing the most "moderate" Palestinian position, to be reconciled with those of Israel's mainstream? It's hard to fathom.
Putting aside the issue of Hamas's control of Gaza, most Israelis would anyway insist on "1967-plus" - retaining strategic settlement blocs along the Green Line; a demilitarized Palestine, and control of the airspace and electromagnetic environment over Judea and Samaria. An IDF presence might long be necessary in the Jordan Valley to protect against threats from the east.
Israeli negotiators thus need to determine whether Palestinian red lines are indelible. It may be that they aren't. Just four decades ago, the Arabs declared: "No peace, no negotiation, no recognition"; today Israel has formal peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and is talking to the Palestinians.
ISRAEL'S NEXT coalition government needs to put defining this country's red lines high on its agenda. Our negotiators can then take those parameters, reflecting a national consensus, to the negotiating table.
Binyamin Netanyahu may be best suited to help us identify our red lines at home; Tzipi Livni might be more credible at marketing them abroad.
Crystallizing red lines is not about throwing down the gauntlet, it's about knowing our own minds.
The danger lies not in revealing our hand, but in not having one.
Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry's Diplomatic-Security Bureau, told this week's Herzliya Conference that Israel should try for a peace treaty with Syria within "the parameters at which we have arrived, but with vital additions which constitute red lines." Gilad believes that Israel needs to make peace with Syria because the two countries are on a collision course.
Gilad shuttles between here and Cairo meeting with Egyptian Intelligence Chief Gen. Omar Suleiman about a Gaza cease-fire, freedom for Gilad Schalit and such sensitive issues as smuggling underneath the Philadelphi Corridor. When he speaks, people listen.
Syria has the capacity to rain deadly missiles on Tel Aviv, Gilad said. A peace treaty de-linking Damascus from Teheran would therefore reduce Syrian support for Hamas and Hizbullah and improve Israeli security dramatically. But if a treaty isn't signed, Bashar Assad may provoke a war. The ensuing Israeli retaliation could bring down his Alawite government, to be replaced by a less cuddly, radical Sunni regime.
This summation of the obvious notwithstanding, Gilad's fleeting reference to "red lines" deserves elucidation. Demarking such lines - the point beyond which Israeli policymakers cannot safely go - is essential, both in order to build a domestic consensus and to help Israel articulate a coherent position in the international arena.
Red lines can translate into tangible ones. An Israeli-Syrian peace agreement could place our border along (1) the 1923 boundary; (2) the 1949 Armistice Line; or (3) the June 4, 1967 line. Presumably, Israel balks at handing over the former demilitarized zone, or pulling back to the 1949 demarcation. Other Israeli red lines would surely include ironclad guarantees for a demilitarized Golan and the unobstructed flow of water.
Talking about Israel's safety, what guarantee do we have that once a Syria-Israel peace treaty was in place - and the Golan abandoned - Damascus-Teheran relations wouldn't revert to normal; that Syria wouldn't continue to give Hamas leaders safe haven; and that it wouldn't go on funneling Hizbullah weapons? Should these doubts prompt red lines?
When Israeli strategists like Gilad speak in shorthand, assuming that "everyone" knows Israel's sticking points, they do the country no favors. They need to do a better job of defining them.
Far better if they helped build a consensus about those pesky red lines. Should Israel insist, for instance, that Assad recognize Israel as a Jewish state? That he visit Jerusalem? Assad is holding out a cold peace. What about holding out for a "warm" one?
RED LINES also identify minimum needs. Israelis generally assume that statehood is the Palestinians' red line. But what if their true red line is the one enunciated in December 2000 by Saeb Erekat: "The whole peace process hinges on Israel's willingness to withdraw to the borders of June 4, 1967… and come to terms with the refugees' right to return…"
Mahmoud Abbas today is still demanding: a total pullback to the 1949 Armistice Lines; the redivision of Jerusalem, and the "return" of millions of refugees, and their descendants, to Israel proper.
How are these red lines, representing the most "moderate" Palestinian position, to be reconciled with those of Israel's mainstream? It's hard to fathom.
Putting aside the issue of Hamas's control of Gaza, most Israelis would anyway insist on "1967-plus" - retaining strategic settlement blocs along the Green Line; a demilitarized Palestine, and control of the airspace and electromagnetic environment over Judea and Samaria. An IDF presence might long be necessary in the Jordan Valley to protect against threats from the east.
Israeli negotiators thus need to determine whether Palestinian red lines are indelible. It may be that they aren't. Just four decades ago, the Arabs declared: "No peace, no negotiation, no recognition"; today Israel has formal peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and is talking to the Palestinians.
ISRAEL'S NEXT coalition government needs to put defining this country's red lines high on its agenda. Our negotiators can then take those parameters, reflecting a national consensus, to the negotiating table.
Binyamin Netanyahu may be best suited to help us identify our red lines at home; Tzipi Livni might be more credible at marketing them abroad.
Crystallizing red lines is not about throwing down the gauntlet, it's about knowing our own minds.
The danger lies not in revealing our hand, but in not having one.
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.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Iran at 30 - Happy birthday NOT
Wednesday -- Dark anniversary
The Islamic Republic of Iran was established 30 years ago. That black day in history should, perhaps, have been marked last month; for in January 1979, after a year of demonstrations by his Islamist opponents, the shah - sick with cancer and abandoned by the Carter administration - left Teheran for exile.
Arguably, this month is the proper anniversary because it was in February 1979 that the Iranian military stood down and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ended his exile, returning from Paris to a tumultuous Teheran welcome.
As he was helped down the steps of the plane, Khomeini showed nary a flicker of emotion. He went directly to a cemetery where his "martyred" followers were buried. Millions clogged the route to get a glimpse of the 76-year-old cleric; it took three hours to make the 40-km. journey.
Shapur Bakhtiar, the interim prime minister appointed by the shah, said Khomeini was welcome but would have to respect the rule of law. Khomeini ordered him to resign. He went into exile. In 1991, Khomeini had him killed by Hizbullah.
Sixteen days after Khomeini's triumphant arrival, PLO chief Yasser Arafat became the first foreign visitor to pay him homage. The two men held hands; Arafat beamed and snuggled ever closer to Khomeini, whose revolutionary guards had been trained in PLO camps in Lebanon. When the cameras left, Khomeini lectured Arafat on the need to drop his nationalist facade and make the Palestinian struggle against Israel part of the larger worldwide jihad. And on February 17, he turned the former Israeli embassy in Teheran over to Arafat.
It took Khomeini a while to pacify all of Iran. A revolt by the Turkomans had to be put down; former generals and officials loyal to the shah had to be executed. And over the coming years the revolution would consume its own. Revolutionary committees were established to purge the government and military of bourgeois supporters whose religiosity was suspect.
Khomeini ordered thousands of executions. Well into the late 1980s and beyond, there were always new internal enemies to slaughter.
Some say that the true anniversary of the Iranian revolution should be marked on April 1 when, after a nationwide referendum, Khomeini proclaimed the Islamic Republic.
IRAN'S FALL into the benighted hands of Shi'ite extremists turned out to be a geo-strategic blow of historic proportions to Western interests. The mullahs not only created a theocracy at home, they exported their pernicious fanaticism abroad. The November 4, 1979 takeover of the US embassy, and the 444-day hostage crisis, profoundly undermined customary international law.
A share of the country's vast oil wealth has been put at the disposal of its imperial goals - endowing the regime's quest to build a nuclear bomb, funding terrorist movements and establishing proxies such as Hizbullah.
American policymakers misjudged Iran's willingness to behave pragmatically in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. In 1985, the Reagan administration secretly sold Iran $30 million worth of weapons to defend itself against Iraqi aggression, in the hope that a new leaf could be turned over in relations between the two countries - and as ransom for US hostages held by Iran's Lebanese allies. Rather than warn the US away from such folly, Israel played an instrumental role in facilitating the scheme because Jerusalem also misjudged the depth of the mullahs' intransigence and loathing of the "infidels."
Khomeini died in 1989 and was replaced by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who now controls the ruling 12-man Council of Guardians. On Monday, when Iran launched into orbit its first domestically made satellite - reportedly a civilian version of the Shihab 3 ballistic missile - the supreme leader obtained further, tangible proof that international sanctions are little more than a nuisance to Iran's imperial aspirations.
PRESIDENT Barack Obama says that if Iran is willing to unclench its fist, it "will find an extended hand from us." But the mullahs are playing hard to get.
Today, diplomats from the US, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and China are scheduled to meet in Frankfurt to discuss Iran's drive for nuclear weapons. The US needs to convince them that - whatever the new administration's tactical differences from the previous one - Washington will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was established 30 years ago. That black day in history should, perhaps, have been marked last month; for in January 1979, after a year of demonstrations by his Islamist opponents, the shah - sick with cancer and abandoned by the Carter administration - left Teheran for exile.
Arguably, this month is the proper anniversary because it was in February 1979 that the Iranian military stood down and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ended his exile, returning from Paris to a tumultuous Teheran welcome.
As he was helped down the steps of the plane, Khomeini showed nary a flicker of emotion. He went directly to a cemetery where his "martyred" followers were buried. Millions clogged the route to get a glimpse of the 76-year-old cleric; it took three hours to make the 40-km. journey.
Shapur Bakhtiar, the interim prime minister appointed by the shah, said Khomeini was welcome but would have to respect the rule of law. Khomeini ordered him to resign. He went into exile. In 1991, Khomeini had him killed by Hizbullah.
Sixteen days after Khomeini's triumphant arrival, PLO chief Yasser Arafat became the first foreign visitor to pay him homage. The two men held hands; Arafat beamed and snuggled ever closer to Khomeini, whose revolutionary guards had been trained in PLO camps in Lebanon. When the cameras left, Khomeini lectured Arafat on the need to drop his nationalist facade and make the Palestinian struggle against Israel part of the larger worldwide jihad. And on February 17, he turned the former Israeli embassy in Teheran over to Arafat.
It took Khomeini a while to pacify all of Iran. A revolt by the Turkomans had to be put down; former generals and officials loyal to the shah had to be executed. And over the coming years the revolution would consume its own. Revolutionary committees were established to purge the government and military of bourgeois supporters whose religiosity was suspect.
Khomeini ordered thousands of executions. Well into the late 1980s and beyond, there were always new internal enemies to slaughter.
Some say that the true anniversary of the Iranian revolution should be marked on April 1 when, after a nationwide referendum, Khomeini proclaimed the Islamic Republic.
IRAN'S FALL into the benighted hands of Shi'ite extremists turned out to be a geo-strategic blow of historic proportions to Western interests. The mullahs not only created a theocracy at home, they exported their pernicious fanaticism abroad. The November 4, 1979 takeover of the US embassy, and the 444-day hostage crisis, profoundly undermined customary international law.
A share of the country's vast oil wealth has been put at the disposal of its imperial goals - endowing the regime's quest to build a nuclear bomb, funding terrorist movements and establishing proxies such as Hizbullah.
American policymakers misjudged Iran's willingness to behave pragmatically in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. In 1985, the Reagan administration secretly sold Iran $30 million worth of weapons to defend itself against Iraqi aggression, in the hope that a new leaf could be turned over in relations between the two countries - and as ransom for US hostages held by Iran's Lebanese allies. Rather than warn the US away from such folly, Israel played an instrumental role in facilitating the scheme because Jerusalem also misjudged the depth of the mullahs' intransigence and loathing of the "infidels."
Khomeini died in 1989 and was replaced by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who now controls the ruling 12-man Council of Guardians. On Monday, when Iran launched into orbit its first domestically made satellite - reportedly a civilian version of the Shihab 3 ballistic missile - the supreme leader obtained further, tangible proof that international sanctions are little more than a nuisance to Iran's imperial aspirations.
PRESIDENT Barack Obama says that if Iran is willing to unclench its fist, it "will find an extended hand from us." But the mullahs are playing hard to get.
Today, diplomats from the US, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and China are scheduled to meet in Frankfurt to discuss Iran's drive for nuclear weapons. The US needs to convince them that - whatever the new administration's tactical differences from the previous one - Washington will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran.
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.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
IN GAZA PALESTINIANS ARE STILL SHOOTING
Tuesday -- Gaza cease-fire talk
The pressure is on for another Egyptian-brokered Gaza cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. A bad arrangement would further consolidate Hamas's control over the Strip, leave Gilad Schalit in captivity, throw open the crossing points, and allow for the continued smuggling of ever-more lethal armaments under the Philadelphi Corridor. On the plus side, it would deliver southern Israel from enemy bombardment - give or take the occasional "unauthorized" barrage - for about a year.
While Israel has been funneling tens of thousands of tons of humanitarian goods into Gaza - earmarked for UNRWA, the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and others; along with truckloads of diesel fuel and cooking gas - the Palestinians have "supplied" Israel with deadly cross-border ambushes and fusillades of rockets and mortars. Hamas explains that in the absence of a formal cease-fire, it will do nothing to hinder other "resistance groups."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insists that Israel "will not go back to the rules of the game" which prevailed prior to Operation Cast Lead. But it sure does look that way: Aggression from Gaza is met with Israeli airstrikes, tit-for-tat. Citizens in the south are again having to calculate whether it is safe to walk their children 30 meters to kindergarten, or more prudent to drive.
Our leaders - eight days from national elections - are talking tough, though at cross-purposes. Hamas is taking no chances; its key operatives are back in hiding.
The debate over whether the war ended "too soon" is being answered in the affirmative every time an insolent Hamas violates the interim cease-fire.
Arab media reports say that a tahadiyeh, or temporary truce, could kick in as early as Thursday if, in Hamas's words, Israel stops "torpedoing" Egyptian efforts.
WHAT kind of cease-fire would benefit Israel's interests? A one-year hiatus in Kassam and mortar attacks in return for lifting the "siege" is a bad idea. Been there, done that.
A good deal would give Israel a buffer zone between it and the Strip. It would provide for tight control over the crossing points from Egypt, and from Israel, into Gaza. Our security is dependent on effective monitoring by reliable parties of who comes in and goes out, and what material is brought into the Strip.
An effective deal would have Egypt genuinely securing its side of the border; and we may be starting to see this happening. Lately, Egyptian authorities have exploded several tunnels on their side; and with outside support (under international pressure), they've installed security cameras and sensors. Cairo is taking advice from US engineers on how to interdict the tunnels, and they've deployed better-motivated, better-trained personnel.
While the main responsibility for security along the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah crossing necessarily falls on Cairo - it must ensure that terrorists and money for terror do not routinely flow into the Strip - Western-trained Palestinian Authority personnel, accompanied by EU monitors, should be on the Gaza side.
Under no circumstances should the crossings be opened, beyond humanitarian aid, until Hamas frees Gilad Schalit in an exchange Israeli security officials can live with. So far, Hamas has not budged from its demand that Israel release 1,000 handpicked inmates involved in some of the most monstrous bloodbaths of the second intifada. This must not happen.
For a viable cease-fire, it's clear the Palestinians need to put their house in order. But the PA and Hamas remain in violent confrontation.
The reconstruction of Gaza is also dependent on Palestinian reconciliation. Donors should insist that the Palestinians drop their opposition to a genuine rebuilding of the territory that does away with the refugee camps and squalid townships. But for the Palestinian predilection to wallow in victimization, Gaza could today be a Singapore on the Mediterranean.
ISRAEL'S outgoing cabinet must not allow itself to be stampeded into a bad cease-fire deal. The harsh reality may be that once a new government is formed, it will find it necessary to order the IDF to retake and hold the Philadelphi Corridor, along with parts of northern Gaza.
If the Arab world and the international community don't want that to happen, now is the time for them to lean on Hamas.
===============
“Allah Akbar” in London UPDATE
I've removed the link that Tom Gross sent out in good faith and which I posted here which showed Muslim extremists rioting in central London.
The footage was real as best as I can tell. But the link delivered my browsers to the site of the British National Party. Oi vey. Apologies for any offense.
The pressure is on for another Egyptian-brokered Gaza cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. A bad arrangement would further consolidate Hamas's control over the Strip, leave Gilad Schalit in captivity, throw open the crossing points, and allow for the continued smuggling of ever-more lethal armaments under the Philadelphi Corridor. On the plus side, it would deliver southern Israel from enemy bombardment - give or take the occasional "unauthorized" barrage - for about a year.
While Israel has been funneling tens of thousands of tons of humanitarian goods into Gaza - earmarked for UNRWA, the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and others; along with truckloads of diesel fuel and cooking gas - the Palestinians have "supplied" Israel with deadly cross-border ambushes and fusillades of rockets and mortars. Hamas explains that in the absence of a formal cease-fire, it will do nothing to hinder other "resistance groups."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insists that Israel "will not go back to the rules of the game" which prevailed prior to Operation Cast Lead. But it sure does look that way: Aggression from Gaza is met with Israeli airstrikes, tit-for-tat. Citizens in the south are again having to calculate whether it is safe to walk their children 30 meters to kindergarten, or more prudent to drive.
Our leaders - eight days from national elections - are talking tough, though at cross-purposes. Hamas is taking no chances; its key operatives are back in hiding.
The debate over whether the war ended "too soon" is being answered in the affirmative every time an insolent Hamas violates the interim cease-fire.
Arab media reports say that a tahadiyeh, or temporary truce, could kick in as early as Thursday if, in Hamas's words, Israel stops "torpedoing" Egyptian efforts.
WHAT kind of cease-fire would benefit Israel's interests? A one-year hiatus in Kassam and mortar attacks in return for lifting the "siege" is a bad idea. Been there, done that.
A good deal would give Israel a buffer zone between it and the Strip. It would provide for tight control over the crossing points from Egypt, and from Israel, into Gaza. Our security is dependent on effective monitoring by reliable parties of who comes in and goes out, and what material is brought into the Strip.
An effective deal would have Egypt genuinely securing its side of the border; and we may be starting to see this happening. Lately, Egyptian authorities have exploded several tunnels on their side; and with outside support (under international pressure), they've installed security cameras and sensors. Cairo is taking advice from US engineers on how to interdict the tunnels, and they've deployed better-motivated, better-trained personnel.
While the main responsibility for security along the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah crossing necessarily falls on Cairo - it must ensure that terrorists and money for terror do not routinely flow into the Strip - Western-trained Palestinian Authority personnel, accompanied by EU monitors, should be on the Gaza side.
Under no circumstances should the crossings be opened, beyond humanitarian aid, until Hamas frees Gilad Schalit in an exchange Israeli security officials can live with. So far, Hamas has not budged from its demand that Israel release 1,000 handpicked inmates involved in some of the most monstrous bloodbaths of the second intifada. This must not happen.
For a viable cease-fire, it's clear the Palestinians need to put their house in order. But the PA and Hamas remain in violent confrontation.
The reconstruction of Gaza is also dependent on Palestinian reconciliation. Donors should insist that the Palestinians drop their opposition to a genuine rebuilding of the territory that does away with the refugee camps and squalid townships. But for the Palestinian predilection to wallow in victimization, Gaza could today be a Singapore on the Mediterranean.
ISRAEL'S outgoing cabinet must not allow itself to be stampeded into a bad cease-fire deal. The harsh reality may be that once a new government is formed, it will find it necessary to order the IDF to retake and hold the Philadelphi Corridor, along with parts of northern Gaza.
If the Arab world and the international community don't want that to happen, now is the time for them to lean on Hamas.
===============
“Allah Akbar” in London UPDATE
I've removed the link that Tom Gross sent out in good faith and which I posted here which showed Muslim extremists rioting in central London.
The footage was real as best as I can tell. But the link delivered my browsers to the site of the British National Party. Oi vey. Apologies for any offense.
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.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Turkey & Israel after Operation Cast Lead
Monday -- Turkey: The longer view
In considering the Israel-Turkey relationship, Israelis have reason to feel let down by the behavior of the Turkish government and people. From the start of Operation Cast Lead on December 27, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been on a diplomatic rampage. His words - coupled with the unbalanced media coverage prevalent worldwide - incited the Turkish masses into an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish frenzy. Turkish leaders declared that Israel was committing atrocities against Gaza and would be punished by Allah.
Israel's Ankara embassy has been in a virtual security lock-down. Turkish basketball fans chanted "Death to the Jews" during a recent match against Bnei Hasharon. Signs in Anatolia declare: "No Armenians or Jews. Dogs OK."
In the latest outrage, Erdogan stormed off the stage in Davos after shouting, "You are killing people" at President Shimon Peres; he was welcomed home as "The Conqueror of Davos."
No wonder Israeli tourists - over 500,000 in 2008 - are staying away.
The 25,000-member Turkish Jewish community doesn't have that luxury.
Anti-Jewish prejudice is endemic. The Izmir synagogue has been vandalized; anti-Jewish posters in Istanbul urge patrons to boycott Jewish shops. Jewish schoolchildren felt compelled to stand during a nationwide moment of silence for the Palestinian dead in Gaza.
SO Israelis have good reason to think Turkey has chosen Hamas over Israel, and Iran over the West. But it may not be quite that simple. Turkey, a nation of 71 million people, a quarter under age 25, is too multifaceted to pigeonhole. While its masses are unsophisticated and easily manipulated by demagoguery, key segments among the elite oppose Erdogan's policies.
In the old days the army might have intervened; the generals saw themselves as Turkey's "constitution," charged with defending Kemal Attaturk's legacy in the face of tyranny, governmental incompetence or threats to civil liberties. Paradoxically, as Turkey has moved closer to EU membership - a prospect now on hold - the army's overt role as the system's final arbiter has diminished.
Nowadays the army has pro-Iranian elements, and the Islamist government is suspected of trying to discredit pro-Western generals. The state of play is truly Byzantine.
Erdogan's tirades against Israel have not been uniformly popular, notably in the Western-oriented press. Many in the elite care deeply about Turkey's relationship with Israel. They argue that only 7 percent of Turks are hardcore extremists, but the complicated political system gives them disproportionate influence. They claim the number of anti-Israel demonstrators has been exaggerated and is small in ratio to the population. They point, further, to $6 billion a year in bilateral trade (factoring in military sales); Turkey will take delivery of Israeli-manufactured armed drones next month. The IAF has used Turkish airspace to train, according to foreign press reports.
As for Iran, our friends in the elite explain that Persians and Turks have a long history of animosity, but Turkey needs to import oil and gas from its neighbor.
Beyond all this, the Turkish premier's outbursts are attributable, those friends emphasize, to his strong sense of personal betrayal by Ehud Olmert.
During the prime minister's farewell visit to his Turkish counterpart, Erdogan invested his energies in ironing out a deal for direct talks between Israel and Syria. With Olmert in an adjacent room, he spent hours on the phone with Bashar Assad teasing out a statement that would have led to face-to-face talks. We don't know what price Israel would have been expected to pay for such contact. Nevertheless, before departing for Jerusalem on the eve of the war, Olmert told Erdogan to keep at it.
So when Israel launched its operation mere hours after Olmert's departure, Erdogan was accused by members of his Islamist coalition of "conspiring with the Zionists to betray the Palestinians." If he knew the Gaza operation was imminent, the pro-Israel Turks say, Olmert should have stayed away. With critically important regional elections set for March 29, Erdogan switched tracks - from being tirelessly helpful on Syria to verbally bludgeoning Israel.
CAN the relationship survive Erdogan's term, which expires in 2011? Ankara may well have forfeited its role as honest broker for a long time to come. Still, those who care about the bond between Turkey and Israel want to see relations back on an even keel.
In considering the Israel-Turkey relationship, Israelis have reason to feel let down by the behavior of the Turkish government and people. From the start of Operation Cast Lead on December 27, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been on a diplomatic rampage. His words - coupled with the unbalanced media coverage prevalent worldwide - incited the Turkish masses into an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish frenzy. Turkish leaders declared that Israel was committing atrocities against Gaza and would be punished by Allah.
Israel's Ankara embassy has been in a virtual security lock-down. Turkish basketball fans chanted "Death to the Jews" during a recent match against Bnei Hasharon. Signs in Anatolia declare: "No Armenians or Jews. Dogs OK."
In the latest outrage, Erdogan stormed off the stage in Davos after shouting, "You are killing people" at President Shimon Peres; he was welcomed home as "The Conqueror of Davos."
No wonder Israeli tourists - over 500,000 in 2008 - are staying away.
The 25,000-member Turkish Jewish community doesn't have that luxury.
Anti-Jewish prejudice is endemic. The Izmir synagogue has been vandalized; anti-Jewish posters in Istanbul urge patrons to boycott Jewish shops. Jewish schoolchildren felt compelled to stand during a nationwide moment of silence for the Palestinian dead in Gaza.
SO Israelis have good reason to think Turkey has chosen Hamas over Israel, and Iran over the West. But it may not be quite that simple. Turkey, a nation of 71 million people, a quarter under age 25, is too multifaceted to pigeonhole. While its masses are unsophisticated and easily manipulated by demagoguery, key segments among the elite oppose Erdogan's policies.
In the old days the army might have intervened; the generals saw themselves as Turkey's "constitution," charged with defending Kemal Attaturk's legacy in the face of tyranny, governmental incompetence or threats to civil liberties. Paradoxically, as Turkey has moved closer to EU membership - a prospect now on hold - the army's overt role as the system's final arbiter has diminished.
Nowadays the army has pro-Iranian elements, and the Islamist government is suspected of trying to discredit pro-Western generals. The state of play is truly Byzantine.
Erdogan's tirades against Israel have not been uniformly popular, notably in the Western-oriented press. Many in the elite care deeply about Turkey's relationship with Israel. They argue that only 7 percent of Turks are hardcore extremists, but the complicated political system gives them disproportionate influence. They claim the number of anti-Israel demonstrators has been exaggerated and is small in ratio to the population. They point, further, to $6 billion a year in bilateral trade (factoring in military sales); Turkey will take delivery of Israeli-manufactured armed drones next month. The IAF has used Turkish airspace to train, according to foreign press reports.
As for Iran, our friends in the elite explain that Persians and Turks have a long history of animosity, but Turkey needs to import oil and gas from its neighbor.
Beyond all this, the Turkish premier's outbursts are attributable, those friends emphasize, to his strong sense of personal betrayal by Ehud Olmert.
During the prime minister's farewell visit to his Turkish counterpart, Erdogan invested his energies in ironing out a deal for direct talks between Israel and Syria. With Olmert in an adjacent room, he spent hours on the phone with Bashar Assad teasing out a statement that would have led to face-to-face talks. We don't know what price Israel would have been expected to pay for such contact. Nevertheless, before departing for Jerusalem on the eve of the war, Olmert told Erdogan to keep at it.
So when Israel launched its operation mere hours after Olmert's departure, Erdogan was accused by members of his Islamist coalition of "conspiring with the Zionists to betray the Palestinians." If he knew the Gaza operation was imminent, the pro-Israel Turks say, Olmert should have stayed away. With critically important regional elections set for March 29, Erdogan switched tracks - from being tirelessly helpful on Syria to verbally bludgeoning Israel.
CAN the relationship survive Erdogan's term, which expires in 2011? Ankara may well have forfeited its role as honest broker for a long time to come. Still, those who care about the bond between Turkey and Israel want to see relations back on an even keel.
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, January 30, 2009
Israel Elections
Friday - Kadima slips
Want to know why the latest polls show Kadima running a solid second behind Likud? It's not because centrist Israelis have suddenly become more hawkish - they've simply lost faith in Kadima as a coherent third way party. Middle Israel no longer trusts it to oversee negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority.
Our prime minister and foreign minister, respectively, have been negotiating with Abbas and Ahmed Qurei since the November 2007 Annapolis conference. By holding continuous bilateral negotiations aimed at concluding a deal by the end of 2008, Annapolis sought to supplant the moribund April 2003 road map.
The road map was a reciprocal arrangement: Israel would freeze all settlements, including "natural growth"; the Palestinians would end violence. But Palestinian terrorism continued unabated, so Israeli leaders had no incentive to freeze settlements. Annapolis was an attempt to leapfrog over the messy problem of noncompliance by going directly to a final status agreement.
Sure enough, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni negotiated energetically with Abbas and Qurei. Thanks to an interview Olmert gave Yediot Aharonot on Rosh Hashana eve (September 29, 2008), and a series of shameless leaks from his office to that tabloid - including one just yesterday - we pretty much know what Kadima has offered the Palestinians: Just about total withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines, the boundaries from which the 1967 war broke out; including east Jerusalem. A settlement freeze has become a moot issue now that Olmert has offered the Palestinians much, much more.
Kadima is reportedly planning to uproot 70,000 Israelis (out of roughly 250,000) living beyond the Green Line. Large settlement blocs like Ma'aleh Adumim, which abuts the capital on the east, would be annexed to Israel. In return, the Palestinians would take possession of an equal amount of land in southern Israel.
Kadima plans to transfer to Palestinian sovereignty Arab neighborhoods which encircle Jerusalem on the east, north and south. Holy places, presumably including the Western Wall and Temple Mount, would be placed in the custody of an international body. A tunnel or bridge would connect the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to provide "Palestine" with territorial contiguity.
Except for refusing to absorb millions of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents within the Green Line - thereby having Israel commit national suicide - Olmert has given Abbas just about everything he could hope for.
Livni has criticized Olmert only for breaking his Annapolis oath to negotiate in secrecy.
WHAT fascinates is that Olmert, without addressing in tandem security, has publicized the most far-reaching concessions of any Israeli leader since the territories came into Israeli hands.
This revelation, unaccompanied by explicit assurances that Olmert and Livni have answers to the security dilemmas posed by their momentous territorial withdrawals, will cause many middle-of-the-road Israelis to lose sleep. Those who live or study in areas of Jerusalem slated to become frontline outposts abutting "Palestine" - places such as East Talpiot, Gilo and Mount Scopus - will want to know what this means for them. Those living in Kfar Saba, Hadera, Afula and Arad will also become frontline communities. Similarly, and equally worryingly, Israel's main airport will fall within range of rudimentary, shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles.
It gives us no comfort to hear Livni say "the Palestinians' military capability is not a threat." Perhaps, but it has made life in southern Israel wretched and can make life along the coastal plain and Jerusalem equally miserable.
Given that Israel has found no effective answer to Hamas's aggression from Gaza, does Kadima have a contingency plan, should all of "Palestine" fall to Hamas?
Meanwhile, we find it mind-boggling that Abbas, rather than taking Olmert's concessions to his people, has rejected them out of hand, telling US officials that he is uncompromising on his demand for a total Israeli pullback to the 1949 lines. He also refuses to renounce the "right of return."
Kadima's leaders have reacted to Abbas's intransigence and historic shortsightedness with more blather about the need for Israeli concessions; but not a word of criticism of Abbas.
The 700,000 voters who supported Kadima in the last election still think a deal with the Palestinians is an Israeli interest. They're just not sure Kadima is sufficiently responsible to bring it to fruition.
Want to know why the latest polls show Kadima running a solid second behind Likud? It's not because centrist Israelis have suddenly become more hawkish - they've simply lost faith in Kadima as a coherent third way party. Middle Israel no longer trusts it to oversee negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority.
Our prime minister and foreign minister, respectively, have been negotiating with Abbas and Ahmed Qurei since the November 2007 Annapolis conference. By holding continuous bilateral negotiations aimed at concluding a deal by the end of 2008, Annapolis sought to supplant the moribund April 2003 road map.
The road map was a reciprocal arrangement: Israel would freeze all settlements, including "natural growth"; the Palestinians would end violence. But Palestinian terrorism continued unabated, so Israeli leaders had no incentive to freeze settlements. Annapolis was an attempt to leapfrog over the messy problem of noncompliance by going directly to a final status agreement.
Sure enough, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni negotiated energetically with Abbas and Qurei. Thanks to an interview Olmert gave Yediot Aharonot on Rosh Hashana eve (September 29, 2008), and a series of shameless leaks from his office to that tabloid - including one just yesterday - we pretty much know what Kadima has offered the Palestinians: Just about total withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines, the boundaries from which the 1967 war broke out; including east Jerusalem. A settlement freeze has become a moot issue now that Olmert has offered the Palestinians much, much more.
Kadima is reportedly planning to uproot 70,000 Israelis (out of roughly 250,000) living beyond the Green Line. Large settlement blocs like Ma'aleh Adumim, which abuts the capital on the east, would be annexed to Israel. In return, the Palestinians would take possession of an equal amount of land in southern Israel.
Kadima plans to transfer to Palestinian sovereignty Arab neighborhoods which encircle Jerusalem on the east, north and south. Holy places, presumably including the Western Wall and Temple Mount, would be placed in the custody of an international body. A tunnel or bridge would connect the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to provide "Palestine" with territorial contiguity.
Except for refusing to absorb millions of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents within the Green Line - thereby having Israel commit national suicide - Olmert has given Abbas just about everything he could hope for.
Livni has criticized Olmert only for breaking his Annapolis oath to negotiate in secrecy.
WHAT fascinates is that Olmert, without addressing in tandem security, has publicized the most far-reaching concessions of any Israeli leader since the territories came into Israeli hands.
This revelation, unaccompanied by explicit assurances that Olmert and Livni have answers to the security dilemmas posed by their momentous territorial withdrawals, will cause many middle-of-the-road Israelis to lose sleep. Those who live or study in areas of Jerusalem slated to become frontline outposts abutting "Palestine" - places such as East Talpiot, Gilo and Mount Scopus - will want to know what this means for them. Those living in Kfar Saba, Hadera, Afula and Arad will also become frontline communities. Similarly, and equally worryingly, Israel's main airport will fall within range of rudimentary, shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles.
It gives us no comfort to hear Livni say "the Palestinians' military capability is not a threat." Perhaps, but it has made life in southern Israel wretched and can make life along the coastal plain and Jerusalem equally miserable.
Given that Israel has found no effective answer to Hamas's aggression from Gaza, does Kadima have a contingency plan, should all of "Palestine" fall to Hamas?
Meanwhile, we find it mind-boggling that Abbas, rather than taking Olmert's concessions to his people, has rejected them out of hand, telling US officials that he is uncompromising on his demand for a total Israeli pullback to the 1949 lines. He also refuses to renounce the "right of return."
Kadima's leaders have reacted to Abbas's intransigence and historic shortsightedness with more blather about the need for Israeli concessions; but not a word of criticism of Abbas.
The 700,000 voters who supported Kadima in the last election still think a deal with the Palestinians is an Israeli interest. They're just not sure Kadima is sufficiently responsible to bring it to fruition.
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.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Iraq's elections. Good Islamists & Bad Ones, And...
Thursday - Obama's Islamist challenge
This Saturday, about 15 million Iraqis will be voting in council races across most of the country's provinces. A nationwide election will follow at the end of 2009. These, together, could determine whether Iraq evolves into the Arab world's first representative democracy, where the majority respects the rights of the minority.
The price for establishing a stable, safe and free Iraq, assuming one eventually emerges, has been staggering. For Americans, maybe $3 trillion; 4,000 soldiers killed and 30,000 wounded. Some 100,000 Iraqis have died - "only" 8,000 in 2008, compared to around 20,000 in 2007. Perhaps two million Iraqis became refugees.
The war was launched in 2003 because of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." None were found. Had Saddam been a pro-American autocrat, there is little likelihood he would have been deposed just to promote democracy. Nor has anyone established that Saddam was connected to 9/11, though some Osama bin Laden operatives may have had ties with Iraqi intelligence.
Saddam was a champion of Palestinian extremism, so no one in Israel regrets his exit.
The unintended consequences of Saddam's departure include the chaos and radicalism unleashed in the wake of his downfall, and the regional ascendancy of Iran - Saddam's natural enemy. The war monopolized, even exhausted, American resources, lessening the prospect of US military intervention to stop Teheran from building a nuclear weapon.
During the campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised that within 16 months of taking office he'd redeploy most US troops from Iraq to the Afghan-Pakistan border to do battle with al-Qaida and the resurgent Taliban. In the interim, the Bush administration signed an accord with Iraq to withdraw US troops from population centers by June 2009, and entirely by the end of 2011. Baghdad - incapable of taking full security control of the country and needing US logistical and intelligence support - would not want to phase down any faster, despite ordinary Iraqis' view of the US presence as an "occupation."
The war overthrew Saddam's Sunni ruling clique of Ba'athists, replacing it with a violently fragmented Shi'ite majority. (Shi'ite Arabs comprise about 60 percent of the country, Sunni Arabs between 15-20%, and the remainder are non-Arab - Sunni - Kurds.) With ethnic bloodletting comparatively in check, Saturday's voting, along ethnic lines, will pit various Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish parties against each other. In 2005, the Sunnis boycotted balloting; now even those with one foot in the extremist camp are participating.
IF CONDITIONS in Iraq permit, the Obama administration can focus singlemindedly on the Taliban and the real al-Qaida. The hub of global jihad isn't in Iraq - it is along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Obama clearly appreciates that Muslim extremism flourishes in a toxic environment of deep-seated social, demographic and economic dislocation, where masses who feel disenfranchised are receptive to religious demagogues inciting against the "infidels."
Can the new president undermine global jihad by reaching out directly to Muslim believers? It's worth a try, so we applaud his decision to give his first interview as president, on January 26, to the Al-Arabiya TV station. He told his audience that America's battle was not with ordinary Muslims - indeed, some members of his own family are of the faith - but with "organizations like al-Qaida that espouse violence, espouse terror, and act on it." He said, America is going to hunt down those who "would kill innocent civilians."
Regrettably, in Muslim civilization the leadership choice is not between authentic secularists and religious fanatics, but between violent and non-violent Islamists. So the best Obama can hope to do is help unlink Islam from brutality and drive a wedge between the two Islamist camps. Both, lamentably, favor Shari'a law as a way of life. But "good" Islamists, for instance in Turkey, Iraq, Morocco and Egypt, operate peacefully. Their "fundamentalism lite" is something the West can, at least theoretically, abide.
Yet for such an "unlinking" approach to work, Obama must stick to his principles and show zero tolerance for organizations that "kill innocent civilians."
He might permit talks with Iran; he might allow discreet inquiries into Hamas's policies. But ultimately, as he determines that they, together with Hizbullah, are incorrigible, he must inevitably conclude that Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah - like al-Qaida - need to be defeated.
This Saturday, about 15 million Iraqis will be voting in council races across most of the country's provinces. A nationwide election will follow at the end of 2009. These, together, could determine whether Iraq evolves into the Arab world's first representative democracy, where the majority respects the rights of the minority.
The price for establishing a stable, safe and free Iraq, assuming one eventually emerges, has been staggering. For Americans, maybe $3 trillion; 4,000 soldiers killed and 30,000 wounded. Some 100,000 Iraqis have died - "only" 8,000 in 2008, compared to around 20,000 in 2007. Perhaps two million Iraqis became refugees.
The war was launched in 2003 because of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." None were found. Had Saddam been a pro-American autocrat, there is little likelihood he would have been deposed just to promote democracy. Nor has anyone established that Saddam was connected to 9/11, though some Osama bin Laden operatives may have had ties with Iraqi intelligence.
Saddam was a champion of Palestinian extremism, so no one in Israel regrets his exit.
The unintended consequences of Saddam's departure include the chaos and radicalism unleashed in the wake of his downfall, and the regional ascendancy of Iran - Saddam's natural enemy. The war monopolized, even exhausted, American resources, lessening the prospect of US military intervention to stop Teheran from building a nuclear weapon.
During the campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised that within 16 months of taking office he'd redeploy most US troops from Iraq to the Afghan-Pakistan border to do battle with al-Qaida and the resurgent Taliban. In the interim, the Bush administration signed an accord with Iraq to withdraw US troops from population centers by June 2009, and entirely by the end of 2011. Baghdad - incapable of taking full security control of the country and needing US logistical and intelligence support - would not want to phase down any faster, despite ordinary Iraqis' view of the US presence as an "occupation."
The war overthrew Saddam's Sunni ruling clique of Ba'athists, replacing it with a violently fragmented Shi'ite majority. (Shi'ite Arabs comprise about 60 percent of the country, Sunni Arabs between 15-20%, and the remainder are non-Arab - Sunni - Kurds.) With ethnic bloodletting comparatively in check, Saturday's voting, along ethnic lines, will pit various Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish parties against each other. In 2005, the Sunnis boycotted balloting; now even those with one foot in the extremist camp are participating.
IF CONDITIONS in Iraq permit, the Obama administration can focus singlemindedly on the Taliban and the real al-Qaida. The hub of global jihad isn't in Iraq - it is along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Obama clearly appreciates that Muslim extremism flourishes in a toxic environment of deep-seated social, demographic and economic dislocation, where masses who feel disenfranchised are receptive to religious demagogues inciting against the "infidels."
Can the new president undermine global jihad by reaching out directly to Muslim believers? It's worth a try, so we applaud his decision to give his first interview as president, on January 26, to the Al-Arabiya TV station. He told his audience that America's battle was not with ordinary Muslims - indeed, some members of his own family are of the faith - but with "organizations like al-Qaida that espouse violence, espouse terror, and act on it." He said, America is going to hunt down those who "would kill innocent civilians."
Regrettably, in Muslim civilization the leadership choice is not between authentic secularists and religious fanatics, but between violent and non-violent Islamists. So the best Obama can hope to do is help unlink Islam from brutality and drive a wedge between the two Islamist camps. Both, lamentably, favor Shari'a law as a way of life. But "good" Islamists, for instance in Turkey, Iraq, Morocco and Egypt, operate peacefully. Their "fundamentalism lite" is something the West can, at least theoretically, abide.
Yet for such an "unlinking" approach to work, Obama must stick to his principles and show zero tolerance for organizations that "kill innocent civilians."
He might permit talks with Iran; he might allow discreet inquiries into Hamas's policies. But ultimately, as he determines that they, together with Hizbullah, are incorrigible, he must inevitably conclude that Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah - like al-Qaida - need to be defeated.
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.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Gaza wants to go another round
Wednesday - This is the test
While the outside world focuses on "Gaza relief," fretting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to years of Hamas aggression, and treating the inflated civilian casualty figures disseminated by Palestinian authorities as fact, Hamas itself has just signaled it wants to go another round.
Tuesday morning enemy forces crossed our border, detonated a powerful roadside bomb and attacked an IDF patrol near Kissufim. One soldier was killed, another was badly wounded, and several were more lightly hurt.
This is a test. Israel can either respond powerfully, or be satisfied with the kind of tit-for-tat retaliations that preceded Operation Cast Lead. It all depends on whether we consider our border inviolate.
We are tested at an inopportune moment. Elections are upon us and President Barack Obama's envoy is here.
After Israel announced the cease-fire, unknown terrorists shot an Israeli motorist near Ramallah; a mortar barrage struck the Negev; Iranian arms ships kept steaming this way; arms smuggling via tunnels below the Philadelphi Corridor resumed. Hamas continues to loot humanitarian aid, and the Islamists refuse to negotiate sensibly on Gilad Schalit.
What Hamas must do is: stop rearming; stop violating the border and make Israel a reasonable prisoner exchange offer. If Hamas does this, and if a suitable monitoring mechanism can be implemented, the Gaza crossings can be reopened.
But first Hamas must get its second round. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged that if Hamas persisted in violating the border, the IDF would respond.
Now Israel must do what needs to be done. Not because we want to see Palestinians suffer, but because we want normalcy to return to southern Israel.
Hizbullah is watching. The world is watching. For the sake of quiet, Israel must act and shake the ground in Gaza.
While the outside world focuses on "Gaza relief," fretting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to years of Hamas aggression, and treating the inflated civilian casualty figures disseminated by Palestinian authorities as fact, Hamas itself has just signaled it wants to go another round.
Tuesday morning enemy forces crossed our border, detonated a powerful roadside bomb and attacked an IDF patrol near Kissufim. One soldier was killed, another was badly wounded, and several were more lightly hurt.
This is a test. Israel can either respond powerfully, or be satisfied with the kind of tit-for-tat retaliations that preceded Operation Cast Lead. It all depends on whether we consider our border inviolate.
We are tested at an inopportune moment. Elections are upon us and President Barack Obama's envoy is here.
After Israel announced the cease-fire, unknown terrorists shot an Israeli motorist near Ramallah; a mortar barrage struck the Negev; Iranian arms ships kept steaming this way; arms smuggling via tunnels below the Philadelphi Corridor resumed. Hamas continues to loot humanitarian aid, and the Islamists refuse to negotiate sensibly on Gilad Schalit.
What Hamas must do is: stop rearming; stop violating the border and make Israel a reasonable prisoner exchange offer. If Hamas does this, and if a suitable monitoring mechanism can be implemented, the Gaza crossings can be reopened.
But first Hamas must get its second round. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged that if Hamas persisted in violating the border, the IDF would respond.
Now Israel must do what needs to be done. Not because we want to see Palestinians suffer, but because we want normalcy to return to southern Israel.
Hizbullah is watching. The world is watching. For the sake of quiet, Israel must act and shake the ground in Gaza.
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.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Vatican & the Jews
Tuesday - Iudicium perversum
Pope Benedict XVI surely did not set out to undercut decades of progress in Catholic-Jewish relations initiated by Pope John XXIII, but he's managing to do just that. We do not suggest that a series of unfortunate decisions by Benedict had anything to do with malice.
Though he never explicitly condemns Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jews, Benedict routinely meets with Israeli and Jewish figures, visits a fair share of synagogues and maintains Vatican-Israel diplomatic relations on an even keel. He is scheduled to visit here in May.
The pope simply made a strategic decision: Enticing Catholic ultra-conservatives back to the fold was more important than the Church's relationship with its "dearly beloved elder brothers."
THAT IS how we understand the intention to reinstate a Holocaust-denying bishop, along with earlier decisions to identify Pius XII as a saint (though Eugenio Pacelli's detractors think of him simply as "Hitler's pope"); plus Benedict's July 2007 policy of making it easier for ultra-conservatives to celebrate the Easter Tridentine Latin Mass, despite its original references to "perfidious [or faithless] Jews."
The pope has had lots of time to reflect on Catholic dogma. From 1981 until he assumed the office in 2005, the former cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Vatican's doctrinal affairs ministry.
Benedict is evidently resigned, according to Rachel Donadio of The New York Times, "to the Church's diminished status in a secular world" and would rather have "a smaller Church of more ardent believers over a larger one with looser faith."
Those fervently faithful happen to be religious arch-conservatives, a few of them old-line Jew-haters.
Some ultra-conservative clergy and lay people have never forgiven the Church for the decisions of the Second Vatican Council, including its reversal of the Church's historic teaching of contempt of the Jewish people; for absolving "the Jews of today" from the crime of deicide, and for the council's denunciation of anti-Semitism.
The pope wants it both ways: to support Vatican II and - by patching up relations with ultra-conservative followers of the late archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who broke away from Rome in 1988 over such issues as promoting interreligious understanding and religious tolerance - have its most vehement opponents back in the fold.
Lefebvre's base was the Society of Saint Pius X, which he established in 1970. Among its key theologians are the four bishops Benedict has just reinstated (they were excommunicated during the reign of John Paul II).
One of the four is Richard Williamson, a classic anti-Semite who believes Jews seek world domination as they pave the way for the Anti-Christ. Williamson doesn't see much "historical evidence" that six million Jews were slaughtered by Hitler. Indeed, he believes "there were no gas chambers," and that maybe 300,000 Jews were murdered during WWII. He also does not think Muslim terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks.
Benedict's spokesman explained that the Vatican did not share Williamson's views. "Saying a person is not excommunicated is not the same as saying one shares all his ideas or statements."
The American Jewish Committee, which has long been in the forefront of interreligious dialogue, declared it was "shocked" by the Vatican's reinstatement decision. "It is a serious blow for Jewish-Vatican relations and a slap in the face of the late Pope John Paul II, who made such remarkable efforts to eradicate and combat anti-Semitism," said Rabbi David Rosen, AJC's International Director of Interreligious Affairs. Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni said the decision opens up a "deep wound." It does.
BENEDICT'S DECISION is injudicious and perverse. What to do?
Interfaith dialogue remains an overall Jewish interest not because it prevents the Church from ever doing wrong things, but because having a relationship affords the community a channel for trying to get the Church to do the right thing.
We appreciate that the pope has compelling reasons to want to heal the rift within the Church. Yet Benedict's decision to include Williamson in the reinstatements is an extraordinary sign of moral indifference.
Jewish dignity demands a measured response. This newspaper calls for an immediate three-month moratorium on substantive contacts between the organized Jewish community and the Vatican. During this period, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See should be recalled to Jerusalem for consultations.
Pope Benedict XVI surely did not set out to undercut decades of progress in Catholic-Jewish relations initiated by Pope John XXIII, but he's managing to do just that. We do not suggest that a series of unfortunate decisions by Benedict had anything to do with malice.
Though he never explicitly condemns Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jews, Benedict routinely meets with Israeli and Jewish figures, visits a fair share of synagogues and maintains Vatican-Israel diplomatic relations on an even keel. He is scheduled to visit here in May.
The pope simply made a strategic decision: Enticing Catholic ultra-conservatives back to the fold was more important than the Church's relationship with its "dearly beloved elder brothers."
THAT IS how we understand the intention to reinstate a Holocaust-denying bishop, along with earlier decisions to identify Pius XII as a saint (though Eugenio Pacelli's detractors think of him simply as "Hitler's pope"); plus Benedict's July 2007 policy of making it easier for ultra-conservatives to celebrate the Easter Tridentine Latin Mass, despite its original references to "perfidious [or faithless] Jews."
The pope has had lots of time to reflect on Catholic dogma. From 1981 until he assumed the office in 2005, the former cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Vatican's doctrinal affairs ministry.
Benedict is evidently resigned, according to Rachel Donadio of The New York Times, "to the Church's diminished status in a secular world" and would rather have "a smaller Church of more ardent believers over a larger one with looser faith."
Those fervently faithful happen to be religious arch-conservatives, a few of them old-line Jew-haters.
Some ultra-conservative clergy and lay people have never forgiven the Church for the decisions of the Second Vatican Council, including its reversal of the Church's historic teaching of contempt of the Jewish people; for absolving "the Jews of today" from the crime of deicide, and for the council's denunciation of anti-Semitism.
The pope wants it both ways: to support Vatican II and - by patching up relations with ultra-conservative followers of the late archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who broke away from Rome in 1988 over such issues as promoting interreligious understanding and religious tolerance - have its most vehement opponents back in the fold.
Lefebvre's base was the Society of Saint Pius X, which he established in 1970. Among its key theologians are the four bishops Benedict has just reinstated (they were excommunicated during the reign of John Paul II).
One of the four is Richard Williamson, a classic anti-Semite who believes Jews seek world domination as they pave the way for the Anti-Christ. Williamson doesn't see much "historical evidence" that six million Jews were slaughtered by Hitler. Indeed, he believes "there were no gas chambers," and that maybe 300,000 Jews were murdered during WWII. He also does not think Muslim terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks.
Benedict's spokesman explained that the Vatican did not share Williamson's views. "Saying a person is not excommunicated is not the same as saying one shares all his ideas or statements."
The American Jewish Committee, which has long been in the forefront of interreligious dialogue, declared it was "shocked" by the Vatican's reinstatement decision. "It is a serious blow for Jewish-Vatican relations and a slap in the face of the late Pope John Paul II, who made such remarkable efforts to eradicate and combat anti-Semitism," said Rabbi David Rosen, AJC's International Director of Interreligious Affairs. Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni said the decision opens up a "deep wound." It does.
BENEDICT'S DECISION is injudicious and perverse. What to do?
Interfaith dialogue remains an overall Jewish interest not because it prevents the Church from ever doing wrong things, but because having a relationship affords the community a channel for trying to get the Church to do the right thing.
We appreciate that the pope has compelling reasons to want to heal the rift within the Church. Yet Benedict's decision to include Williamson in the reinstatements is an extraordinary sign of moral indifference.
Jewish dignity demands a measured response. This newspaper calls for an immediate three-month moratorium on substantive contacts between the organized Jewish community and the Vatican. During this period, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See should be recalled to Jerusalem for consultations.
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.
Monday, January 26, 2009
George Mitchell & Israel
Monday - Why Israelis worry
George Mitchell drew a few laughs Thursday at the State Department. After being introduced by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the person she and President Barack Obama wanted as their Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, Mitchell remarked on how the Irish troubles had dragged on for 800 years.
"Just recently," he said, "I spoke in Jerusalem and I mentioned the 800 years. And afterward, an elderly gentleman came up to me and he said, 'Did you say 800 years?' And I said, 'Yes, 800.' He repeated the number again - I repeated it again. He said, 'Uh, such a recent argument. No wonder you settled it.'"
Obama says his administration "will make a sustained push" and work "actively and aggressively" for a lasting peace so that Israel and a Palestinian state can live side by side in peace and security. Mitchell, who is due to arrive here on Wednesday, is primarily tasked with reinvigorating negotiations and developing an integrated strategy to resolve the conflict.
One might expect the Israeli reaction to such a commitment to be: Thank you, Mr. President.
Instead, it's one of trepidation. Mitchell is coming to "pressure Israel," the Hebrew tabloids have chorused.
One reason for this anxiety is that those gloating over Mitchell's appointment - the Israel Policy Forum, Americans for Peace Now, J Street, Prof. Stephen ("The Israel Lobby") Walt, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) - either don't seem to "get" what this conflict is all about; or are outright champions of the Arab cause.
Take New York Times star columnist Tom Friedman. He'd have Obama draw a false parallel between "Hamas in Gaza and the fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank." Friedman knows that only a splinter group of settlers can reasonably be labeled fanatics. What he should be telling Obama is that the surest way of closing Israeli minds is to adopt this revolting moral equivalence.
AMERICAN policy since 1967, from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, has consistently called for an Israeli withdrawal from territories - not all territories - captured in the Six Day War, on the theory that one day the Arabs would be willing to trade land for peace.
Few Israelis today would countenance a total withdrawal to the boundaries Israel found itself in when the Six Day War erupted. But offer us "1967-plus," an end to Arab violence, an explicit commitment to resettle refugees and their descendants in the Palestinian territories - not in Israel - and a recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland within agreed borders, and you'd be surprised how rapidly most every other obstacle to a deal would vanish.
No one has to pressure Israel into making peace - because no one wants peace more than Israel. Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's ideas for peace in 2000; similarly, Mahmoud Abbas has rejected Ehud Olmert's apparent offer to remove most Jewish communities over the Green Line.
What is holding up a deal? The chronically fragmented Palestinian polity is in no position to make one. This week's Economist claims to see "hints" that Hamas is moderating. It would be a pity if Obama shared this delusion and, like the Bush administration, tried to paper over the chasm between Fatah, which at least professes to want a negotiated peace with Israel, and Hamas, which adamantly pursues a zero-sum struggle.
There would be virtually no support among Israelis for concessions to a Palestinian unity government in which an unreformed Hamas plays any role. Conversely, if the Obama administration could devise a strategy of sidelining the radicals and defanging their chief backer and the most destabilizing force in the region - Iran, the prospects for a sustainable peace would improve dramatically.
What about the illegal settlement "outposts" Israel committed to dismantling? They should have been taken down as part of Israel's road map commitments. But eight years of unremitting enemy violence - intifada, Kassams, Gilad Schalit's post-disengagement kidnapping - robbed our politicians of the domestic support for such a move.
It is legitimate for friends of Israel to differ over West Bank settlements. But anyone who calls themselves "pro-Israel," while demanding a withdrawal to the perilous 1949 Armistice Lines in an environment where that would represent national suicide, needs to do some serious soul-searching.
George Mitchell drew a few laughs Thursday at the State Department. After being introduced by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the person she and President Barack Obama wanted as their Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, Mitchell remarked on how the Irish troubles had dragged on for 800 years.
"Just recently," he said, "I spoke in Jerusalem and I mentioned the 800 years. And afterward, an elderly gentleman came up to me and he said, 'Did you say 800 years?' And I said, 'Yes, 800.' He repeated the number again - I repeated it again. He said, 'Uh, such a recent argument. No wonder you settled it.'"
Obama says his administration "will make a sustained push" and work "actively and aggressively" for a lasting peace so that Israel and a Palestinian state can live side by side in peace and security. Mitchell, who is due to arrive here on Wednesday, is primarily tasked with reinvigorating negotiations and developing an integrated strategy to resolve the conflict.
One might expect the Israeli reaction to such a commitment to be: Thank you, Mr. President.
Instead, it's one of trepidation. Mitchell is coming to "pressure Israel," the Hebrew tabloids have chorused.
One reason for this anxiety is that those gloating over Mitchell's appointment - the Israel Policy Forum, Americans for Peace Now, J Street, Prof. Stephen ("The Israel Lobby") Walt, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) - either don't seem to "get" what this conflict is all about; or are outright champions of the Arab cause.
Take New York Times star columnist Tom Friedman. He'd have Obama draw a false parallel between "Hamas in Gaza and the fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank." Friedman knows that only a splinter group of settlers can reasonably be labeled fanatics. What he should be telling Obama is that the surest way of closing Israeli minds is to adopt this revolting moral equivalence.
AMERICAN policy since 1967, from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, has consistently called for an Israeli withdrawal from territories - not all territories - captured in the Six Day War, on the theory that one day the Arabs would be willing to trade land for peace.
Few Israelis today would countenance a total withdrawal to the boundaries Israel found itself in when the Six Day War erupted. But offer us "1967-plus," an end to Arab violence, an explicit commitment to resettle refugees and their descendants in the Palestinian territories - not in Israel - and a recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland within agreed borders, and you'd be surprised how rapidly most every other obstacle to a deal would vanish.
No one has to pressure Israel into making peace - because no one wants peace more than Israel. Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's ideas for peace in 2000; similarly, Mahmoud Abbas has rejected Ehud Olmert's apparent offer to remove most Jewish communities over the Green Line.
What is holding up a deal? The chronically fragmented Palestinian polity is in no position to make one. This week's Economist claims to see "hints" that Hamas is moderating. It would be a pity if Obama shared this delusion and, like the Bush administration, tried to paper over the chasm between Fatah, which at least professes to want a negotiated peace with Israel, and Hamas, which adamantly pursues a zero-sum struggle.
There would be virtually no support among Israelis for concessions to a Palestinian unity government in which an unreformed Hamas plays any role. Conversely, if the Obama administration could devise a strategy of sidelining the radicals and defanging their chief backer and the most destabilizing force in the region - Iran, the prospects for a sustainable peace would improve dramatically.
What about the illegal settlement "outposts" Israel committed to dismantling? They should have been taken down as part of Israel's road map commitments. But eight years of unremitting enemy violence - intifada, Kassams, Gilad Schalit's post-disengagement kidnapping - robbed our politicians of the domestic support for such a move.
It is legitimate for friends of Israel to differ over West Bank settlements. But anyone who calls themselves "pro-Israel," while demanding a withdrawal to the perilous 1949 Armistice Lines in an environment where that would represent national suicide, needs to do some serious soul-searching.
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, January 23, 2009
17 Days to Israel's Knesset Elections
Friday - Talk to us
Benjamin Disraeli was reputedly once asked by a novice member of parliament whether he would advise him to take frequent part in House debate. Disraeli answered: "No, I do not think you ought to do so, because it is much better that the House should wonder why you do not speak than why you do."
So in joining Ehud Barak's call for a debate between the three most likely candidates for prime minister, this newspaper is mindful that such an encounter could easily devolve into a cacophony of vacuous sound-bites.
Jaded Israelis claim intelligent debate is alien to the political culture. Moreover, they say: We know the candidates - too well. We've already made up our minds. What could we learn from a debate?
To which we say: Plenty.
What we propose is not a candidates' brawl. We envision a tightly choreographed discussion, operating under strictly enforced rules and chaperoned by a moderator respected for fair-mindedness who won't take drivel delivered in clever cadence for an answer.
There are just 17 days left before Israelis go to the polls to elect a new Knesset, from which the next government will be formed. Public opinion surveys tell us that the Likud, Kadima and Labor - in that order - are in the lead, with Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas and Hatnua Hahadasha-Meretz a tier below. Perhaps another five smaller parties, including Arab nationalists and haredim, will pass the ludicrously low two-percent threshold.
Whatever other electoral surprises may be in store, it is all but certain that Israel's next prime minister will, in order of likelihood, be Binyamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni or Barak. Wouldn't it be valuable, then, if we could pin them down on where they want to take the country, and how they distinguish themselves from one another?
The voters deserve more than the manipulative TV electioneering spots that begin rolling this coming Tuesday and the print, billboard and Internet ads already attacking our senses.
ISRAEL'S first televised election debate took place between Labor's Shimon Peres and the Likud's Menachem Begin in the 1977 race, which broke Labor's lock on power. In 1996, in the wake of the Rabin assassination, Peres barely deigned to acknowledge Netanyahu in an encounter that contributed to Likud's win.
In 1999, Ehud Barak boycotted a three-way debate with Yitzhak Mordechai and Binyamin Netanyahu. Mordechai chipped away at Netanyahu's credibility by asking the Likud chief to look him in the eye and answer his questions. In the event, Mordechai ultimately threw his support to Barak, who went on to win.
In 2006, Kadima's Ehud Olmert refused to debate Labor's Amir Peretz.
Netanyahu and Livni may be right to see no political profit in engaging in a debate with Barak. The only beneficiaries would be the voters - yet shouldn't that count for something?
The format we envisage would require Netanyahu, Livni and Barak to each answer questions on national security and domestic issues, with the opportunity for rebuttal.
For instance, Livni might be asked whether, since Mahmoud Abbas says Israeli-Palestinian talks have reached a dead end, Kadima still stands as the party of unilateralism, disengagement and convergence. And if unilateralism is to be jettisoned, what sets Kadima apart?
Barak could perhaps be invited to delineate the tweaks and changes he'd want to make to the Saudi-sponsored Arab League peace initiative, which Labor says it sees as a good jumping-off point for negotiations.
Binyamin Netanyahu's question could be: Since you are on record as acquiescing in the creation of a Palestinian state, what - when all is said and done - separates the Likud from Kadima and Labor?
Going beyond the issue of security, we'd ask:
• Do you favor reforming Israel's electoral system to allow some form of district representation?
• With increasing numbers of Israelis Jewishly illiterate and the Orthodox rabbinate alienating many from their heritage, how would you enrich the Jewish content of our lives?
• How can ordinary Israelis be shielded from the effects of the global economic recession?
Benjamin Disraeli was reputedly once asked by a novice member of parliament whether he would advise him to take frequent part in House debate. Disraeli answered: "No, I do not think you ought to do so, because it is much better that the House should wonder why you do not speak than why you do."
So in joining Ehud Barak's call for a debate between the three most likely candidates for prime minister, this newspaper is mindful that such an encounter could easily devolve into a cacophony of vacuous sound-bites.
Jaded Israelis claim intelligent debate is alien to the political culture. Moreover, they say: We know the candidates - too well. We've already made up our minds. What could we learn from a debate?
To which we say: Plenty.
What we propose is not a candidates' brawl. We envision a tightly choreographed discussion, operating under strictly enforced rules and chaperoned by a moderator respected for fair-mindedness who won't take drivel delivered in clever cadence for an answer.
There are just 17 days left before Israelis go to the polls to elect a new Knesset, from which the next government will be formed. Public opinion surveys tell us that the Likud, Kadima and Labor - in that order - are in the lead, with Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas and Hatnua Hahadasha-Meretz a tier below. Perhaps another five smaller parties, including Arab nationalists and haredim, will pass the ludicrously low two-percent threshold.
Whatever other electoral surprises may be in store, it is all but certain that Israel's next prime minister will, in order of likelihood, be Binyamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni or Barak. Wouldn't it be valuable, then, if we could pin them down on where they want to take the country, and how they distinguish themselves from one another?
The voters deserve more than the manipulative TV electioneering spots that begin rolling this coming Tuesday and the print, billboard and Internet ads already attacking our senses.
ISRAEL'S first televised election debate took place between Labor's Shimon Peres and the Likud's Menachem Begin in the 1977 race, which broke Labor's lock on power. In 1996, in the wake of the Rabin assassination, Peres barely deigned to acknowledge Netanyahu in an encounter that contributed to Likud's win.
In 1999, Ehud Barak boycotted a three-way debate with Yitzhak Mordechai and Binyamin Netanyahu. Mordechai chipped away at Netanyahu's credibility by asking the Likud chief to look him in the eye and answer his questions. In the event, Mordechai ultimately threw his support to Barak, who went on to win.
In 2006, Kadima's Ehud Olmert refused to debate Labor's Amir Peretz.
Netanyahu and Livni may be right to see no political profit in engaging in a debate with Barak. The only beneficiaries would be the voters - yet shouldn't that count for something?
The format we envisage would require Netanyahu, Livni and Barak to each answer questions on national security and domestic issues, with the opportunity for rebuttal.
For instance, Livni might be asked whether, since Mahmoud Abbas says Israeli-Palestinian talks have reached a dead end, Kadima still stands as the party of unilateralism, disengagement and convergence. And if unilateralism is to be jettisoned, what sets Kadima apart?
Barak could perhaps be invited to delineate the tweaks and changes he'd want to make to the Saudi-sponsored Arab League peace initiative, which Labor says it sees as a good jumping-off point for negotiations.
Binyamin Netanyahu's question could be: Since you are on record as acquiescing in the creation of a Palestinian state, what - when all is said and done - separates the Likud from Kadima and Labor?
Going beyond the issue of security, we'd ask:
• Do you favor reforming Israel's electoral system to allow some form of district representation?
• With increasing numbers of Israelis Jewishly illiterate and the Orthodox rabbinate alienating many from their heritage, how would you enrich the Jewish content of our lives?
• How can ordinary Israelis be shielded from the effects of the global economic recession?
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.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
George W. Bush goes; Barack Obama comes. What does this mean for Israel?
Wednesday -- From Bush to Obama
As we, from 6,000 miles away, watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, promising America's friendship to all those who seek peace, the extraordinary enthusiasm of Americans for their new president, together with the optimism that he can begin to meet the challenges their country faces, draws our admiration and our affection.
The first time the name Barack Obama appeared in the pages of The Jerusalem Post was on July 28, 2004, in a report on the Democratic National Convention which nominated John Kerry. Our correspondent noted that "Barack Obama, a candidate for US Senate from Illinois, has become a star of the Democratic Party" and was scheduled to address the convention. The next day we reported that Obama "energized the crowd with an indictment of the Bush administration's decision to wage war in Iraq."
Obama was elected to the Senate that November. And by the time he made his first trip to Israel in January 2006, the junior senator was already being touted as a possible presidential candidate. He declared his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, in February 2007, won the Democratic nomination and went on to defeat John McCain to become America's first African American president.
ONE HEBREW tabloid headlined a front-page picture of Obama in English: "Good luck." In truth, beyond wishing the new president well, Israelis are apprehensive over whether he will be not just supportive, but empathetic toward Israel - like George W. Bush.
Yet Israel had plenty of ups and downs with Bush, too.
Shortly after al-Qaida's attack on September 11, 2001, Bush sought support to build an anti-terrorism coalition by emphasizing - Palestinian suicide bombings notwithstanding - that a Palestinian state living alongside a secure Israel was part of his vision of a Middle East peace. He quickly dissociated the war on Islamist terror from Israel's war against Palestinian terror. His administration initially resisted isolating Yasser Arafat; it even opposed Operation Defensive Shield.
Bush eventually figured out that before the Palestinians can create a state they needed an institutional infrastructure and civic-minded technocrats. His administration recruited Salaam Fayad to be the PA's finance, and later prime minister.
Bush will go down in history as the first US president to explicitly call for the creation of a Palestinian state, while urging the Palestinians to reject Arafat's violent ways.
His administration proposed a "road map" aiming to settle the conflict by 2005. In it, the Palestinians committed to an unconditional cessation of violence. Israel promised to dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001.
Bush opposed the security barrier. He found nice things to say about the EU-funded Geneva Initiative promoted by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abd Rabbo, which would have driven Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines while obfuscating a resolution of Arab claims for a "right of return."
Though Bush supported disengagement only reluctantly, out of this tentative backing came, potentially, his most important contribution to Israel's security: His April 2004 letter to premier Ariel Sharon acknowledging that "it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
In 2007, in the wake of the Iraq War and the need to rebuild support for the US in the Arab world, Bush repackaged the road map as the Annapolis process, setting December 2008 as the new deadline for ending the conflict.
It was under Bush's watch that the disastrous 2003 National Intelligence Estimate was issued, taking the wind out of efforts to isolate Iran. Not only didn't Bush "solve" the Iran nuclear crisis - perhaps because he had overstretched US military resources in Iraq - he also reportedly blocked Israeli efforts to go it alone.
THE LESSON in all this? Israelis would be wise not to panic at the first sign of turbulence in Jerusalem-Washington relations. American interests in the Middle East are not always in harmony with Israel's. But we have every reason to expect that Obama will support the Jewish state in its quest for defensible borders and genuine acceptance by its neighbors.
He knows that this can happen only if Iranian and Arab extremists - charter members of that very "far-reaching network of violence and hatred" he warned against in his inaugural address - are sidelined.
As we, from 6,000 miles away, watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, promising America's friendship to all those who seek peace, the extraordinary enthusiasm of Americans for their new president, together with the optimism that he can begin to meet the challenges their country faces, draws our admiration and our affection.
The first time the name Barack Obama appeared in the pages of The Jerusalem Post was on July 28, 2004, in a report on the Democratic National Convention which nominated John Kerry. Our correspondent noted that "Barack Obama, a candidate for US Senate from Illinois, has become a star of the Democratic Party" and was scheduled to address the convention. The next day we reported that Obama "energized the crowd with an indictment of the Bush administration's decision to wage war in Iraq."
Obama was elected to the Senate that November. And by the time he made his first trip to Israel in January 2006, the junior senator was already being touted as a possible presidential candidate. He declared his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, in February 2007, won the Democratic nomination and went on to defeat John McCain to become America's first African American president.
ONE HEBREW tabloid headlined a front-page picture of Obama in English: "Good luck." In truth, beyond wishing the new president well, Israelis are apprehensive over whether he will be not just supportive, but empathetic toward Israel - like George W. Bush.
Yet Israel had plenty of ups and downs with Bush, too.
Shortly after al-Qaida's attack on September 11, 2001, Bush sought support to build an anti-terrorism coalition by emphasizing - Palestinian suicide bombings notwithstanding - that a Palestinian state living alongside a secure Israel was part of his vision of a Middle East peace. He quickly dissociated the war on Islamist terror from Israel's war against Palestinian terror. His administration initially resisted isolating Yasser Arafat; it even opposed Operation Defensive Shield.
Bush eventually figured out that before the Palestinians can create a state they needed an institutional infrastructure and civic-minded technocrats. His administration recruited Salaam Fayad to be the PA's finance, and later prime minister.
Bush will go down in history as the first US president to explicitly call for the creation of a Palestinian state, while urging the Palestinians to reject Arafat's violent ways.
His administration proposed a "road map" aiming to settle the conflict by 2005. In it, the Palestinians committed to an unconditional cessation of violence. Israel promised to dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001.
Bush opposed the security barrier. He found nice things to say about the EU-funded Geneva Initiative promoted by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abd Rabbo, which would have driven Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines while obfuscating a resolution of Arab claims for a "right of return."
Though Bush supported disengagement only reluctantly, out of this tentative backing came, potentially, his most important contribution to Israel's security: His April 2004 letter to premier Ariel Sharon acknowledging that "it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
In 2007, in the wake of the Iraq War and the need to rebuild support for the US in the Arab world, Bush repackaged the road map as the Annapolis process, setting December 2008 as the new deadline for ending the conflict.
It was under Bush's watch that the disastrous 2003 National Intelligence Estimate was issued, taking the wind out of efforts to isolate Iran. Not only didn't Bush "solve" the Iran nuclear crisis - perhaps because he had overstretched US military resources in Iraq - he also reportedly blocked Israeli efforts to go it alone.
THE LESSON in all this? Israelis would be wise not to panic at the first sign of turbulence in Jerusalem-Washington relations. American interests in the Middle East are not always in harmony with Israel's. But we have every reason to expect that Obama will support the Jewish state in its quest for defensible borders and genuine acceptance by its neighbors.
He knows that this can happen only if Iranian and Arab extremists - charter members of that very "far-reaching network of violence and hatred" he warned against in his inaugural address - are sidelined.
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.
Monday, January 19, 2009
The true test & Tragedy is no crime
For the latest please go to the Jerusalem Post web site
www.jpost.com
And thanks for visiting elliotjager.com
======================================================
Tuesday -- The true test
By the time Barack Obama is sworn in today as America's 44th president, every Israeli soldier, save for Gilad Schalit, will be out of Gaza. And when President Obama starts his first full day at the White House tomorrow Hamas will already be setting the stage for the next conflagration.
The new American president will no doubt have noted Ismail Haniya's speech "thanksgiving" broadcast on Hamas TV in which Gaza's prime minister declared: "God has granted us a great victory, not for one faction, or party, or area, but for our entire people."
Briefing journalists, Hamas military officials claimed that they lost just 48 gunmen to the IDF (Islamic Jihad and other organizations suffered another 40 or so killed, they said). Hamas managed to launch 1,000 rockets and mortars at Israel, killed 80 soldiers, captured some and shot down a helicopter. With these achievements under its belt, the manufacture and smuggling of arms – described as "holy" work -- would now pick up where it left off.
Ordinary Gazans, much as they are wont to identify with Hamas's delusional sense of triumph, will find their gratification tempered by their coming face-to-face with the price paid for Hamas's "achievements" which according to Palestinian sources include 1,300 dead; over 5,000 wounded; 90,000 made homeless and over $1 billion in economic damages.
Hamas's claims notwithstanding, no IDF soldiers were captured; 10 soldiers were killed (though several in "friendly fire" incidents); some 50 troops remain hospitalized. Three civilians lost their lives. Hamas's bombardments (some 852 flying bombs packed with shrapnel) injured over 700 Israelis. Fourteen non-combatants remain hospitalized, including seven-year old Orel Yelizarov, who lies gravely injured with shrapnel in the brain.
WE WILL know soon enough whether Operation Cast Lead achieved its purpose. The test is not whether it is "quiet" in the south while the terrorist organizations take a hiatus. The true test is whether Hamas is allowed to realize its plans to rearm.
The IDF needs to intervene the moment Gaza's workshops resume producing Kassams; the instant its laboratories renew the production of explosives; and the minute tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor are refurbished for the smuggling of weapons and supplies necessary for the arms industry. Failure to act, without delay, would instantly return Israel to the intolerable state of affairs which prevailed prior to the launching of IDF operations.
We were glad to hear Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni tell Israel Radio that she had reached an understanding with the outgoing Bush administration that Israel could act even in the absence of actual Hamas shooting. Israel also reserves the right, she said, to operate along the Philadelphi Corridor, if the pledges made by Egypt and other countries to halt weapons smuggling go unfilled. Should Hamas resume its attacks, Livni warned, it would get another dose of what the IDF dished out over the past three weeks.
Will Israelis and Palestinians have reason to recollect the flash visit, first to Sharm e-Sheikh and then to Jerusalem of six European leaders, including the voluble French President Nicolas Sarkozy? They Europeans came expressively to bolster the cease-fire, and Israel's leaders are convinced they now have part their solid support against Hamas. Each leader assured Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Israel has every right to defend itself. Sadly, it's not self-evident that any of them meant what they said – literally.
Be that as it may, beyond doing the obvious and making certain that those who brought devastation upon Gaza aren't given the wherewithal to do so again by rearming, Europe and the international community needs to restrain itself for making Hamas the project manager and chief financial officer for the reconstruction of the Strip. EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner seems to have taken this point on board and hints that it will be difficult to rebuild Gaza while the Islamist remains opposed to peace.
So long as Hamas remains an unrepentant enemy of peace, so long as it is full-throttle committed to violence, so long as it refuses to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a homeland anywhere, and so long as it refuses to abide by the Palestinians' international commitments, Hamas can never, legitimately, be part of the solution in Gaza – not even under the fig leaf of a Palestinian unity government.
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Monday -- Tragedy is no crime
You are a freshman university student on the first day of a philosophy course. Your professor poses this ethical dilemma: A devoutly religious man is shooting at you with an AK-47. He is determined to kill you and your family. Is it moral to shoot back? Before you answer; consider that he is shielded by his pregnant wife and three young children.
Ordinary Israelis know what any undergraduate not suffering from a death-wish intuitively appreciates - namely, that human beings should not intentionally injure other human beings but may sometimes need to resort to violence to keep themselves and others from harm.
We are sensitive to the heartrending loss of innocent life in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Arab and foreign press reports claim upwards of 1,300 Palestinians killed, including 300 children and 100 women. It will take Israeli experts time to accurately determine how many of the dead were truly non-combatants. For now, there are huge discrepancies.
Of the 900 enemy dead that Israeli intelligence had reportedly identified by last Thursday, about 250 were said to be non-combatants. The blame for their deaths rests solely with Hamas. Hamas provoked this war, and then fought it from behind Palestinian men, women and children.
Still, for some knee-jerk enemies of Israel like the 78-year-old British MP Gerald Kaufman, even the killing of "militants" is inexcusable. He's implied that Israel's shooting of a Hamas gunman is akin to the Nazis' murder of his grandmother during the Holocaust. We can have no common language with someone whose moral compass is so warped. Kaufman, like the mullahs in Iran, has convinced himself that Israel is exploiting the "continuing guilt from Gentiles" over the Holocaust "as justification for their murder of Palestinians."
That broken record won't play. Presumably, Kaufman means the "gentiles" who control the United Nations. But how sympathetic are they to Israel's right of self-defense? Or perhaps he means the "gentiles" in the international media? How convincing is it to suggest that they side with Israel in their Gaza coverage?
Even Kaufman's notoriety as a "Jewish critic" of Israel has lost its cachet - such critics are hardly a rare species.
And anyway, Kaufman has been siding with the Palestinians since 1988, when he endorsed the first intifada.
The Kaufmans of the world apart, Israel can also do no right in the eyes of those critics who believe that our existence here is an "original sin"; that since there were 600,000 Jews here in 1948 and, arguably, twice that number of Arabs, any partition of Palestine was inherently "theft." We have no claims on the hearts of those who embrace the Arab narrative so utterly.
BUT WE'VE also been let down by those who profess to believe that the Jewish people do have the right to a homeland. Why is it so hard for them to comprehend the nature of the enemy we're facing in Gaza? After all, the theology that motivates Hamas is analogous to the fanaticism that brought down the World Trade Center, exploded London's transport system, and continues to spill innocent blood from Bali to Mumbai.
Israelis are told that no matter the provocation, we are "too quick" to resort to force. As if negotiations with Hamas were an option; as if eight years was too quick.
And if we've acted so "disproportionately" in our brutal march to triumph, how come the enemy is still standing and declaring victory?
To the morally obscene charge that we've committed "genocide" in Gaza - does anyone seriously doubt that were genocide our goal, heaven forbid, there would be 500,000 dead Palestinians, and not 1,000?
What other army drops warning leaflets and makes automated warning calls prior to attacking? Why is it ethical for Hamas to fire from a mosque or over the walls of a UN facility, but unethical for our citizen-soldiers to save themselves by responding with heavy weapons?
The truth is that no Western country faced with a similar set of circumstances - fighting an enemy that principally targets non-combatants while hiding behind its own civilians - would comport itself with higher moral standards than the IDF.
Sophomoric ideals about wartime morality are barely tolerable in Philosophy 101. When mouthed by leaders and pundits who should know better, they reflect intellectual laziness and dishonesty.
www.jpost.com
And thanks for visiting elliotjager.com
======================================================
Tuesday -- The true test
By the time Barack Obama is sworn in today as America's 44th president, every Israeli soldier, save for Gilad Schalit, will be out of Gaza. And when President Obama starts his first full day at the White House tomorrow Hamas will already be setting the stage for the next conflagration.
The new American president will no doubt have noted Ismail Haniya's speech "thanksgiving" broadcast on Hamas TV in which Gaza's prime minister declared: "God has granted us a great victory, not for one faction, or party, or area, but for our entire people."
Briefing journalists, Hamas military officials claimed that they lost just 48 gunmen to the IDF (Islamic Jihad and other organizations suffered another 40 or so killed, they said). Hamas managed to launch 1,000 rockets and mortars at Israel, killed 80 soldiers, captured some and shot down a helicopter. With these achievements under its belt, the manufacture and smuggling of arms – described as "holy" work -- would now pick up where it left off.
Ordinary Gazans, much as they are wont to identify with Hamas's delusional sense of triumph, will find their gratification tempered by their coming face-to-face with the price paid for Hamas's "achievements" which according to Palestinian sources include 1,300 dead; over 5,000 wounded; 90,000 made homeless and over $1 billion in economic damages.
Hamas's claims notwithstanding, no IDF soldiers were captured; 10 soldiers were killed (though several in "friendly fire" incidents); some 50 troops remain hospitalized. Three civilians lost their lives. Hamas's bombardments (some 852 flying bombs packed with shrapnel) injured over 700 Israelis. Fourteen non-combatants remain hospitalized, including seven-year old Orel Yelizarov, who lies gravely injured with shrapnel in the brain.
WE WILL know soon enough whether Operation Cast Lead achieved its purpose. The test is not whether it is "quiet" in the south while the terrorist organizations take a hiatus. The true test is whether Hamas is allowed to realize its plans to rearm.
The IDF needs to intervene the moment Gaza's workshops resume producing Kassams; the instant its laboratories renew the production of explosives; and the minute tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor are refurbished for the smuggling of weapons and supplies necessary for the arms industry. Failure to act, without delay, would instantly return Israel to the intolerable state of affairs which prevailed prior to the launching of IDF operations.
We were glad to hear Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni tell Israel Radio that she had reached an understanding with the outgoing Bush administration that Israel could act even in the absence of actual Hamas shooting. Israel also reserves the right, she said, to operate along the Philadelphi Corridor, if the pledges made by Egypt and other countries to halt weapons smuggling go unfilled. Should Hamas resume its attacks, Livni warned, it would get another dose of what the IDF dished out over the past three weeks.
Will Israelis and Palestinians have reason to recollect the flash visit, first to Sharm e-Sheikh and then to Jerusalem of six European leaders, including the voluble French President Nicolas Sarkozy? They Europeans came expressively to bolster the cease-fire, and Israel's leaders are convinced they now have part their solid support against Hamas. Each leader assured Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Israel has every right to defend itself. Sadly, it's not self-evident that any of them meant what they said – literally.
Be that as it may, beyond doing the obvious and making certain that those who brought devastation upon Gaza aren't given the wherewithal to do so again by rearming, Europe and the international community needs to restrain itself for making Hamas the project manager and chief financial officer for the reconstruction of the Strip. EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner seems to have taken this point on board and hints that it will be difficult to rebuild Gaza while the Islamist remains opposed to peace.
So long as Hamas remains an unrepentant enemy of peace, so long as it is full-throttle committed to violence, so long as it refuses to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a homeland anywhere, and so long as it refuses to abide by the Palestinians' international commitments, Hamas can never, legitimately, be part of the solution in Gaza – not even under the fig leaf of a Palestinian unity government.
##########################
Monday -- Tragedy is no crime
You are a freshman university student on the first day of a philosophy course. Your professor poses this ethical dilemma: A devoutly religious man is shooting at you with an AK-47. He is determined to kill you and your family. Is it moral to shoot back? Before you answer; consider that he is shielded by his pregnant wife and three young children.
Ordinary Israelis know what any undergraduate not suffering from a death-wish intuitively appreciates - namely, that human beings should not intentionally injure other human beings but may sometimes need to resort to violence to keep themselves and others from harm.
We are sensitive to the heartrending loss of innocent life in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Arab and foreign press reports claim upwards of 1,300 Palestinians killed, including 300 children and 100 women. It will take Israeli experts time to accurately determine how many of the dead were truly non-combatants. For now, there are huge discrepancies.
Of the 900 enemy dead that Israeli intelligence had reportedly identified by last Thursday, about 250 were said to be non-combatants. The blame for their deaths rests solely with Hamas. Hamas provoked this war, and then fought it from behind Palestinian men, women and children.
Still, for some knee-jerk enemies of Israel like the 78-year-old British MP Gerald Kaufman, even the killing of "militants" is inexcusable. He's implied that Israel's shooting of a Hamas gunman is akin to the Nazis' murder of his grandmother during the Holocaust. We can have no common language with someone whose moral compass is so warped. Kaufman, like the mullahs in Iran, has convinced himself that Israel is exploiting the "continuing guilt from Gentiles" over the Holocaust "as justification for their murder of Palestinians."
That broken record won't play. Presumably, Kaufman means the "gentiles" who control the United Nations. But how sympathetic are they to Israel's right of self-defense? Or perhaps he means the "gentiles" in the international media? How convincing is it to suggest that they side with Israel in their Gaza coverage?
Even Kaufman's notoriety as a "Jewish critic" of Israel has lost its cachet - such critics are hardly a rare species.
And anyway, Kaufman has been siding with the Palestinians since 1988, when he endorsed the first intifada.
The Kaufmans of the world apart, Israel can also do no right in the eyes of those critics who believe that our existence here is an "original sin"; that since there were 600,000 Jews here in 1948 and, arguably, twice that number of Arabs, any partition of Palestine was inherently "theft." We have no claims on the hearts of those who embrace the Arab narrative so utterly.
BUT WE'VE also been let down by those who profess to believe that the Jewish people do have the right to a homeland. Why is it so hard for them to comprehend the nature of the enemy we're facing in Gaza? After all, the theology that motivates Hamas is analogous to the fanaticism that brought down the World Trade Center, exploded London's transport system, and continues to spill innocent blood from Bali to Mumbai.
Israelis are told that no matter the provocation, we are "too quick" to resort to force. As if negotiations with Hamas were an option; as if eight years was too quick.
And if we've acted so "disproportionately" in our brutal march to triumph, how come the enemy is still standing and declaring victory?
To the morally obscene charge that we've committed "genocide" in Gaza - does anyone seriously doubt that were genocide our goal, heaven forbid, there would be 500,000 dead Palestinians, and not 1,000?
What other army drops warning leaflets and makes automated warning calls prior to attacking? Why is it ethical for Hamas to fire from a mosque or over the walls of a UN facility, but unethical for our citizen-soldiers to save themselves by responding with heavy weapons?
The truth is that no Western country faced with a similar set of circumstances - fighting an enemy that principally targets non-combatants while hiding behind its own civilians - would comport itself with higher moral standards than the IDF.
Sophomoric ideals about wartime morality are barely tolerable in Philosophy 101. When mouthed by leaders and pundits who should know better, they reflect intellectual laziness and dishonesty.
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.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Cease-fire -- Day 1
SUNDAY
Deterrence restored?
If the cabinet's decision Saturday night to halt Operation Cast Lead is premised on the notion that such restraint will afford this country renewed international legitimacy to defend itself against continued Hamas aggression, the ministers are likely to be disappointed.
Nevertheless, under intense worldwide pressure, including from the US, the cabinet declared an immediate unilateral Gaza cease-fire whose longevity will depend on how Hamas responds. The cease-fire comes in the wake of commitments by Egypt regarding the Philadelphi Corridor. Meanwhile, our forces will remain in-place; the crossing points from Israel and from Egypt into Gaza will stay closed until security arrangements to prevent Hamas arms smuggling can be implemented.
UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon declared: "We cannot wait for all the details, the mechanisms, to be conclusively negotiated and agreed, while civilians continue to be traumatized, injured or killed."
Though Hamas has repeatedly rejected the cease-fire, and even now says that "resistance and confrontation will continue," the feeling among ordinary Israelis is that Ban was hectoring Israel and not the Islamist aggressors. Because the international community never seems to have the time to "wait for all the details" on how to stop Hamas or Hizbullah from arming themselves to be worked out; and because the UN has said not a single word to criticize Hamas's belligerence or its unlawful practice of fighting from behind Gaza's civilian population, it may be setting the stage for yet another round of bloodshed.
The goal of the IDF operation which began on Dec. 27 was to halt continuing Hamas rocket attacks and infiltration attempts against southern Israel; to change a reality in which a generation of Israeli schoolchildren has grown up thinking the threat of rockets and mortars was part of the fabric of life; and to plug up the hundreds of tunnels from Egypt into Gaza which deliver military hardware, trained gunmen and illicit cash that prop up Hamas. Defense Minister Ehud Barak argues that Israel is "very close" to reaching these goals "and securing them through diplomatic agreements."
Time will tell.
Israel's decision to agree to a cease-fire was facilitated by its talks with Egypt and a rather nebulous memorandum of understanding signed Friday between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and outgoing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (in coordination with incoming Obama administration officials). Washington pledged to "work cooperatively" with Jerusalem on an array of steps to stem the flow of arms to Hamas. Separately, Italy, the UK, France and Germany have signed on to the memorandum.
ISRAELIS HAVE every reason to be skeptical that these pledges will translate into a tangible diminution of the enemy's capacity to smuggle Iranian weapons into Gaza. Moreover, while the US and EU have always supported Israel's theoretical right of self defense against terrorism – and do so again in these latest commitments – when push comes to shove, as it did at the UN Security Council debate on Gaza, that support evaporated.
We are hardly encouraged by Egypt's announcement that the Israel-US memo does not obligate it. Indeed, all we heard from President Hosni Mubarak was an adamant demand for "an immediate and unconditional cease-fire" and "a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Strip."
Leaders of several EU countries are due to visit Egypt and Israel tomorrow to bolster the cease-fire. But unless Mubarak can be convinced to fulfill his responsibilities to stop the smuggling beneath the Philadelphi Corridor, all the photo-ops in the world will be to no avail.
Whatever the fate of the cease-fire, it is not too soon to praise the IDF for an astoundingly effective war against Hamas, and to thank our fighters for their extraordinary efforts -- the disparagement of the foreign media notwithstanding -- to avoid hurting non-combatants.
Operation Cast Lead has taught Hamas that just because Israel is a civilized society, and though we cherish life and are loath to engage an enemy that shields among its own civilian population; our army can nevertheless overcome its inhibitions. It has admittedly been disagreeable for the IDF to strike back at Hamas as it operates out of mosques, schools, hospitals and aid buildings. But the enemy now knows that Israel will not commit national suicide -- not even if surviving makes us unpopular.
Deterrence restored?
If the cabinet's decision Saturday night to halt Operation Cast Lead is premised on the notion that such restraint will afford this country renewed international legitimacy to defend itself against continued Hamas aggression, the ministers are likely to be disappointed.
Nevertheless, under intense worldwide pressure, including from the US, the cabinet declared an immediate unilateral Gaza cease-fire whose longevity will depend on how Hamas responds. The cease-fire comes in the wake of commitments by Egypt regarding the Philadelphi Corridor. Meanwhile, our forces will remain in-place; the crossing points from Israel and from Egypt into Gaza will stay closed until security arrangements to prevent Hamas arms smuggling can be implemented.
UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon declared: "We cannot wait for all the details, the mechanisms, to be conclusively negotiated and agreed, while civilians continue to be traumatized, injured or killed."
Though Hamas has repeatedly rejected the cease-fire, and even now says that "resistance and confrontation will continue," the feeling among ordinary Israelis is that Ban was hectoring Israel and not the Islamist aggressors. Because the international community never seems to have the time to "wait for all the details" on how to stop Hamas or Hizbullah from arming themselves to be worked out; and because the UN has said not a single word to criticize Hamas's belligerence or its unlawful practice of fighting from behind Gaza's civilian population, it may be setting the stage for yet another round of bloodshed.
The goal of the IDF operation which began on Dec. 27 was to halt continuing Hamas rocket attacks and infiltration attempts against southern Israel; to change a reality in which a generation of Israeli schoolchildren has grown up thinking the threat of rockets and mortars was part of the fabric of life; and to plug up the hundreds of tunnels from Egypt into Gaza which deliver military hardware, trained gunmen and illicit cash that prop up Hamas. Defense Minister Ehud Barak argues that Israel is "very close" to reaching these goals "and securing them through diplomatic agreements."
Time will tell.
Israel's decision to agree to a cease-fire was facilitated by its talks with Egypt and a rather nebulous memorandum of understanding signed Friday between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and outgoing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (in coordination with incoming Obama administration officials). Washington pledged to "work cooperatively" with Jerusalem on an array of steps to stem the flow of arms to Hamas. Separately, Italy, the UK, France and Germany have signed on to the memorandum.
ISRAELIS HAVE every reason to be skeptical that these pledges will translate into a tangible diminution of the enemy's capacity to smuggle Iranian weapons into Gaza. Moreover, while the US and EU have always supported Israel's theoretical right of self defense against terrorism – and do so again in these latest commitments – when push comes to shove, as it did at the UN Security Council debate on Gaza, that support evaporated.
We are hardly encouraged by Egypt's announcement that the Israel-US memo does not obligate it. Indeed, all we heard from President Hosni Mubarak was an adamant demand for "an immediate and unconditional cease-fire" and "a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Strip."
Leaders of several EU countries are due to visit Egypt and Israel tomorrow to bolster the cease-fire. But unless Mubarak can be convinced to fulfill his responsibilities to stop the smuggling beneath the Philadelphi Corridor, all the photo-ops in the world will be to no avail.
Whatever the fate of the cease-fire, it is not too soon to praise the IDF for an astoundingly effective war against Hamas, and to thank our fighters for their extraordinary efforts -- the disparagement of the foreign media notwithstanding -- to avoid hurting non-combatants.
Operation Cast Lead has taught Hamas that just because Israel is a civilized society, and though we cherish life and are loath to engage an enemy that shields among its own civilian population; our army can nevertheless overcome its inhibitions. It has admittedly been disagreeable for the IDF to strike back at Hamas as it operates out of mosques, schools, hospitals and aid buildings. But the enemy now knows that Israel will not commit national suicide -- not even if surviving makes us unpopular.
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, January 16, 2009
Gaza War Week 3 continued -- closer to the endgame?
Don't forget to check www.jpost.com for the latest.
FRIDAY - Fatah and Abbas to the rescue?
In the rosiest of rosy scenarios, one purportedly championed by Egypt though not necessarily by Israel, Operation Cast Lead ends with Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority restored to power in Gaza. A multi-billion-dollar internationally-financed reconstruction effort gets under way, administered to great acclaim by Fatah. At the Rafah crossing, meanwhile, the 2005 agreement that put Abbas's Force 17 in charge of security would be resurrected, returning international monitors and Israeli cameras to scrutinize comings and goings.
A battered Hamas would, the optimists have it, accept the prolongation of Abbas's presidency (his term expired last week) and a junior role in a Fatah-led government of national reconciliation. This turnabout would reverse Hamas's June 2007 coup in Gaza and undo the diplomatic damage to Palestinian aspirations for international legitimacy caused by the Islamists' January 2006 electoral victory. Fatah would gain a new lease on life.
It would solve so many problems for Israelis, moderate Arabs and the West, if Fatah were truly capable of rebuilding Gaza, conscientiously governing its denizens and policing its borders.
But those who place their hopes in the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority are, regrettably,in for a let-down.
Why? Because 100 years of Palestinian Arab history shows that Palestinians reward extremism and punish moderation; because Fatah remains crooked; and because, as its own activists acknowledge, they are simply not up to the task of governing Gaza.
Writing in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi bemoans the fact that though Fatah was formed in the 1950s, the PLO in the 1960s, and the PA in the 1990s; though its leadership was already running a mammoth bureaucracy by the 1970s and a quasi-state in Lebanon until 1982, "the PLO had done precious little to prepare for independent statehood."
Khalidi, predictably, claims it was mostly Israel's fault. "Nevertheless," he writes, "there was much that [the PLO] could have done in spite of these crippling disabilities that they did not do. Notably, when they established the PA they failed to create a solid framework for the rule of law, a constitutional system, a balance of powers, and many of the other building blocks of a modern state to organize the governance of the 3.6 million Palestinians whose welfare they were now responsible for."
SOME Westerners delude themselves into believing they know why support for Hamas appears to have grown despite the fact that since it kidnapped Gilad Schalit in June 2006, the Islamists' self-destructive behavior has paid dividends mostly in Palestinian blood, suffering and mayhem. They attribute Hamas's ascendancy and Fatah's decline to the current fighting, or to settlements, or to the "occupation" pushing ordinary Palestinians ever deeper into Hamas's embrace.
It is more accurate, however, to sadly acknowledge that Hamas's worldview better reflects the extremism, rejectionism and self-destructive tendencies that embody the ethos of the Palestinian polity. Fatah's perceived drift toward moderation, combined with its corruption, have made it increasingly irrelevant to many Palestinians.
Since the start of the Zionist enterprise, Arab fanatics have been at war not only with our national liberation movement, but, simultaneously, with any internal voice advocating Arab-Jewish coexistence. Those who acquiesce in any semblance of Jewish rights are habitually labeled "collaborators."
Though Fatah denounces Israel's battle with Hamas in the most venomous terms, the West Bank masses are said to be fuming that Fatah won't let them confront Israel directly. "This will irreparably damage its standing in the eyes of Palestinians…" an Arab expert told The Christian Science Monitor.
In other words, many ordinary Palestinians want Fatah to again lead them into another violent uprising - despite the devastation a third intifada would bring down on them. Never mind that the standard of living in the West Bank is better than it has been in years.
So the problem is not just a PA demonstrably incapable of reforming itself, or a politically toxic Hamas; it is, more fundamentally, much of the Palestinian political culture.
Those who want to create a Palestinian state living peaceably with Israel could, then, reasonably conclude that what Palestinians need foremost is some kind of trusteeship to help them create a civil society, accountable institutions, transparent government... and the tools necessary for political socialization toward tolerance.
Until that happens, talk about creating a Palestinian state is...just talk.
THURSDAY - Remember the mission
Somewhere in a cave along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a gaunt man who hasn't seen much sun for seven long years has been watching Al-Jazeera's coverage of Operation Cast Lead. Perhaps he's telling himself that the 20 days Hamas commanders have been hunkered down in the sub-basement of Gaza's Shifa hospital is nothing compared to the ordeal he's been through.
Still, Osama bin Laden wants to do the "Islamist thing." So he's called - again - for a holy war against the Jews. Such a Sunni jihad offers the added delight of irking the detested Shi'ite "heretics" in Iran. Didn't Ayatollah Ali Khamenei invite young Persian men to volunteer for suicide missions in Gaza - only to snatch back the offer after 70,000 actually signed up?
Time may be running out for a holy war to save Hamas. Its leaders from both Damascus and Gaza - who cross overland at Rafah - have been dialoguing with each other, and with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman in Cairo, on a cease-fire. Hamas "inside" is said to be pushing hard to bring the fighting to an end; Hamas "outside" appears, belatedly, to be coming around.
The toing and froing is not limited to Hamas's functionaries. Our own Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry's Diplomatic-Security Bureau, travels to Cairo today. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spent Wednesday there and is heading to Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Kuwait.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton began her Senate confirmation hearings by declaring that she will make the Arab-Israel conflict a priority. On Sunday, the Arab League is scheduled to meet in Kuwait to discuss the Gaza crisis. And the UN General Assembly wants to hold a session to condemn Israel - something it hasn't done in two months.
Here in Israel, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni have resumed their sniping. Supposedly, Barak has recommended a one-week humanitarian cease-fire; Olmert wants to push on; and Livni wants to act unilaterally once the IDF has done its (undefined) work.
All this plays out as the world waits for Barack Obama to assume the US presidency on Tuesday.
WITH ALL this going on, it is essential that Israel not lose sight of the minimum it should be getting before Operation Cast Lead ends.
• The smuggling must stop. Hamas's access to armaments must be choked off. Any deal between Israel and Egypt on the tunnels beneath the Philadelphi Corridor must not encumber the IDF's freedom to operate when necessary. Once Egypt fulfills its commitments, IDF activity can be wound down.
• There must be an end to shooting at Israel, and to infiltration attempts. The cease-fire must have no time-limit. And it must be honored not just by Hamas's Izzadin Kassam, but also by Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP, the DFLP and Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades. All violations will meet with immediate and "disproportionate" retaliation.
• Hamas must become more reasonable on the Gilad Schalit issue; until it does, Hamas "military" figures will enjoy no repose.
• Regardless of who runs Gaza, Egypt must keep tight control of its side of the Rafah border. When it comes to entry and egress, the buck stops with Cairo.
• There can be absolutely no Turkish or other foreign troops on the Palestinian side of the border. Such a presence would hamper any necessary IDF activity. The foreigners can operate on the Egyptian side, if Cairo desires.
If Israel's fundamental needs are met, how the Palestinians choose to govern themselves in Gaza is their own affair.
Israel, for its part, will open crossing points to everything excepting materiel that can be used for military purposes. The embargo, for all intents and purposes, would be over.
ON DAY 1 of this war, Ehud Barak declared that its mission was to put an end to Hamas aggression. Nothing short of achieving this goal should bring Israel's efforts to a permanent halt.
No deal is better than a bad deal. If Hamas insists on fighting on, Israeli decision-makers will need to weigh when and how to mobilize our society for the prolonged, all-out assault needed to uproot the Islamist menace.
FRIDAY - Fatah and Abbas to the rescue?
In the rosiest of rosy scenarios, one purportedly championed by Egypt though not necessarily by Israel, Operation Cast Lead ends with Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority restored to power in Gaza. A multi-billion-dollar internationally-financed reconstruction effort gets under way, administered to great acclaim by Fatah. At the Rafah crossing, meanwhile, the 2005 agreement that put Abbas's Force 17 in charge of security would be resurrected, returning international monitors and Israeli cameras to scrutinize comings and goings.
A battered Hamas would, the optimists have it, accept the prolongation of Abbas's presidency (his term expired last week) and a junior role in a Fatah-led government of national reconciliation. This turnabout would reverse Hamas's June 2007 coup in Gaza and undo the diplomatic damage to Palestinian aspirations for international legitimacy caused by the Islamists' January 2006 electoral victory. Fatah would gain a new lease on life.
It would solve so many problems for Israelis, moderate Arabs and the West, if Fatah were truly capable of rebuilding Gaza, conscientiously governing its denizens and policing its borders.
But those who place their hopes in the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority are, regrettably,in for a let-down.
Why? Because 100 years of Palestinian Arab history shows that Palestinians reward extremism and punish moderation; because Fatah remains crooked; and because, as its own activists acknowledge, they are simply not up to the task of governing Gaza.
Writing in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi bemoans the fact that though Fatah was formed in the 1950s, the PLO in the 1960s, and the PA in the 1990s; though its leadership was already running a mammoth bureaucracy by the 1970s and a quasi-state in Lebanon until 1982, "the PLO had done precious little to prepare for independent statehood."
Khalidi, predictably, claims it was mostly Israel's fault. "Nevertheless," he writes, "there was much that [the PLO] could have done in spite of these crippling disabilities that they did not do. Notably, when they established the PA they failed to create a solid framework for the rule of law, a constitutional system, a balance of powers, and many of the other building blocks of a modern state to organize the governance of the 3.6 million Palestinians whose welfare they were now responsible for."
SOME Westerners delude themselves into believing they know why support for Hamas appears to have grown despite the fact that since it kidnapped Gilad Schalit in June 2006, the Islamists' self-destructive behavior has paid dividends mostly in Palestinian blood, suffering and mayhem. They attribute Hamas's ascendancy and Fatah's decline to the current fighting, or to settlements, or to the "occupation" pushing ordinary Palestinians ever deeper into Hamas's embrace.
It is more accurate, however, to sadly acknowledge that Hamas's worldview better reflects the extremism, rejectionism and self-destructive tendencies that embody the ethos of the Palestinian polity. Fatah's perceived drift toward moderation, combined with its corruption, have made it increasingly irrelevant to many Palestinians.
Since the start of the Zionist enterprise, Arab fanatics have been at war not only with our national liberation movement, but, simultaneously, with any internal voice advocating Arab-Jewish coexistence. Those who acquiesce in any semblance of Jewish rights are habitually labeled "collaborators."
Though Fatah denounces Israel's battle with Hamas in the most venomous terms, the West Bank masses are said to be fuming that Fatah won't let them confront Israel directly. "This will irreparably damage its standing in the eyes of Palestinians…" an Arab expert told The Christian Science Monitor.
In other words, many ordinary Palestinians want Fatah to again lead them into another violent uprising - despite the devastation a third intifada would bring down on them. Never mind that the standard of living in the West Bank is better than it has been in years.
So the problem is not just a PA demonstrably incapable of reforming itself, or a politically toxic Hamas; it is, more fundamentally, much of the Palestinian political culture.
Those who want to create a Palestinian state living peaceably with Israel could, then, reasonably conclude that what Palestinians need foremost is some kind of trusteeship to help them create a civil society, accountable institutions, transparent government... and the tools necessary for political socialization toward tolerance.
Until that happens, talk about creating a Palestinian state is...just talk.
THURSDAY - Remember the mission
Somewhere in a cave along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a gaunt man who hasn't seen much sun for seven long years has been watching Al-Jazeera's coverage of Operation Cast Lead. Perhaps he's telling himself that the 20 days Hamas commanders have been hunkered down in the sub-basement of Gaza's Shifa hospital is nothing compared to the ordeal he's been through.
Still, Osama bin Laden wants to do the "Islamist thing." So he's called - again - for a holy war against the Jews. Such a Sunni jihad offers the added delight of irking the detested Shi'ite "heretics" in Iran. Didn't Ayatollah Ali Khamenei invite young Persian men to volunteer for suicide missions in Gaza - only to snatch back the offer after 70,000 actually signed up?
Time may be running out for a holy war to save Hamas. Its leaders from both Damascus and Gaza - who cross overland at Rafah - have been dialoguing with each other, and with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman in Cairo, on a cease-fire. Hamas "inside" is said to be pushing hard to bring the fighting to an end; Hamas "outside" appears, belatedly, to be coming around.
The toing and froing is not limited to Hamas's functionaries. Our own Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry's Diplomatic-Security Bureau, travels to Cairo today. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spent Wednesday there and is heading to Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Kuwait.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton began her Senate confirmation hearings by declaring that she will make the Arab-Israel conflict a priority. On Sunday, the Arab League is scheduled to meet in Kuwait to discuss the Gaza crisis. And the UN General Assembly wants to hold a session to condemn Israel - something it hasn't done in two months.
Here in Israel, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni have resumed their sniping. Supposedly, Barak has recommended a one-week humanitarian cease-fire; Olmert wants to push on; and Livni wants to act unilaterally once the IDF has done its (undefined) work.
All this plays out as the world waits for Barack Obama to assume the US presidency on Tuesday.
WITH ALL this going on, it is essential that Israel not lose sight of the minimum it should be getting before Operation Cast Lead ends.
• The smuggling must stop. Hamas's access to armaments must be choked off. Any deal between Israel and Egypt on the tunnels beneath the Philadelphi Corridor must not encumber the IDF's freedom to operate when necessary. Once Egypt fulfills its commitments, IDF activity can be wound down.
• There must be an end to shooting at Israel, and to infiltration attempts. The cease-fire must have no time-limit. And it must be honored not just by Hamas's Izzadin Kassam, but also by Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP, the DFLP and Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades. All violations will meet with immediate and "disproportionate" retaliation.
• Hamas must become more reasonable on the Gilad Schalit issue; until it does, Hamas "military" figures will enjoy no repose.
• Regardless of who runs Gaza, Egypt must keep tight control of its side of the Rafah border. When it comes to entry and egress, the buck stops with Cairo.
• There can be absolutely no Turkish or other foreign troops on the Palestinian side of the border. Such a presence would hamper any necessary IDF activity. The foreigners can operate on the Egyptian side, if Cairo desires.
If Israel's fundamental needs are met, how the Palestinians choose to govern themselves in Gaza is their own affair.
Israel, for its part, will open crossing points to everything excepting materiel that can be used for military purposes. The embargo, for all intents and purposes, would be over.
ON DAY 1 of this war, Ehud Barak declared that its mission was to put an end to Hamas aggression. Nothing short of achieving this goal should bring Israel's efforts to a permanent halt.
No deal is better than a bad deal. If Hamas insists on fighting on, Israeli decision-makers will need to weigh when and how to mobilize our society for the prolonged, all-out assault needed to uproot the Islamist menace.
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.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The war - week 3
Dear all,
Thank you for your notes of support. I am sorry that I can't reply to everyone individually.
For the latest news about what is really taking place -- please go to the Jerusalem Post homepage: www.jpost.com
Shalom,
elliot
Wed: What a democracy owes itself
There is something unpalatable about banning political parties. During the coldest days of the Cold War, American voters were never deprived of the chance to vote for Gus Hall and his Soviet-funded Communist Party USA. In Germany, voters can today opt for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. The British National Party, whose mission is to secure a future for "indigenous" white people, is there for UK voters.
In contrast, authoritarian countries show little compunction about banning. Saudi Arabia bars the Green Party; Sudan and Cuba outlaw all parties. And Syria allows opposition parties that accept the "vanguard role" of the ruling Ba'ath Party.
On Monday, the Knesset Central Elections Committee, comprising 25 politicians and one jurist, disqualified Balad and the United Arab List from running in the February 10 elections. The consensus was that both support terrorism, incitement and reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Arab critics retorted that the decision proved Israel is "racist" and "fascist."
The High Court of Justice, which overruled an effort to disqualify Balad prior to the 2006 elections, will make the final call. The attorney-general's office is on record as determining that there is not enough evidence to disqualify either party.
But overturning the ban this time may be harder. The Knesset recently passed a new law based on clause 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset, which outlaws candidates who deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state; engage in incitement, or support violence against Israel by an enemy state or terror organization. The amended legislation adds that anyone who illegally visited an enemy state in the past seven years can be banned.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on challenges to the amended law.
DEMOCRACIES are not obligated to commit suicide. Spain, for instance, bans the political party affiliated with the terror group ETA. Similarly, US law makes it illegal for an organization that abets the use of violence against the government to seek office.
The case for banning Balad seems fairly plain. While it's off-putting to hear MK Jamal Zahalka say, "We are not Zionists and we will never be," the reason for keeping his party out of the Knesset is that it refuses to dissociate from its former leader Azmi Bishara - with whom Zahalka proudly consults - who fled to Syria after the Second Lebanon War, fearing arrest as a Hizbullah agent.
The case against Tibi's UAL party is not clear-cut. He is perhaps the most intellectually formidable of the Arab anti-Zionists, has a disarming personality, and calibrates his actions to stay just within the law. He won't declare unequivocally that he opposes terrorism, merely "militarization of the intifada."
At a 2007 Fatah rally in Ramallah, Tibi urged continued struggle against Israel "until all of the Palestinian land is freed." Yasser Arafat's former consigliere tells Palestinians that Israel wants to "eliminate" them "en route to the elimination of the ideas of Palestinian freedom and liberty."
Tibi says he does not oppose the state - just its policies. And he too declares that Arab citizens "will never accept Zionism..." He will not, he says, stop visiting enemy states.
Paradoxically, the disappearance of Balad and UAL from the Knesset might allow the emergence of Arab parties that actually cared about building the kinds of parliamentary alliances that can get things done for the Arab sector.
Israel's proportional representation system allowed the UAL and Balad to gain six seats in the current Knesset. The tragic dynamic is that the more radical the party, the more support it garners from the Arab public. It doesn't help matters that the major parties give Arab voters little incentive to shun the extremists.
In a world where 21 states define themselves as "Arab," and 56 proudly identify as Islamic, we do have a problem with Knesset members who begrudge Jewish self-determination within the rubric of a democratic Israel that respects minority rights.
The Likud's Bennie Begin cautions that Israeli society must be "very, very, careful" about outlawing factions or disenfranchising constituencies in wartime. To that we would add: But neither should our polity shy away from making tough decisions to protect the system from those who would destabilize it.
Tuesday: Egypt at the crossroads
(With Sarah Honig)
For a myriad reasons it suits those who mold international public opinion to minimize the intrinsic importance of Egypt's contiguity to the Gaza Strip. Not only does Egypt border Gaza, it even ruled it for most of the time between 1948 and 1967. This geographic reality could well become the source of Gaza's salvation just as, in recent years, it became the source of its misfortune. Egypt's role is pivotal.
Hamas propagandists like to portray Gaza as "one big prison" totally blockaded by Israel. Yet, as any map shows, Gaza isn't fully encircled by Israel. Its southern end, the Philadelphi Corridor, borders Egyptian Sinai.
This outlet could, assuming prudence and good will, become Gaza's lifeline. Or it could continue to serve as a gateway for the importation of death - which is what it became during years of assiduous weapons smuggling by Hamas.
There can be no lasting stability between Israel and Gaza unless the Philadelphi Corridor is plugged up to prevent gun-running and transformed, instead, into a conduit for improving Gazans' living standards. This necessitates a vigilant presence.
The buildup of Gaza's rocket arsenal since 2005 illustrates what happens when so vital a passage is abandoned to the supervision of a disinclined Cairo and international observers with no clout. It is this state of affairs that allowed Hamas commanders to travel freely in and out of Gaza for training in Iran.
While IDF deployment along the Corridor offers the best way to stop Hamas smuggling in weapons, terrorists and illicit cash, it is not our first preference. Such a deployment would be diplomatically and militarily problematic. The international community does not want to see Israel carve out a buffer zone there, and holding that thin sliver of territory would leave our soldiers highly vulnerable.
The best way - militarily, diplomatically and politically - to secure this crucial bit of real estate is from the Egyptian, not the Gazan side.
WERE Egyptian goodwill unadulterated and its commitment to getting the job done unstinting, sealing Philadelphi would still be a tall order.
Alas, Egypt has not over-extended itself. Its failure to keep Gaza from becoming a combustible repository of Hamas weaponry isn't merely the result, as Cairo claims, of not having enough personnel on the border because the Israel-Egypt peace treaty caps their allowable number.
In reality, Hamas's ability to connect Gaza and Sinai via hundreds of tunnels has better explanations: the failure to check rampant lawlessness among Sinai Beduin tribes; sclerotic Egyptian decision-making, which deprives officials on the spot of authority; and the failure to adequately recompense those charged with securing the border, leaving them susceptible to bakshish.
But the best explanation is that Hosni Mubarak's regime failed to make the cessation of smuggling its own priority. While on the one hand, it didn't want Hamas to grow ever stronger, it didn't, on the other hand, want to be seen as collaborating with Jerusalem against Hamas. Trying to have it both ways has now come back to bite the regime. It inadvertently helped create the explosive situation that forced Israel into Operation Cast Lead.
Egypt is in a bind. Its own national interest isn't far from Israel's, yet it dare not inflame its domestic Islamist opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is closely tied to Hamas. It is understandably loath to allow a free flow of Gazans - who might have Brotherhood or Iranian ties and stir up more unrest inside Egypt.
Keeping the current situation on a low flame may strike Egypt as the least distasteful of a poor menu of choices. Yet it is a recipe for further bloodshed. If the Philadelphi Corridor isn't permanently secured, another - worse - round of warfare is inevitable. It would leave Hamas approaching Hizbullah in strength and posing an even greater risk of destabilization within Egypt.
Egypt stands at a fateful crossroads. It must, finally, overcome its inhibitions vis-a-vis its own Islamists and take real action to stop arms trafficking. Alternatively, it must allow an empowered multi-national military presence on its soil to do the job.
Either way, Egypt ought to desire the most effective supervisory mechanism, one it can oversee and coordinate, thereby cementing its status as regional leader.
Monday:Israel goes it alone
The world must be wondering, 17 days into Operation Cast Lead, why it is taking so long for Jerusalem to cave into pressure for a cease-fire in Gaza. From the UN Security Council, that renowned bastion of international probity, and the constellation of Muslim, Arab and non-aligned states to our unwavering European allies, the international community - and much of the media - wants Israel to stop fighting.
We Israelis can hear these erstwhile friends in Europe and the media saying: "Everybody is wrong, and you alone are right?"
They continue: "Yes, Israel has a right to self-defense - but must your IDF kill innocent civilians and destroy buildings in the process? Can't your tanks avoid harming them? Your failure to fight a war that is televised live, 24/7, without spilling blood has enraged the Arab street. We don't want this fury turned against our interests in the Middle East."
That's why London's Telegraph could withdraw its "support."
"There comes a point beyond which an operation of this sort becomes… morally unjustifiable," it said. "The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is so severe that a cease-fire is essential, irrespective of whether Israel feels it has achieved its military objectives."
By this logic, Britain should have thrown in the towel in its war against Germany by September 18, 1939 - 17 days into WWII. Instead, Winston Churchill fought on for five long years at an awful - but morally justifiable - cost in Allied and enemy civilian lives.
The New York Times, likewise, sympathizes with Israel's predicament but worries that trying to wrest Gaza from Hamas's grip will complicate the efforts of the incoming Obama administration to broker peace.
Yet the reality is precisely the opposite: Unless Hamas is defanged, the prospect that relative moderates among the Palestinians, led by Mahmoud Abbas, will be emboldened to strike a deal with Israel is - nil.
The reaction of Israel's European allies in particular has been instructive. Having abandoned Israel as it defends itself against a transparently fanatical Hamas - and after Israel unilaterally uprooted its settlements and pulled its soldiers out of Gaza in 2005 - Israel will be mindful of how much their support is worth when the time comes to "take risks for peace" in the West Bank.
SPEAKING AT the Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made Israelis feel proud when he summed up the justice of the struggle and denounced the world's callous reaction: "For three weeks now… Israel has been making an impressive military effort in the Gaza Strip in order to change the security situation in the south of the country. For many years we've shown restraint. We reined in our reactions. We gritted our teeth and absorbed barrage after barrage.
"No country in the world - not even those who preach morality at us - would have shown similar patience and self-control. At the end of the day, the... obligation to defend our citizens - after we issued many warnings - led us to the unavoidable decision [that we had] to defend our [people], whose lives had become intolerable.
"We knew in advance that this struggle would be neither easy nor simple. We did not delude ourselves that what seemed natural, clear and self-evident for any other country would be similarly accepted when the State of Israel is involved. But this did not, and does not hinder our determination to defend our citizens.
"We have never agreed that anyone should decide in our place if we are allowed to strike at those who bomb our kindergartens and schools; nor will ever agree to it...
"Israel is nearing its goal [of changing] the security situation in the south so that our citizens can experience security and stability in the long term. We must not, at the last minute, squander what has been achieved in this unprecedented national effort that has restored a spirit of unity to our nation.
"The Israeli public, especially the residents of the south, have the patience and willingness needed. So does the Israeli government."
Amen to that.
Israel would have preferred to act with the support of those who claim to back our right to self-defense. In a cynical world, Israel must press ahead without it.
The above editorial generated the following NYT piece
Israelis United on War as Censure Rises Abroad
BYLINE: ETHAN BRONNER
Published: Tuesday, January 13, 2009
JERUSALEM — To Israel’s critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel’s war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped.
Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.
Since Israeli warplanes opened the assault on Gaza 17 days ago, about 900 Palestinians have been reported killed, many of them civilians. Red Cross workers were denied access to scores of dead and wounded Gazans, and a civilian crowd near a United Nations school was hit, with at least 40 people killed.
But voices of dissent in this country have been rare. And while tens of thousands have poured into the streets of world capitals demonstrating against the Israeli military operation, antiwar rallies here have struggled to draw 1,000 participants. The Peace Now organization has received many messages from supporters telling it to stay out of the streets on this one.
As the editorial page of The Jerusalem Post put it on Monday, the world must be wondering, do Israelis really believe that everybody is wrong and they alone are right?
The answer is yes.
“It is very frustrating for us not to be understood,” remarked Yoel Esteron, editor of a daily business newspaper called Calcalist. “Almost 100 percent of Israelis feel that the world is hypocritical. Where was the world when our cities were rocketed for eight years and our soldier was kidnapped? Why should we care about the world’s view now?”
Israel, which is sometimes a fractured, bickering society, has turned in the past couple of weeks into a paradigm of unity and mutual support. Flags are flying high. Celebrities are visiting schoolchildren in at-risk areas, soldiers are praising the equipment and camaraderie of their army units, and neighbors are worried about families whose fathers are on reserve duty. Ask people anywhere how they feel about the army’s barring journalists from entering Gaza and the response is: let the army do its job.
Israelis deeply believe, rightly or wrongly, that their military works harder than most to spare civilians, holding their fire in many more cases than using it.
Because Hamas booby-traps schools, apartment buildings and the zoo, and its fighters hide among civilians, it is Hamas that is viewed here as responsible for the civilian toll. Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction and gets help and inspiration from Iran, so that what looks to the world like a disproportionate war of choice is seen by many here as an obligatory war for existence.
“This is a just war and we don’t feel guilty when civilians we don’t intend to hurt get hurt, because we feel Hamas uses these civilians as human shields,” said Elliot Jager, editorial page editor of The Jerusalem Post, who happened to answer his phone for an interview while in Ashkelon, an Israeli city about 10 miles from Gaza, standing in front of a house that had been hit two hours earlier by a Hamas rocket.
“We do feel bad about it, but we don’t feel guilty,” Mr. Jager added. “The most ethical moral imperative is for Israel to prevail in this conflict over an immoral Islamist philosophy. It is a zero sum conflict. That is what is not understood outside this country.”
It is true that there are voices of concern here that the war may be outliving its value. Worries over the risk to Israeli troops and over even steeper civilian casualties as the ground war escalates have produced calls to declare victory and pull out.
For many of the 1.4 million Israelis who are Arabs, the war has produced a very different feeling, a mix of anger and despair. The largest demonstration against the war so far, with some 6,000 participants, was organized by an Arab political party. But that is still distinctly a minority view. Polls have shown nearly 90 percent support for the war thus far, and street interviews confirm that Israelis not only favor it but do so quite strongly. The country’s leaders, while seeking an arrangement to stop Hamas’s ability to rearm, do not want a face-saving agreement. They want one that works, or else they want to continue the war until Hamas has lost either its rockets or its will to fire them.
Boaz Gaon, a playwright and peace activist, said he found it deeply depressing how the Israeli public had embraced the military’s arguments in explaining the deaths of civilians. But he was livid at Hamas, both for what it had done to its own people and civilians in the south, and for its impact on the Israeli left.
“Hamas has pushed Israeli thinking back 30 years,” he said. “It has killed the peace camp.”
Moshe Halbertal, a left-leaning professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, helped write the army’s ethics code. He said he knew from personal experience how much laborious discussion went into deciding when it was acceptable to shoot at a legitimate target if civilians were nearby, adding that there had been several events in this war in which he suspected that the wrong decision had been made.
For example, Israel killed a top Hamas ideologue, Nizar Rayyan, during the first week of the war and at the same time killed his four wives and at least nine of his children. Looking back at it, Mr. Halbertal disapproves, assuming that the decision was made consciously, even if Mr. Rayyan purposely hid among his family to protect himself, as it appears he did. Yet almost no one here publicly questioned the decision to drop a bomb on his house and kill civilians; all the sentiment in Israel was how satisfying and just it was to kill a man whose ideology and activity had been so virulent and destructive.
But Mr. Halbertal takes quite seriously the threat that Hamas poses to Israel’s existence, and that issue affects him in his judgments of the war.
“Rockets from Hamas could eventually reach all of Israel,” he said. “This is not a fantasy. It is a real problem. So there is a gap between actual images on the screen and the geopolitical situation.
“You have Al Jazeera standing at Shifa Hospital and the wounded are coming in,” he continued, referring to an Arab news outlet. “So you have this great Goliath crushing these poor people, and they are perceived as victims. But from the Israeli perspective, Hamas and Hezbollah are really the spearhead of a whole larger threat that is invisible. Israelis feel like the tiny David faced with an immense Muslim Goliath. The question is: who is the David here?”
The war, of course, is portrayed differently here and abroad. What Israelis see on the front pages of their newspapers and on their evening broadcasts is not what the rest of the world is reading and seeing. Israeli news focuses on Israeli suffering — the continuing rocket attacks on Israel, the wounded Israeli soldiers with pictures from Gaza coming later. On a day last week when the foreign news media focused on Red Cross allegations of possible war crimes, Israeli news outlets played down the story.
But the Israeli news media are not so much determining the national agenda as reflecting it. Even the left and what was long called the peace camp consider this conflict almost entirely the responsibility of Hamas, and thus a moral and just struggle.
“By this stage in the first and second Lebanon wars, there were much larger street demonstrations, vigils and op-ed pieces,” said Janet Aviad, a former sociologist and peace activist. “But in this case, the entire Israeli public is angry at the immoral behavior of Hamas.”
The writer A.B. Yehoshua, who opposes Israel’s occupation and promotes a Palestinian state, has been trying to explain the war to foreigners.
“ ‘Imagine,’ I tell a French reporter, ‘that every two days a missile falls in the Champs-Élysées and only the glass windows of the shops break and five people suffer from shock,’ ” Mr. Yehoshua told a reporter from Yediot Aharonot, a Tel Aviv newspaper. “ ‘What would you say? Wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you send missiles at Belgium if it were responsible for missiles on your grand boulevard?’ ”
Thank you for your notes of support. I am sorry that I can't reply to everyone individually.
For the latest news about what is really taking place -- please go to the Jerusalem Post homepage: www.jpost.com
Shalom,
elliot
Wed: What a democracy owes itself
There is something unpalatable about banning political parties. During the coldest days of the Cold War, American voters were never deprived of the chance to vote for Gus Hall and his Soviet-funded Communist Party USA. In Germany, voters can today opt for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. The British National Party, whose mission is to secure a future for "indigenous" white people, is there for UK voters.
In contrast, authoritarian countries show little compunction about banning. Saudi Arabia bars the Green Party; Sudan and Cuba outlaw all parties. And Syria allows opposition parties that accept the "vanguard role" of the ruling Ba'ath Party.
On Monday, the Knesset Central Elections Committee, comprising 25 politicians and one jurist, disqualified Balad and the United Arab List from running in the February 10 elections. The consensus was that both support terrorism, incitement and reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Arab critics retorted that the decision proved Israel is "racist" and "fascist."
The High Court of Justice, which overruled an effort to disqualify Balad prior to the 2006 elections, will make the final call. The attorney-general's office is on record as determining that there is not enough evidence to disqualify either party.
But overturning the ban this time may be harder. The Knesset recently passed a new law based on clause 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset, which outlaws candidates who deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state; engage in incitement, or support violence against Israel by an enemy state or terror organization. The amended legislation adds that anyone who illegally visited an enemy state in the past seven years can be banned.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on challenges to the amended law.
DEMOCRACIES are not obligated to commit suicide. Spain, for instance, bans the political party affiliated with the terror group ETA. Similarly, US law makes it illegal for an organization that abets the use of violence against the government to seek office.
The case for banning Balad seems fairly plain. While it's off-putting to hear MK Jamal Zahalka say, "We are not Zionists and we will never be," the reason for keeping his party out of the Knesset is that it refuses to dissociate from its former leader Azmi Bishara - with whom Zahalka proudly consults - who fled to Syria after the Second Lebanon War, fearing arrest as a Hizbullah agent.
The case against Tibi's UAL party is not clear-cut. He is perhaps the most intellectually formidable of the Arab anti-Zionists, has a disarming personality, and calibrates his actions to stay just within the law. He won't declare unequivocally that he opposes terrorism, merely "militarization of the intifada."
At a 2007 Fatah rally in Ramallah, Tibi urged continued struggle against Israel "until all of the Palestinian land is freed." Yasser Arafat's former consigliere tells Palestinians that Israel wants to "eliminate" them "en route to the elimination of the ideas of Palestinian freedom and liberty."
Tibi says he does not oppose the state - just its policies. And he too declares that Arab citizens "will never accept Zionism..." He will not, he says, stop visiting enemy states.
Paradoxically, the disappearance of Balad and UAL from the Knesset might allow the emergence of Arab parties that actually cared about building the kinds of parliamentary alliances that can get things done for the Arab sector.
Israel's proportional representation system allowed the UAL and Balad to gain six seats in the current Knesset. The tragic dynamic is that the more radical the party, the more support it garners from the Arab public. It doesn't help matters that the major parties give Arab voters little incentive to shun the extremists.
In a world where 21 states define themselves as "Arab," and 56 proudly identify as Islamic, we do have a problem with Knesset members who begrudge Jewish self-determination within the rubric of a democratic Israel that respects minority rights.
The Likud's Bennie Begin cautions that Israeli society must be "very, very, careful" about outlawing factions or disenfranchising constituencies in wartime. To that we would add: But neither should our polity shy away from making tough decisions to protect the system from those who would destabilize it.
Tuesday: Egypt at the crossroads
(With Sarah Honig)
For a myriad reasons it suits those who mold international public opinion to minimize the intrinsic importance of Egypt's contiguity to the Gaza Strip. Not only does Egypt border Gaza, it even ruled it for most of the time between 1948 and 1967. This geographic reality could well become the source of Gaza's salvation just as, in recent years, it became the source of its misfortune. Egypt's role is pivotal.
Hamas propagandists like to portray Gaza as "one big prison" totally blockaded by Israel. Yet, as any map shows, Gaza isn't fully encircled by Israel. Its southern end, the Philadelphi Corridor, borders Egyptian Sinai.
This outlet could, assuming prudence and good will, become Gaza's lifeline. Or it could continue to serve as a gateway for the importation of death - which is what it became during years of assiduous weapons smuggling by Hamas.
There can be no lasting stability between Israel and Gaza unless the Philadelphi Corridor is plugged up to prevent gun-running and transformed, instead, into a conduit for improving Gazans' living standards. This necessitates a vigilant presence.
The buildup of Gaza's rocket arsenal since 2005 illustrates what happens when so vital a passage is abandoned to the supervision of a disinclined Cairo and international observers with no clout. It is this state of affairs that allowed Hamas commanders to travel freely in and out of Gaza for training in Iran.
While IDF deployment along the Corridor offers the best way to stop Hamas smuggling in weapons, terrorists and illicit cash, it is not our first preference. Such a deployment would be diplomatically and militarily problematic. The international community does not want to see Israel carve out a buffer zone there, and holding that thin sliver of territory would leave our soldiers highly vulnerable.
The best way - militarily, diplomatically and politically - to secure this crucial bit of real estate is from the Egyptian, not the Gazan side.
WERE Egyptian goodwill unadulterated and its commitment to getting the job done unstinting, sealing Philadelphi would still be a tall order.
Alas, Egypt has not over-extended itself. Its failure to keep Gaza from becoming a combustible repository of Hamas weaponry isn't merely the result, as Cairo claims, of not having enough personnel on the border because the Israel-Egypt peace treaty caps their allowable number.
In reality, Hamas's ability to connect Gaza and Sinai via hundreds of tunnels has better explanations: the failure to check rampant lawlessness among Sinai Beduin tribes; sclerotic Egyptian decision-making, which deprives officials on the spot of authority; and the failure to adequately recompense those charged with securing the border, leaving them susceptible to bakshish.
But the best explanation is that Hosni Mubarak's regime failed to make the cessation of smuggling its own priority. While on the one hand, it didn't want Hamas to grow ever stronger, it didn't, on the other hand, want to be seen as collaborating with Jerusalem against Hamas. Trying to have it both ways has now come back to bite the regime. It inadvertently helped create the explosive situation that forced Israel into Operation Cast Lead.
Egypt is in a bind. Its own national interest isn't far from Israel's, yet it dare not inflame its domestic Islamist opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is closely tied to Hamas. It is understandably loath to allow a free flow of Gazans - who might have Brotherhood or Iranian ties and stir up more unrest inside Egypt.
Keeping the current situation on a low flame may strike Egypt as the least distasteful of a poor menu of choices. Yet it is a recipe for further bloodshed. If the Philadelphi Corridor isn't permanently secured, another - worse - round of warfare is inevitable. It would leave Hamas approaching Hizbullah in strength and posing an even greater risk of destabilization within Egypt.
Egypt stands at a fateful crossroads. It must, finally, overcome its inhibitions vis-a-vis its own Islamists and take real action to stop arms trafficking. Alternatively, it must allow an empowered multi-national military presence on its soil to do the job.
Either way, Egypt ought to desire the most effective supervisory mechanism, one it can oversee and coordinate, thereby cementing its status as regional leader.
Monday:Israel goes it alone
The world must be wondering, 17 days into Operation Cast Lead, why it is taking so long for Jerusalem to cave into pressure for a cease-fire in Gaza. From the UN Security Council, that renowned bastion of international probity, and the constellation of Muslim, Arab and non-aligned states to our unwavering European allies, the international community - and much of the media - wants Israel to stop fighting.
We Israelis can hear these erstwhile friends in Europe and the media saying: "Everybody is wrong, and you alone are right?"
They continue: "Yes, Israel has a right to self-defense - but must your IDF kill innocent civilians and destroy buildings in the process? Can't your tanks avoid harming them? Your failure to fight a war that is televised live, 24/7, without spilling blood has enraged the Arab street. We don't want this fury turned against our interests in the Middle East."
That's why London's Telegraph could withdraw its "support."
"There comes a point beyond which an operation of this sort becomes… morally unjustifiable," it said. "The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is so severe that a cease-fire is essential, irrespective of whether Israel feels it has achieved its military objectives."
By this logic, Britain should have thrown in the towel in its war against Germany by September 18, 1939 - 17 days into WWII. Instead, Winston Churchill fought on for five long years at an awful - but morally justifiable - cost in Allied and enemy civilian lives.
The New York Times, likewise, sympathizes with Israel's predicament but worries that trying to wrest Gaza from Hamas's grip will complicate the efforts of the incoming Obama administration to broker peace.
Yet the reality is precisely the opposite: Unless Hamas is defanged, the prospect that relative moderates among the Palestinians, led by Mahmoud Abbas, will be emboldened to strike a deal with Israel is - nil.
The reaction of Israel's European allies in particular has been instructive. Having abandoned Israel as it defends itself against a transparently fanatical Hamas - and after Israel unilaterally uprooted its settlements and pulled its soldiers out of Gaza in 2005 - Israel will be mindful of how much their support is worth when the time comes to "take risks for peace" in the West Bank.
SPEAKING AT the Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made Israelis feel proud when he summed up the justice of the struggle and denounced the world's callous reaction: "For three weeks now… Israel has been making an impressive military effort in the Gaza Strip in order to change the security situation in the south of the country. For many years we've shown restraint. We reined in our reactions. We gritted our teeth and absorbed barrage after barrage.
"No country in the world - not even those who preach morality at us - would have shown similar patience and self-control. At the end of the day, the... obligation to defend our citizens - after we issued many warnings - led us to the unavoidable decision [that we had] to defend our [people], whose lives had become intolerable.
"We knew in advance that this struggle would be neither easy nor simple. We did not delude ourselves that what seemed natural, clear and self-evident for any other country would be similarly accepted when the State of Israel is involved. But this did not, and does not hinder our determination to defend our citizens.
"We have never agreed that anyone should decide in our place if we are allowed to strike at those who bomb our kindergartens and schools; nor will ever agree to it...
"Israel is nearing its goal [of changing] the security situation in the south so that our citizens can experience security and stability in the long term. We must not, at the last minute, squander what has been achieved in this unprecedented national effort that has restored a spirit of unity to our nation.
"The Israeli public, especially the residents of the south, have the patience and willingness needed. So does the Israeli government."
Amen to that.
Israel would have preferred to act with the support of those who claim to back our right to self-defense. In a cynical world, Israel must press ahead without it.
The above editorial generated the following NYT piece
Israelis United on War as Censure Rises Abroad
BYLINE: ETHAN BRONNER
Published: Tuesday, January 13, 2009
JERUSALEM — To Israel’s critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel’s war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped.
Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.
Since Israeli warplanes opened the assault on Gaza 17 days ago, about 900 Palestinians have been reported killed, many of them civilians. Red Cross workers were denied access to scores of dead and wounded Gazans, and a civilian crowd near a United Nations school was hit, with at least 40 people killed.
But voices of dissent in this country have been rare. And while tens of thousands have poured into the streets of world capitals demonstrating against the Israeli military operation, antiwar rallies here have struggled to draw 1,000 participants. The Peace Now organization has received many messages from supporters telling it to stay out of the streets on this one.
As the editorial page of The Jerusalem Post put it on Monday, the world must be wondering, do Israelis really believe that everybody is wrong and they alone are right?
The answer is yes.
“It is very frustrating for us not to be understood,” remarked Yoel Esteron, editor of a daily business newspaper called Calcalist. “Almost 100 percent of Israelis feel that the world is hypocritical. Where was the world when our cities were rocketed for eight years and our soldier was kidnapped? Why should we care about the world’s view now?”
Israel, which is sometimes a fractured, bickering society, has turned in the past couple of weeks into a paradigm of unity and mutual support. Flags are flying high. Celebrities are visiting schoolchildren in at-risk areas, soldiers are praising the equipment and camaraderie of their army units, and neighbors are worried about families whose fathers are on reserve duty. Ask people anywhere how they feel about the army’s barring journalists from entering Gaza and the response is: let the army do its job.
Israelis deeply believe, rightly or wrongly, that their military works harder than most to spare civilians, holding their fire in many more cases than using it.
Because Hamas booby-traps schools, apartment buildings and the zoo, and its fighters hide among civilians, it is Hamas that is viewed here as responsible for the civilian toll. Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction and gets help and inspiration from Iran, so that what looks to the world like a disproportionate war of choice is seen by many here as an obligatory war for existence.
“This is a just war and we don’t feel guilty when civilians we don’t intend to hurt get hurt, because we feel Hamas uses these civilians as human shields,” said Elliot Jager, editorial page editor of The Jerusalem Post, who happened to answer his phone for an interview while in Ashkelon, an Israeli city about 10 miles from Gaza, standing in front of a house that had been hit two hours earlier by a Hamas rocket.
“We do feel bad about it, but we don’t feel guilty,” Mr. Jager added. “The most ethical moral imperative is for Israel to prevail in this conflict over an immoral Islamist philosophy. It is a zero sum conflict. That is what is not understood outside this country.”
It is true that there are voices of concern here that the war may be outliving its value. Worries over the risk to Israeli troops and over even steeper civilian casualties as the ground war escalates have produced calls to declare victory and pull out.
For many of the 1.4 million Israelis who are Arabs, the war has produced a very different feeling, a mix of anger and despair. The largest demonstration against the war so far, with some 6,000 participants, was organized by an Arab political party. But that is still distinctly a minority view. Polls have shown nearly 90 percent support for the war thus far, and street interviews confirm that Israelis not only favor it but do so quite strongly. The country’s leaders, while seeking an arrangement to stop Hamas’s ability to rearm, do not want a face-saving agreement. They want one that works, or else they want to continue the war until Hamas has lost either its rockets or its will to fire them.
Boaz Gaon, a playwright and peace activist, said he found it deeply depressing how the Israeli public had embraced the military’s arguments in explaining the deaths of civilians. But he was livid at Hamas, both for what it had done to its own people and civilians in the south, and for its impact on the Israeli left.
“Hamas has pushed Israeli thinking back 30 years,” he said. “It has killed the peace camp.”
Moshe Halbertal, a left-leaning professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, helped write the army’s ethics code. He said he knew from personal experience how much laborious discussion went into deciding when it was acceptable to shoot at a legitimate target if civilians were nearby, adding that there had been several events in this war in which he suspected that the wrong decision had been made.
For example, Israel killed a top Hamas ideologue, Nizar Rayyan, during the first week of the war and at the same time killed his four wives and at least nine of his children. Looking back at it, Mr. Halbertal disapproves, assuming that the decision was made consciously, even if Mr. Rayyan purposely hid among his family to protect himself, as it appears he did. Yet almost no one here publicly questioned the decision to drop a bomb on his house and kill civilians; all the sentiment in Israel was how satisfying and just it was to kill a man whose ideology and activity had been so virulent and destructive.
But Mr. Halbertal takes quite seriously the threat that Hamas poses to Israel’s existence, and that issue affects him in his judgments of the war.
“Rockets from Hamas could eventually reach all of Israel,” he said. “This is not a fantasy. It is a real problem. So there is a gap between actual images on the screen and the geopolitical situation.
“You have Al Jazeera standing at Shifa Hospital and the wounded are coming in,” he continued, referring to an Arab news outlet. “So you have this great Goliath crushing these poor people, and they are perceived as victims. But from the Israeli perspective, Hamas and Hezbollah are really the spearhead of a whole larger threat that is invisible. Israelis feel like the tiny David faced with an immense Muslim Goliath. The question is: who is the David here?”
The war, of course, is portrayed differently here and abroad. What Israelis see on the front pages of their newspapers and on their evening broadcasts is not what the rest of the world is reading and seeing. Israeli news focuses on Israeli suffering — the continuing rocket attacks on Israel, the wounded Israeli soldiers with pictures from Gaza coming later. On a day last week when the foreign news media focused on Red Cross allegations of possible war crimes, Israeli news outlets played down the story.
But the Israeli news media are not so much determining the national agenda as reflecting it. Even the left and what was long called the peace camp consider this conflict almost entirely the responsibility of Hamas, and thus a moral and just struggle.
“By this stage in the first and second Lebanon wars, there were much larger street demonstrations, vigils and op-ed pieces,” said Janet Aviad, a former sociologist and peace activist. “But in this case, the entire Israeli public is angry at the immoral behavior of Hamas.”
The writer A.B. Yehoshua, who opposes Israel’s occupation and promotes a Palestinian state, has been trying to explain the war to foreigners.
“ ‘Imagine,’ I tell a French reporter, ‘that every two days a missile falls in the Champs-Élysées and only the glass windows of the shops break and five people suffer from shock,’ ” Mr. Yehoshua told a reporter from Yediot Aharonot, a Tel Aviv newspaper. “ ‘What would you say? Wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you send missiles at Belgium if it were responsible for missiles on your grand boulevard?’ ”
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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