Israeli Radio's morning news anchor Aryeh Golan summed up the feelings of Israelis on Sunday when he said, "In Turkey, the government is against us, in Egypt the mob is against us and at the UN the majority is against us."
Israel's international isolation is ever more palpable. Turkey, led by its Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has frozen diplomatic relations. On the Palestinian front, it is hard to conceive of a scenario in which the UN General Assembly's automatic majority would not rubber stamp Mahmoud Abbas's unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In increasingly anarchic Egypt, a bad situation turned dramatically worse over the weekend requiring the rescue of six besieged Israeli Embassy security guards from a Cairo lynch mob.
Against the background of roiling Arab uprisings from Damascus to Cairo and from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf – none of which has anything to do with Israel – censorious voices continued to fault the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel's increasing isolation. The critics range from a habitually unsympathetic global media, to wobbly friends in the U.S. and EU, to domestic Israeli pundits and opposition politicians.
Why, critics ask, doesn't Israel take "bold conciliatory" steps toward the Palestinians? Why does it adhere to its demand that Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish state? Why won't Jerusalem prostrate itself before Ankara, lift the blockade of Gaza and thereby allow Hamas to solidify its control of the Strip unhindered? Why must Jerusalem carp so persistently about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons when so many European countries not to mention China, Russia and India enjoy a robust commerce with the mullahs?
The critics' disparate voices agree that Israel needs to stop being such a nuisance, such an ingrate in the assessment of former US secretary of defense Robert Gates. In that regard, Jerusalem's diplomatic dependency on Washington during the cascading crises with Turkey, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority has undoubtedly been awkward for all concerned in light of the prime minister's "tense relationship" with President Barack Obama.
For some Euro-left critics, however, Israel is simply irredeemable. David Hearst, an editorial writer at Britain's anti-Zionist Guardian implies that Israel is "a supremacist state" and that, maybe, the Jews deserve to lose their country.
But the voices heard most incessantly by Israelis themselves are those of Netanyahu's domestic critics. Shimon Shiffer, a leading columnist at Yediot Aharanot sounded oddly forbearing of the Egyptian lynch mob noting that, after all, Menachem Begin's pledge to grant Palestinian Arabs autonomous rule never fully transitioned into statehood. Never mind that the PLO torpedoed Begin's autonomy efforts every step of the way and that statehood wasn't the goal.
For Netanyahu critics, it is axiomatic that the Arab street needs to express its frustration. Ben Caspit at Ma'ariv allows that Israel’s erstwhile EU and American friends have a point in claiming that Netanyahu is leading the country toward an "abyss." Gideon Levy at Haaretz nobly acknowledges that "Not everything was Israel's fault" though, ultimately it really is because Israeli "arrogance" is to blame for the deterioration of relations with Turkey and Egypt. Yoel Marcus, also at Haaretz, moans that Netanyahu "is getting on the nerves of the entire world."
On Israel's Channel 2, diplomatic reporter Udi Segal not-so-obliquely blamed Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (just minutes after interviewing him live Saturday night) for the siege at the Cairo embassy citing "lack of momentum" on the Palestinian track.
Indeed, government critics uniformly agree that the absence of "momentum" on the Palestinian track – not necessarily genuine progress toward a sustainable peace, but the absence of the heretofore ubiquitous illusion of momentum embodied in the "peace process" – is responsible for Israel's diplomatic isolation. Following this line of thinking, Netanyahu's failure to maintain the "momentum" at any cost has caused Israel's isolation problem.
On the political front, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the new elder statesman of the Labor Party declared, “If I were Bibi Netanyahu, I would recognize a Palestinian state. We would then negotiate borders and security." And Kadima Leader Tzipi Livni was on the radio to say that were she in-charge Israel would be enjoying fruitful negotiations with the Palestinians because she would not adhere to the requirement that Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish state; moreover, she would also know better how to finesse the Turks.
This indulgence by Netanyahu's domestic opponents in blaming Israel first may offer them emotional catharsis, but it hardly reflects the view of the general public. A survey conducted for Israel Radio's Reshet Bet (and broadcast on September 1) indicated that in any new elections, Netanyahu's Likud Party would be trump Livni's Kadima (27 Knesset seats to 18). Parenthetically, recent polling of Palestinian Arab opinion suggests an element of ambivalence about Abbas's unilateralist U.N. approach with 59.3% of West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem Arabs wanting to see a resumption of negotiations with Israel.
Anyhow, the critics' policy prescriptions appear strikingly half-baked. Netanyahu's insistence on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is rooted not in semantics but in the idea that only such acknowledgment of Israel's legitimacy would connote a true end to the conflict and negate further claims on Israeli territory. For that very reason, Abbas continues to withhold recognition while insisting on the right to "return" Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and millions of their descendents to Israel proper. Half the Knesset members of Livni's own party, catalyzed by former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, have backed Netanyahu's stance.
As for Ben-Eliezer's risible suggestion that Israel back Palestinian statehood along the vulnerable 1949 Armistice Lines and afterwards negotiate permanent borders and demilitarization, what possible incentive would the already intransigent West Bank Palestinians – who sat cooling their heels during a ten-month long settlement freeze – have for accommodating Israeli security interests? And what sway would Abbas have over Hamas which continues to block "the president of Palestine" from even visiting Gaza?
If Labor's new leader turns out to be Shelly Yachimovich she will likely maneuver the party away from Ben-Eliezer's politically poisonous security positions. So the critics' counsel to "don't just stand there, do something" strikes many Israelis as reckless.
What is more, far from "isolating itself," as Netanyahu's critics claim, Israel's current predicament is largely the product of an unremitting and decades-long onslaught by the Arab camp and its amen corner to divide, isolate and ultimately wipe out the Zionist enterprise. That makes overcoming Israel's isolation problem a moral imperative for all those who champion the values of Western civilization.
###
Friday, September 16, 2011
Israel's Isolation Problem -- Turkey, Egypt, the UN... Just What is Going On?
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, September 14, 2011
Treaty Trouble - Egypt Wants to Amend the 1979 Peace Treaty
Tension along the 150-mile (230-kilometer) Israeli-Egyptian border remains high in light of intelligence information that Gaza-based Palestinian Arab Islamists plan further cross-border attacks from Sinai into the Negev.
An August 18 incursion near Eilat claimed eight Israeli lives and has generated recriminations within Israel's defense establishment over why the dispatchers were eliminated only after the attack.
Israel relied on Cairo to prevent the incursion. While Egyptian border guards spotted the terrorists they did not intercept them. Later in hot pursuit of the attackers three Egyptian guards were killed either by accidental IDF gunfire or when an explosive belt worn by one of the fleeing gunmen detonated. Three of the infiltrators turned out to have been Egyptian citizens. In response, the Cairo Street erupted in renewed anti-Israel frenzy. Young men competed for adulation with rival claims over who scaled the Israeli Embassy building to tear down its flag for burning.
Rather than take Cairo to task for allowing the cross-border incursion in the first place, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres apologized for the loss of Egyptian life. Planning by Gaza's Popular Resistance Committees for so sizable an attack is unlikely to have escaped Hamas's notice. But concern over deteriorating relations with post-Mubarak Egypt apparently inhibited an Israeli retaliation against Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
The 1979 Peace Treaty obligates Egypt to secure Sinai with a limited troop presence while keeping it demilitarized. After Operation Cast Lead in January 2009, Israel agreed to permit Egypt to move more troops into the Peninsula to contain jihadi elements, Palestinian Islamists and Bedouin gangs responsible for repeated attacks on a pipeline supplying natural gas to Israel (and Jordan). Since the Mubarak regime was toppled, Israel has twice agreed to allow Cairo to deploy more troops. Egypt now has 10,000 troops in the Peninsula with about 4,000 stationed along the Israeli border. It is unclear whether these ad hoc increases are reversible or whether the security vacuum -- a record 2,000 infiltrators mostly illegal refugees managed to cross the Egypt-Israel border last month -- is the result of weak policing in a difficult terrain or a persistent lack of will carried over from the Mubarak era. Not surprisingly, the flow of ever more lethal weaponry making its way through Sinai to Hamas-controlled Gaza has been increasing notwithstanding episodic Egyptian containment efforts.
Egyptians say they view the need to obtain Israeli approval for shifting troops into Sinai an affront to their national pride and their country's sovereignty. Egypt's Supreme Military Council has been pushing hard to amend the treaty arguing that new security threats demand permanently lifting the ceiling on the number of troops allowed into the Peninsula. The treaty does contain a clause that allows security arrangements to be amended by mutual agreement. Both Cairo and Jerusalem agree that ad hoc solutions have been exhausted. Israel's Haaretz newspaper supports official Egyptian demands to amend the treaty; Egypt's Al Ahram said what Egyptians really want is to have it abrogated altogether. Indeed, leading Egyptian figures have repeatedly emphasized that the peace treaty is not "sacrosanct."
With Turkish-Israel relations at a nadir, ties with Jordan practically on life-support, the EU wavering over whether to back Mahmoud Abbas's unilateral push for UN recognition of a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, and the Jewish state facing a range of security threats stemming from Iran and its proxies, it's no wonder that Jerusalem has been considering taking exceptional steps to preserve the cold peace with Cairo.
Barak has been floating the idea, in advance of anticipated presidential elections in Egypt this winter, of holding a strategic dialogue with Cairo in search of ways to make the treaty more palatable to Egyptian voters long inculcated by venomous anti-Israel cant in their media. Barak hopes amending the demilitarization clauses can salvage the treaty. The probable consequence would be abandoning Israel's veto over how many Egyptian troops could be stationed in Sinai. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to changing the treaty but has implied that if formerly offered he'd bring Barak's proposal to the Cabinet.
Hosni Mubarak did nothing to foster support for the peace treaty and occasionally diverted domestic attention by playing the anti-Israel card. Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, Egypt's de-facto ruler, has followed a similar line as illustrated by the continued incarceration of Ilan Grapel on trumped-up espionage charges. Still, if Tantawi (perhaps from behind the scenes) or one of his henchmen continue to rule, the bare bones of the treaty is likely to be preserved in return for continued U.S. military aid ($40 billion since the 1970s). On the other hand, virtually all the declared presidential candidates from across the political spectrum have staked out positions that put into question the long-term viability of the treaty.
Modifying the treaty to appease popular anti-Israel sentiment could open a Pandora's box. If today's limit on the number of soldiers is an "affront" to Egyptian sensibilities who's to say forbidding the Egyptian Air Force from holding maneuvers over Sinai won't be the next "affront" to be overcome? The Jordan-Israel peace treaty is no less unpopular. Would not amending the treaty with Egypt put pressure on King Abdullah II? Moreover, any viable Israeli deal with the Palestinian faction led by Mahmoud Abbas would require demilitarization of the West Bank. What signal would backtracking on the demilitarization of Sinai send to the Palestinians?
If the treaty with Egypt needs to be gutted in order to save it, something may be terribly wrong with the underlying land-for-peace approach.
###
An August 18 incursion near Eilat claimed eight Israeli lives and has generated recriminations within Israel's defense establishment over why the dispatchers were eliminated only after the attack.
Israel relied on Cairo to prevent the incursion. While Egyptian border guards spotted the terrorists they did not intercept them. Later in hot pursuit of the attackers three Egyptian guards were killed either by accidental IDF gunfire or when an explosive belt worn by one of the fleeing gunmen detonated. Three of the infiltrators turned out to have been Egyptian citizens. In response, the Cairo Street erupted in renewed anti-Israel frenzy. Young men competed for adulation with rival claims over who scaled the Israeli Embassy building to tear down its flag for burning.
Rather than take Cairo to task for allowing the cross-border incursion in the first place, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres apologized for the loss of Egyptian life. Planning by Gaza's Popular Resistance Committees for so sizable an attack is unlikely to have escaped Hamas's notice. But concern over deteriorating relations with post-Mubarak Egypt apparently inhibited an Israeli retaliation against Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
The 1979 Peace Treaty obligates Egypt to secure Sinai with a limited troop presence while keeping it demilitarized. After Operation Cast Lead in January 2009, Israel agreed to permit Egypt to move more troops into the Peninsula to contain jihadi elements, Palestinian Islamists and Bedouin gangs responsible for repeated attacks on a pipeline supplying natural gas to Israel (and Jordan). Since the Mubarak regime was toppled, Israel has twice agreed to allow Cairo to deploy more troops. Egypt now has 10,000 troops in the Peninsula with about 4,000 stationed along the Israeli border. It is unclear whether these ad hoc increases are reversible or whether the security vacuum -- a record 2,000 infiltrators mostly illegal refugees managed to cross the Egypt-Israel border last month -- is the result of weak policing in a difficult terrain or a persistent lack of will carried over from the Mubarak era. Not surprisingly, the flow of ever more lethal weaponry making its way through Sinai to Hamas-controlled Gaza has been increasing notwithstanding episodic Egyptian containment efforts.
Egyptians say they view the need to obtain Israeli approval for shifting troops into Sinai an affront to their national pride and their country's sovereignty. Egypt's Supreme Military Council has been pushing hard to amend the treaty arguing that new security threats demand permanently lifting the ceiling on the number of troops allowed into the Peninsula. The treaty does contain a clause that allows security arrangements to be amended by mutual agreement. Both Cairo and Jerusalem agree that ad hoc solutions have been exhausted. Israel's Haaretz newspaper supports official Egyptian demands to amend the treaty; Egypt's Al Ahram said what Egyptians really want is to have it abrogated altogether. Indeed, leading Egyptian figures have repeatedly emphasized that the peace treaty is not "sacrosanct."
With Turkish-Israel relations at a nadir, ties with Jordan practically on life-support, the EU wavering over whether to back Mahmoud Abbas's unilateral push for UN recognition of a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, and the Jewish state facing a range of security threats stemming from Iran and its proxies, it's no wonder that Jerusalem has been considering taking exceptional steps to preserve the cold peace with Cairo.
Barak has been floating the idea, in advance of anticipated presidential elections in Egypt this winter, of holding a strategic dialogue with Cairo in search of ways to make the treaty more palatable to Egyptian voters long inculcated by venomous anti-Israel cant in their media. Barak hopes amending the demilitarization clauses can salvage the treaty. The probable consequence would be abandoning Israel's veto over how many Egyptian troops could be stationed in Sinai. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to changing the treaty but has implied that if formerly offered he'd bring Barak's proposal to the Cabinet.
Hosni Mubarak did nothing to foster support for the peace treaty and occasionally diverted domestic attention by playing the anti-Israel card. Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, Egypt's de-facto ruler, has followed a similar line as illustrated by the continued incarceration of Ilan Grapel on trumped-up espionage charges. Still, if Tantawi (perhaps from behind the scenes) or one of his henchmen continue to rule, the bare bones of the treaty is likely to be preserved in return for continued U.S. military aid ($40 billion since the 1970s). On the other hand, virtually all the declared presidential candidates from across the political spectrum have staked out positions that put into question the long-term viability of the treaty.
Modifying the treaty to appease popular anti-Israel sentiment could open a Pandora's box. If today's limit on the number of soldiers is an "affront" to Egyptian sensibilities who's to say forbidding the Egyptian Air Force from holding maneuvers over Sinai won't be the next "affront" to be overcome? The Jordan-Israel peace treaty is no less unpopular. Would not amending the treaty with Egypt put pressure on King Abdullah II? Moreover, any viable Israeli deal with the Palestinian faction led by Mahmoud Abbas would require demilitarization of the West Bank. What signal would backtracking on the demilitarization of Sinai send to the Palestinians?
If the treaty with Egypt needs to be gutted in order to save it, something may be terribly wrong with the underlying land-for-peace approach.
###
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, July 27, 2011
The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel
Pappe Makes History
Historians writing about Israel's 1948 fight for independence have placed heavy responsibility for the Palestinian Arab refugee problem on the Arab leaders who urged their people to flee Palestine temporarily while the Zionists were to be pushed into the sea. Of course, well before then hundreds of Palestinian Arab moderates who opposed the policies of intransigence, bellicosity and rejectionism had been murdered by the militants.
In the late 1980s a revisionist school of New Historians in Israel, with fresh access to archival material and politicized by their opposition to Israeli settlement policies, put forward a more critical view – which ranged from nuanced to hysterical – that argued Israel's founders had also been culpable for the refugees flight. Such self-criticism and soul-searching, while exasperating to Israel's mainstream, was nevertheless contextualized as an immutable characteristic of the Jewish psyche.
For Ilan Pappe all this is beside the point. The inflammatory author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is out with a new book The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. It regurgitates his creed that the Jewish state was born in sin and that this stain, this moral deformity, is ineradicable. The Haifa-born history professor, self-exiled to Britain, nowadays invests his energies in promoting the Arab cause in general and the academic boycott of his former university in particular.
Pappe's latest polemic focuses on Israel's Arab population, namely those who headed Jewish urgings and did not flee their villages. Never mind. Pappe's premise is that the Jews simply had no moral right to assert their case for national self-determination in Palestine because there were Arabs living there. The Arabs were justified in rejecting every compromise offered including the 1947 UN partition plan which would have created two states – one for them and one for the Jews – because the Jews were "newcomers."
In the course of defeating the invading Arab armies, the Arab Legion and the Palestinian Arab irregulars, the Jews in Pappe's version of history "expelled" over 700,000 refugees and, then, oddly, would not let them return as a state of war between the Arab world and Israel continued.
Pappe is galled "that those who stayed became the 'Arab minority of Israel.'" As soon as the war that claimed one percent of the Jewish population (and ended with a tenuous armistice) was over the Arabs were given citizenship and the right to vote. Were they treated just like the Jews? No. Pappe cannot fathom why their ID cards listed them as "members of the minority community" or why those who abandoned land during the war were prevented from reclaiming it. Or why Israeli Arabs in rural and border areas continued to live under military rule until 1966.
There were dark episodes. Pappe seems to relish retelling the painful calamity of "Kafr Qassem" which took place on the eve of another war, the 1956 Sinai Campaign and in an atmosphere accompanied by heightened fears of Arab fedayeen activity. An awful miscommunication over wartime curfew orders led to the killing by Israeli soldiers of 47 innocent Arabs. A number of those responsible were punished.
Throughout the narrative, Pappe's single-minded devotion to Palestinian victimization sets the tone. His account of the 1976 communist-instigated Land Day rioting, which left six Israeli Arabs dead, therefore misses some salient facts -- notably that the 6, 000 dunams of supposedly "Arab land" expropriated was considerably less than Jewish or state lands also earmarked for development at the time and intended to benefit both Jews and Arabs. Essentially, the Arabs' purpose in that and subsequent annual land day protests is to keep the Galilee a Jew-free zone.
Pappe seems to want it both ways. He tells readers that the Jews had absolutely no reason to imagine that the Arabs among them could conceivably pose a security risk – because "Palestinians by and large accepted Israel as a fait accompli" – yet challenges outside Arab critics for besmirching the community as being too docile. To the contrary, he reports some Israeli Arabs allegedly contemplated "an Algerian-like struggle." He even cites "as a famous case" (without a hint of disapproval) the 1969 bombing of a Hebrew University cafeteria by Arabs from the Galilee. Moreover, he credits the PLO for being considerate of the Israeli Arab predicament in not insisting they engage in systematic violence. He lauds the total solidarity, post-1967, between Israeli Arabs and their West Bank and Gaza cousins. Today, he notes, two increasingly popular Islamist movements compete for Israeli Arab affections; one of which, led by Raid Salah, rejects voting in national elections as conferring legitimacy upon the Jewish state. Tellingly, a reason Pappe opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords was because the national rights of Israeli Arabs as Palestinians had not been protected.
He describes Ehud Barak's recklessly munificent concessions, rejected by Yasir Arafat at Camp David in 2000, as little more than a Zionist diktat. As for the frightening Arab riots of October 2000, unleashed in solidarity with the outbreak of the second intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, and which briefly severed the main north-south Israeli road system – it was a mere "gathering of youths" who were cold-bloodily picked off by "police snipers. Pappe is incensed that an unfeeling Hebrew press didn't bother to provide capsule obituaries for the Israeli Arab rioters even though it did for their Jewish victims.
Not surprisingly, Pappe sees no justification for granting preferential treatment to Israelis who serve in the IDF or do other forms of national service between ages 18-21. Most Israeli Arabs do neither. Instead, he finds it contemptible that there may be colleges that make some Arab high-school graduates wait until age 20 before admitting them into Israeli universities. In fact, most universities offer remedial programs to prepare Arab youths socially and scholastically for success in college. He does not deny that "Palestinian citizens of Israel" – he abhors the terms Israeli Arabs – have achieved successes in a wide range of fields. It's simply irrefutable despite an unbelievably complicated political environment. Pappe himself points out that 25 percent of medical students are Israeli Arabs despite his imaginary "latent apartheid." Yes there are 10 or so Arab members of the 120-member Knesset, but Pappe's complaint is that none sit on its intelligence subcommittee. Go figure. Just speaking Arabic in a shopping mall can open one up to attack by Jewish ruffians, he says. No doubt there are such cases, but he and I plainly do not frequent the same malls.
Even in Pappe's Israel, life is not entirely hellish for the Arab minority. He credits Adalah, an advocacy group funded by the New Israel Fund, for doing a good job at advocating for the "collective rights" of Palestinian Israelis. He is buoyed by the fact that "there are growing spaces of leisure and pastime" where Arabs and Jews enjoy restaurants, coffee houses, and parks together – as if this is really something new. And in perhaps the most condescending aside in the book, he lauds the absence of segregation in public transportation!
Arabs may legitimately control 22 nation states rooted in Arab ethnicity; Muslims may legitimately reign over 56 countries in which religion and citizenship are symbiotically linked. Only the existence of one Jewish state founded on basis of a 2,000 year-old civilizational connection between the Jewish people and Zion is, according to Pappe's analysis, illegitimate.
Even in the pantheon of Blame-Israel-First revisionist historians, Pappe's stands beyond the pale.
His friend and mentor, Avi Shlaim, author of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah and the Zionist Movement, has claimed that Jordan never actually planned to help push Israel into the sea when it invaded in 1948, and that afterwards David Ben-Gurion supposedly had ample opportunity to find a way to make peace with Abdullah before the monarch was assassinated in 1951, but didn't. Shlaim places exclusive blame on Ben-Gurion and on every Israeli prime minister since him, for perpetuating the conflict. He sees Zionism as having been hijacked by Israel's right-wing to perpetuate the "illegal occupation." Yet Shlaim opposes anti-Israel academic boycotts and has described Zionism, presumably in its liberal manifestation, as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.
Similarly, the late Simha Flapan may have recklessly damaged Israel's image with The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by charging that the Zionists were somehow morally responsible for the Palestinian flight because, deep down, they did not really want them to stay. Still, Flapan, a life-long socialist, maintained that he never questioned "the moral justification and historical necessity of Zionism."
If Pappe is a prisoner of his own ideology, the trajectory of Benny Morris shows that at least one of the original revisionist historians has been capable of reevaluating his position even if he can't quite bring himself to explicitly recant.
In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Morris held both Israel and the Arabs culpable for the refugees' flight. One can almost commiserate with Morris's desire to somehow split the difference. If only those who promulgated the Palestinian Arab narrative were similarly inclined. But in the final analysis, the onus must rest with the Arabs; their leaders miscalculated and the masses paid the price.
Morris now claims his egregious 1987 account of Zionism as a "colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement ... intent on politically, and even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs," referred to the 1930s before Zionist leaders embraced multiple plans for partition of Palestine. Morris has turned out to be a passionate Zionist; a liberal critic of Israeli settlement policies, but a defender of the country in the court of world opinion. His recent work, One State, Two States placed decisive responsibility for the continuation of the conflict squarely on the Arabs – a stance that has earned him excommunication by the remaining revisionists.
There is little prospect, however, that Pappe will allow facts to dent his pathological loathing of Israel. History works in mysterious ways. Pappe lost his bid for a Knesset seat in 1996 on the communist ticket. The Knesset's gain is the academy's loss. Pity the student assigned this book and shame on any professor for assigning it.
###
Historians writing about Israel's 1948 fight for independence have placed heavy responsibility for the Palestinian Arab refugee problem on the Arab leaders who urged their people to flee Palestine temporarily while the Zionists were to be pushed into the sea. Of course, well before then hundreds of Palestinian Arab moderates who opposed the policies of intransigence, bellicosity and rejectionism had been murdered by the militants.
In the late 1980s a revisionist school of New Historians in Israel, with fresh access to archival material and politicized by their opposition to Israeli settlement policies, put forward a more critical view – which ranged from nuanced to hysterical – that argued Israel's founders had also been culpable for the refugees flight. Such self-criticism and soul-searching, while exasperating to Israel's mainstream, was nevertheless contextualized as an immutable characteristic of the Jewish psyche.
For Ilan Pappe all this is beside the point. The inflammatory author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is out with a new book The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. It regurgitates his creed that the Jewish state was born in sin and that this stain, this moral deformity, is ineradicable. The Haifa-born history professor, self-exiled to Britain, nowadays invests his energies in promoting the Arab cause in general and the academic boycott of his former university in particular.
Pappe's latest polemic focuses on Israel's Arab population, namely those who headed Jewish urgings and did not flee their villages. Never mind. Pappe's premise is that the Jews simply had no moral right to assert their case for national self-determination in Palestine because there were Arabs living there. The Arabs were justified in rejecting every compromise offered including the 1947 UN partition plan which would have created two states – one for them and one for the Jews – because the Jews were "newcomers."
In the course of defeating the invading Arab armies, the Arab Legion and the Palestinian Arab irregulars, the Jews in Pappe's version of history "expelled" over 700,000 refugees and, then, oddly, would not let them return as a state of war between the Arab world and Israel continued.
Pappe is galled "that those who stayed became the 'Arab minority of Israel.'" As soon as the war that claimed one percent of the Jewish population (and ended with a tenuous armistice) was over the Arabs were given citizenship and the right to vote. Were they treated just like the Jews? No. Pappe cannot fathom why their ID cards listed them as "members of the minority community" or why those who abandoned land during the war were prevented from reclaiming it. Or why Israeli Arabs in rural and border areas continued to live under military rule until 1966.
There were dark episodes. Pappe seems to relish retelling the painful calamity of "Kafr Qassem" which took place on the eve of another war, the 1956 Sinai Campaign and in an atmosphere accompanied by heightened fears of Arab fedayeen activity. An awful miscommunication over wartime curfew orders led to the killing by Israeli soldiers of 47 innocent Arabs. A number of those responsible were punished.
Throughout the narrative, Pappe's single-minded devotion to Palestinian victimization sets the tone. His account of the 1976 communist-instigated Land Day rioting, which left six Israeli Arabs dead, therefore misses some salient facts -- notably that the 6, 000 dunams of supposedly "Arab land" expropriated was considerably less than Jewish or state lands also earmarked for development at the time and intended to benefit both Jews and Arabs. Essentially, the Arabs' purpose in that and subsequent annual land day protests is to keep the Galilee a Jew-free zone.
Pappe seems to want it both ways. He tells readers that the Jews had absolutely no reason to imagine that the Arabs among them could conceivably pose a security risk – because "Palestinians by and large accepted Israel as a fait accompli" – yet challenges outside Arab critics for besmirching the community as being too docile. To the contrary, he reports some Israeli Arabs allegedly contemplated "an Algerian-like struggle." He even cites "as a famous case" (without a hint of disapproval) the 1969 bombing of a Hebrew University cafeteria by Arabs from the Galilee. Moreover, he credits the PLO for being considerate of the Israeli Arab predicament in not insisting they engage in systematic violence. He lauds the total solidarity, post-1967, between Israeli Arabs and their West Bank and Gaza cousins. Today, he notes, two increasingly popular Islamist movements compete for Israeli Arab affections; one of which, led by Raid Salah, rejects voting in national elections as conferring legitimacy upon the Jewish state. Tellingly, a reason Pappe opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords was because the national rights of Israeli Arabs as Palestinians had not been protected.
He describes Ehud Barak's recklessly munificent concessions, rejected by Yasir Arafat at Camp David in 2000, as little more than a Zionist diktat. As for the frightening Arab riots of October 2000, unleashed in solidarity with the outbreak of the second intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, and which briefly severed the main north-south Israeli road system – it was a mere "gathering of youths" who were cold-bloodily picked off by "police snipers. Pappe is incensed that an unfeeling Hebrew press didn't bother to provide capsule obituaries for the Israeli Arab rioters even though it did for their Jewish victims.
Not surprisingly, Pappe sees no justification for granting preferential treatment to Israelis who serve in the IDF or do other forms of national service between ages 18-21. Most Israeli Arabs do neither. Instead, he finds it contemptible that there may be colleges that make some Arab high-school graduates wait until age 20 before admitting them into Israeli universities. In fact, most universities offer remedial programs to prepare Arab youths socially and scholastically for success in college. He does not deny that "Palestinian citizens of Israel" – he abhors the terms Israeli Arabs – have achieved successes in a wide range of fields. It's simply irrefutable despite an unbelievably complicated political environment. Pappe himself points out that 25 percent of medical students are Israeli Arabs despite his imaginary "latent apartheid." Yes there are 10 or so Arab members of the 120-member Knesset, but Pappe's complaint is that none sit on its intelligence subcommittee. Go figure. Just speaking Arabic in a shopping mall can open one up to attack by Jewish ruffians, he says. No doubt there are such cases, but he and I plainly do not frequent the same malls.
Even in Pappe's Israel, life is not entirely hellish for the Arab minority. He credits Adalah, an advocacy group funded by the New Israel Fund, for doing a good job at advocating for the "collective rights" of Palestinian Israelis. He is buoyed by the fact that "there are growing spaces of leisure and pastime" where Arabs and Jews enjoy restaurants, coffee houses, and parks together – as if this is really something new. And in perhaps the most condescending aside in the book, he lauds the absence of segregation in public transportation!
Arabs may legitimately control 22 nation states rooted in Arab ethnicity; Muslims may legitimately reign over 56 countries in which religion and citizenship are symbiotically linked. Only the existence of one Jewish state founded on basis of a 2,000 year-old civilizational connection between the Jewish people and Zion is, according to Pappe's analysis, illegitimate.
Even in the pantheon of Blame-Israel-First revisionist historians, Pappe's stands beyond the pale.
His friend and mentor, Avi Shlaim, author of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah and the Zionist Movement, has claimed that Jordan never actually planned to help push Israel into the sea when it invaded in 1948, and that afterwards David Ben-Gurion supposedly had ample opportunity to find a way to make peace with Abdullah before the monarch was assassinated in 1951, but didn't. Shlaim places exclusive blame on Ben-Gurion and on every Israeli prime minister since him, for perpetuating the conflict. He sees Zionism as having been hijacked by Israel's right-wing to perpetuate the "illegal occupation." Yet Shlaim opposes anti-Israel academic boycotts and has described Zionism, presumably in its liberal manifestation, as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.
Similarly, the late Simha Flapan may have recklessly damaged Israel's image with The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by charging that the Zionists were somehow morally responsible for the Palestinian flight because, deep down, they did not really want them to stay. Still, Flapan, a life-long socialist, maintained that he never questioned "the moral justification and historical necessity of Zionism."
If Pappe is a prisoner of his own ideology, the trajectory of Benny Morris shows that at least one of the original revisionist historians has been capable of reevaluating his position even if he can't quite bring himself to explicitly recant.
In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, Morris held both Israel and the Arabs culpable for the refugees' flight. One can almost commiserate with Morris's desire to somehow split the difference. If only those who promulgated the Palestinian Arab narrative were similarly inclined. But in the final analysis, the onus must rest with the Arabs; their leaders miscalculated and the masses paid the price.
Morris now claims his egregious 1987 account of Zionism as a "colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement ... intent on politically, and even physically, dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs," referred to the 1930s before Zionist leaders embraced multiple plans for partition of Palestine. Morris has turned out to be a passionate Zionist; a liberal critic of Israeli settlement policies, but a defender of the country in the court of world opinion. His recent work, One State, Two States placed decisive responsibility for the continuation of the conflict squarely on the Arabs – a stance that has earned him excommunication by the remaining revisionists.
There is little prospect, however, that Pappe will allow facts to dent his pathological loathing of Israel. History works in mysterious ways. Pappe lost his bid for a Knesset seat in 1996 on the communist ticket. The Knesset's gain is the academy's loss. Pity the student assigned this book and shame on any professor for assigning it.
###
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, July 25, 2011
The Barghouti - Mandala Analogy
Seeing Barghouti Plain
That Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti is culpable in the murder of tens of Israelis -- and a Greek Orthodox monk mistaken for a Jew -- is not in dispute. In collaboration with Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat, Barghouti provided West Bank terror gangs with cash and guns to stoke the second intifada. Convicted on five counts of murder by a Tel Aviv court, he is now serving a life sentence in an Israeli penitentiary.
The 52 year-old Barghouti's Israeli backers -- Uri Avnery's post-Zionist Gush Shalom, the Haaretz newspaper, novelist Amos Oz, former Meretz Party head Haim Oron, past Labor Party leader Benjamin Ben Eliezer and current Labor leadership contender Amir Peretz --- have anointed him the "Palestinian Mandela." That conjures up images of a principled, graying freedom fighter with the courage to move his people toward reconciliation. They say that when Mahmoud Abbas leaves the scene, Barghouti is the redeemer to lead "Palestine" to peace with Israel.
Indeed, in The Long Walk to Freedom, South African leader Nelson Mandela wrote that, "If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner." But those who claim Barghouti walks in the footsteps of Mandela either think too much of the former or too little of the latter.
Who is Barghouti?
He belongs to a prominent Palestinian clan and was a youthful activist in the first intifada which sought to compel Israel out of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and claimed nearly 200 Israeli and over 1,300 Palestinian Arab lives. Israel jailed and deported Barghouti twice in the 1980s, only to see him returned as a senior Fatah leader after the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed. Fluent in Hebrew – The New York Times once described him as "charming, articulate and intelligent, even if a bit of a showboat" – he was a favorite participant at Israeli "peace camp" events.
Even as he proclaimed his commitment to peaceful coexistence – contingent on an Israeli withdrawal to the vulnerable 1949 Armistice Lines – he led openly violent demonstrations against the "occupation" and clandestinely co-founded Tanzim, a new Fatah-aligned terror faction.
During the second intifada, Barghouti served a ranking member of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades which carried out murderous attacks against Israeli civilians on both sides of the Green Line. Still, Barghouti has never stopped insisting that he opposes terrorism especially in pre-1967 Israel.
In prison, Barghouti has honed his gift for dissimulation outsmarting journalists, prison authorities and the Shin Bet intelligence agency which had granted him unparalleled perks including use of the warden's office to conduct media interviews. He swiftly reinvented himself as a "dissident" and scholar. Some Arabists worried, quite needlessly it turned out, that the Shin Bet had succeeded in swaying Barghouti toward genuine moderation.
In a recent interview with Time magazine [July 17, 2011] Barghouti, master of the oxymoron, called for "peaceful resistance…at this point in time." For Time's Karl Vick – who corresponded with Barghouti through his lawyers -- the "setting" (which the reporter could only conjure up) recalled Robben Island in apartheid South Africa. Having disingenuously smeared Israel with the insulting analogy, Vick promptly backpedaled: "Comparisons with Arafat are more apt."
Unsurprisingly, prison has made the charismatic Barghouti ever more popular with the Palestinian street which –like him – is ambivalent about the utility of yet another paroxysm of intifada violence. Barghouti is strong advocate of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and would defeat Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh (61-33 percent) in any Palestinian leadership contest. Following the "there go the people; I must follow them" style of leadership, Barghouti tells Palestinians what they want to hear: They are the "generators of the longest armed revolution in modern history" facing a colonialist enemy whose cruelty "is unparalleled." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 28, 2010]. Peace talks are futile in the quest to push Israel back to the old armistice lines; Palestinians should march in the millions this September to demand the UN unilaterally declare a Palestinian state on the PLOs terms.
The penny may have finally dropped at Shin Bet headquarters; prison authorities lately isolated Barghouti for unauthorized possession of a mobile phone.
In point of fact, there was never much evidence to substantiate the notion that the Palestinian Arabs want a Mandela-like leader. Certainly, their xenophobic war against Zionism is no parallel to the African struggle against apartheid. As for the straw man argument that Israelis reject Barghouti because of his violent history, it's worth recalling that Yitzhak Shamir, who was not squeamish about legitimate armed struggle, refused to talk to the PLO because he was convinced that the "peace" it offered was "the peace of the cemetery." [page 198 autobiography] And in shaking hands with the insalubrious Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin calculated – wrongly in turned out – that “You make peace with your enemies — not the Queen of Holland.”
Barghouti has shown no capacity for being able to move from enemy to real peace partner. Two years after his capture, Oslo architect Yossi Beilin blamed Arafat for leading his former interlocutor astray. Beilin recounted Barghouti telling him that his purpose in unleashing an orgy of violence against Israel was to finesse the Palestinian street which would otherwise fall to Hamas. Beilin found Barghouti's explanation "cynical" and "frightening."
True to form, Beilin got over his sense of betrayal and has joined other leftists in advocating Barghouti's release.
For Israelis not enamored with his charisma, what disqualifies Barghouti from the "Palestinian Mandela" moniker is not his history of malice, but his continuing refusal to abandon it. Barghouti two-state solution today is ominously reminiscent of Arafat's 1974 scheme for the phased destruction of Israel – which underpinned his approach to Oslo.
This Palestinian redeemer lacks the courage to tell his people that they can't have peace with Israel while insisting on the "right" of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees from the 1948 War, plus millions of their progeny, to "return" to what is today Israel. Nor will he tell Palestinian Arabs that the Jewish people have a legitimate historical, cultural and political connection to the land of Israel. Is he the Palestinian peacemaker to make the gutsy case that a single Jewish state, surrounded by 22 unfriendly Arab states will need security arrangements, including Palestinian demilitarization and defensible boundaries, before it can withdraw from most of its heartland.
The Palestinian Arabs have no realistic plan forward – beyond exploiting their automatic majority in the UN General assembly – and Barghouti is no Mandela because he's incapable of providing them with one. Rather than lead his people to a sustainable two-state solution, coexistence with Israel and, ultimately, healing and reconciliation he simply trails behind them toward one more dead end.
###
That Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti is culpable in the murder of tens of Israelis -- and a Greek Orthodox monk mistaken for a Jew -- is not in dispute. In collaboration with Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat, Barghouti provided West Bank terror gangs with cash and guns to stoke the second intifada. Convicted on five counts of murder by a Tel Aviv court, he is now serving a life sentence in an Israeli penitentiary.
The 52 year-old Barghouti's Israeli backers -- Uri Avnery's post-Zionist Gush Shalom, the Haaretz newspaper, novelist Amos Oz, former Meretz Party head Haim Oron, past Labor Party leader Benjamin Ben Eliezer and current Labor leadership contender Amir Peretz --- have anointed him the "Palestinian Mandela." That conjures up images of a principled, graying freedom fighter with the courage to move his people toward reconciliation. They say that when Mahmoud Abbas leaves the scene, Barghouti is the redeemer to lead "Palestine" to peace with Israel.
Indeed, in The Long Walk to Freedom, South African leader Nelson Mandela wrote that, "If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner." But those who claim Barghouti walks in the footsteps of Mandela either think too much of the former or too little of the latter.
Who is Barghouti?
He belongs to a prominent Palestinian clan and was a youthful activist in the first intifada which sought to compel Israel out of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and claimed nearly 200 Israeli and over 1,300 Palestinian Arab lives. Israel jailed and deported Barghouti twice in the 1980s, only to see him returned as a senior Fatah leader after the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed. Fluent in Hebrew – The New York Times once described him as "charming, articulate and intelligent, even if a bit of a showboat" – he was a favorite participant at Israeli "peace camp" events.
Even as he proclaimed his commitment to peaceful coexistence – contingent on an Israeli withdrawal to the vulnerable 1949 Armistice Lines – he led openly violent demonstrations against the "occupation" and clandestinely co-founded Tanzim, a new Fatah-aligned terror faction.
During the second intifada, Barghouti served a ranking member of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades which carried out murderous attacks against Israeli civilians on both sides of the Green Line. Still, Barghouti has never stopped insisting that he opposes terrorism especially in pre-1967 Israel.
In prison, Barghouti has honed his gift for dissimulation outsmarting journalists, prison authorities and the Shin Bet intelligence agency which had granted him unparalleled perks including use of the warden's office to conduct media interviews. He swiftly reinvented himself as a "dissident" and scholar. Some Arabists worried, quite needlessly it turned out, that the Shin Bet had succeeded in swaying Barghouti toward genuine moderation.
In a recent interview with Time magazine [July 17, 2011] Barghouti, master of the oxymoron, called for "peaceful resistance…at this point in time." For Time's Karl Vick – who corresponded with Barghouti through his lawyers -- the "setting" (which the reporter could only conjure up) recalled Robben Island in apartheid South Africa. Having disingenuously smeared Israel with the insulting analogy, Vick promptly backpedaled: "Comparisons with Arafat are more apt."
Unsurprisingly, prison has made the charismatic Barghouti ever more popular with the Palestinian street which –like him – is ambivalent about the utility of yet another paroxysm of intifada violence. Barghouti is strong advocate of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and would defeat Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh (61-33 percent) in any Palestinian leadership contest. Following the "there go the people; I must follow them" style of leadership, Barghouti tells Palestinians what they want to hear: They are the "generators of the longest armed revolution in modern history" facing a colonialist enemy whose cruelty "is unparalleled." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 28, 2010]. Peace talks are futile in the quest to push Israel back to the old armistice lines; Palestinians should march in the millions this September to demand the UN unilaterally declare a Palestinian state on the PLOs terms.
The penny may have finally dropped at Shin Bet headquarters; prison authorities lately isolated Barghouti for unauthorized possession of a mobile phone.
In point of fact, there was never much evidence to substantiate the notion that the Palestinian Arabs want a Mandela-like leader. Certainly, their xenophobic war against Zionism is no parallel to the African struggle against apartheid. As for the straw man argument that Israelis reject Barghouti because of his violent history, it's worth recalling that Yitzhak Shamir, who was not squeamish about legitimate armed struggle, refused to talk to the PLO because he was convinced that the "peace" it offered was "the peace of the cemetery." [page 198 autobiography] And in shaking hands with the insalubrious Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin calculated – wrongly in turned out – that “You make peace with your enemies — not the Queen of Holland.”
Barghouti has shown no capacity for being able to move from enemy to real peace partner. Two years after his capture, Oslo architect Yossi Beilin blamed Arafat for leading his former interlocutor astray. Beilin recounted Barghouti telling him that his purpose in unleashing an orgy of violence against Israel was to finesse the Palestinian street which would otherwise fall to Hamas. Beilin found Barghouti's explanation "cynical" and "frightening."
True to form, Beilin got over his sense of betrayal and has joined other leftists in advocating Barghouti's release.
For Israelis not enamored with his charisma, what disqualifies Barghouti from the "Palestinian Mandela" moniker is not his history of malice, but his continuing refusal to abandon it. Barghouti two-state solution today is ominously reminiscent of Arafat's 1974 scheme for the phased destruction of Israel – which underpinned his approach to Oslo.
This Palestinian redeemer lacks the courage to tell his people that they can't have peace with Israel while insisting on the "right" of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees from the 1948 War, plus millions of their progeny, to "return" to what is today Israel. Nor will he tell Palestinian Arabs that the Jewish people have a legitimate historical, cultural and political connection to the land of Israel. Is he the Palestinian peacemaker to make the gutsy case that a single Jewish state, surrounded by 22 unfriendly Arab states will need security arrangements, including Palestinian demilitarization and defensible boundaries, before it can withdraw from most of its heartland.
The Palestinian Arabs have no realistic plan forward – beyond exploiting their automatic majority in the UN General assembly – and Barghouti is no Mandela because he's incapable of providing them with one. Rather than lead his people to a sustainable two-state solution, coexistence with Israel and, ultimately, healing and reconciliation he simply trails behind them toward one more dead end.
###
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, July 20, 2011
EILAT
A More Than Peripheral Challenge
In a country where the sky is mostly blue and the sun mostly shines the southernmost city of Eilat has nonetheless laid claim – with justification – to being Israel's sun capital. Reliable good weather does not, however, solve all problems. Eilat has been inundated with illegal, mostly Eritrean and Sudanese, immigrants. Its airport is antiquated; there is no rail service, and many of its young people can't wait to move out.
In July, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a high-powered committee charged with finding ways to rehabilitate Eilat's transportation, education, tourism and cultural infrastructure. This committee has all the right players: the premier's loyal cabinet secretary; ministers of Education and Finance, as well as the ministers of Negev & Galilee Development, Transportation, Tourism, Interior and Culture & Sports. They are joined by Eilat Mayor Meir Yitzhak Halevy and Prof. Eugene Kandel, chairman of the National Economic Council.
When in 1947 the UN voted to create an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine it gave Eilat to nascent Israel. The Arabs rejected partition so Israeli forces had to capture, on March 10, 1949, the desolate though strategic spot. Settled out of Negev badlands, Eilat was incorporated as a municipality in 1952 for just several thousand souls. Commuter buses serving Eilat were murderously set upon by Fedayeen gangs from Gaza and Jordan. Water had to be piped in though by the 1960s revolutionary desalination plants began providing for the bulk of the city's water needs.
A less than picturesque port was developed which became crucial to Israel's trade with Africa and Asia and for oil imports from Iran. In 1956 and again in 1967 Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran (where the Gulf of Eilat opens into the Red Sea) to Israeli shipping. This unlawful blockade contributed to the outbreak of both the Sinai Campaign and the Six Day War.
Eilat's port now handles about six percent of Israel's maritime trade. By government fiat, cars produced in the Far East must enter Israel via Port Eilat making this commerce the facility's main source of income and providing jobs for 130 longshoremen. The Finance Ministry is in the process of privatizing the port while the Eilat committee is weighing a plan to relocate the docks in order to expand the hotel district. Meantime, pollution from the port has repeatedly closed area beaches. A not well maintained oil pipeline that connects Eilat to Haifa recently punctured causing substantial environmental damage north of the city.
Eilat's early bad rap as an "ill-planned honky-tonk" town notwithstanding, the city has blossomed over the decades. Branding itself as the place where the sun, desert and sea meet, Eilat has been thriving as an ideal vacation destination offering a wide range of hotels (12,000 rooms) and an assortment of recreational activities from diving and snorkeling to parasailing and duty-free shopping. Budget conscious Israelis may complain that it is cheaper to take a packaged vacation abroad but Europeans, especially, find the city a good value. Geographically, Eilat is only 170 miles (280 kilometers) from Tel Aviv. Looking out from the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea a visitor can glance simultaneously at the Egyptian Sinai, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Tel Aviv's humidity is replaced by Eilat's dry desert climate. The area is just far enough away from the country's center to be designated as a wartime evacuation point in the event of an all-out war. In the main, the city has been spared wartime violence even during the gruesome second intifada. That said three Israelis were murdered in 2007 in a suicide bombing of a bakery and the city has also been the occasional target of rocket attacks.
Eilat has a small modern pier terminal which accommodates about 10,000 passenger arrivals a year. It's the southern terminus of the 580-mile long Israel Trail, but most visitors come by land transportation. Tens of thousands of European tourists arrive on charter flights to Ovda Airport, part of a military airbase north of the city; others arrive on shuttle flights to Eilat Airport from Ben-Gurion Airport. The IDF is not thrilled to share its airspace with commercial planes and the downtown Eilat field has outgrown its location. So Netanyahu has approved building new airport – to be named after Ilan Ramon – just north of Eilat in the copper mining Timna Valley district, to accommodate both domestic and international arrivals.
Still, even a casual visitor will notice what permanent residents cannot escape. There are an estimated 8,000 illegal immigrants among Eilat's population of 56,000 (7,500 of whom are new immigrants). Hundreds more African workers have been legalized for employment in the hotel industry. One has just become South Sudan's consul in Israel.
To be clear: Most serious crimes in Eilat are committed by Israelis, but with 14 percent of the total population consisting of poverty-stricken Africans, and 80% of the citizenry employed by the tourist industry, Eilat can't afford losing its image as a carefree vacation destination. The municipality is now under criticism from leftwing campaigners for having set up special school for foreign pupils rather than absorbing them somehow in the municipal system. In this context, Eilat's citizens are hoping Netanyahu fulfils his pledge to accelerate construction of a fence along the Negev-Sinai border to block illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration.
Locals will be watching to see what tangible steps the government takes to upgrade roads leading to the city. What is most needed is the government's promised rail link to Eilat via Beersheba from Tel Aviv. Netanyahu has also spoken of a rail link to Ashdod which would mean that passengers (and freight) could move between Israel's Red Sea and Mediterranean ports. "That will change Israel forever," Netanyahu said.
The city has been fortunate to have the support of the organized North American Jewish community which has invested in its school system. Now, 72% of high school students have passed their higher education matriculation exams (up from 27%). In 2002, Ben-Gurion University of Beersheba began operating a local campus serving 700 students with dorm facilities funded by the UJA. Locals who have completed their IDF service are eligible for tuition-free study. Philanthropic support has also enabled Josephtal Hospital to provide state-of-the-art emergency services.
Of course, Eilat is no newcomer to Jewish history. It is mentioned in the Bible (Deut. 2:8) in connection with the wonderings of the Israelites out of Egypt and Solomon's creation of a "navy of ships" (I Kings 9:26;). Jews held on to a hardscrabble existence there possibly until Crusader times.
Netanyahu has pledged to "jump Eilat forward." Not only Eilat, but other development towns settled in the 1950s in border and rural areas up and down Israel are hoping this promise is not made to be broken. At stake is meeting the perennial Zionist challenge of linking, finally, the center to the periphery.
###
In a country where the sky is mostly blue and the sun mostly shines the southernmost city of Eilat has nonetheless laid claim – with justification – to being Israel's sun capital. Reliable good weather does not, however, solve all problems. Eilat has been inundated with illegal, mostly Eritrean and Sudanese, immigrants. Its airport is antiquated; there is no rail service, and many of its young people can't wait to move out.
In July, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a high-powered committee charged with finding ways to rehabilitate Eilat's transportation, education, tourism and cultural infrastructure. This committee has all the right players: the premier's loyal cabinet secretary; ministers of Education and Finance, as well as the ministers of Negev & Galilee Development, Transportation, Tourism, Interior and Culture & Sports. They are joined by Eilat Mayor Meir Yitzhak Halevy and Prof. Eugene Kandel, chairman of the National Economic Council.
When in 1947 the UN voted to create an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine it gave Eilat to nascent Israel. The Arabs rejected partition so Israeli forces had to capture, on March 10, 1949, the desolate though strategic spot. Settled out of Negev badlands, Eilat was incorporated as a municipality in 1952 for just several thousand souls. Commuter buses serving Eilat were murderously set upon by Fedayeen gangs from Gaza and Jordan. Water had to be piped in though by the 1960s revolutionary desalination plants began providing for the bulk of the city's water needs.
A less than picturesque port was developed which became crucial to Israel's trade with Africa and Asia and for oil imports from Iran. In 1956 and again in 1967 Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran (where the Gulf of Eilat opens into the Red Sea) to Israeli shipping. This unlawful blockade contributed to the outbreak of both the Sinai Campaign and the Six Day War.
Eilat's port now handles about six percent of Israel's maritime trade. By government fiat, cars produced in the Far East must enter Israel via Port Eilat making this commerce the facility's main source of income and providing jobs for 130 longshoremen. The Finance Ministry is in the process of privatizing the port while the Eilat committee is weighing a plan to relocate the docks in order to expand the hotel district. Meantime, pollution from the port has repeatedly closed area beaches. A not well maintained oil pipeline that connects Eilat to Haifa recently punctured causing substantial environmental damage north of the city.
Eilat's early bad rap as an "ill-planned honky-tonk" town notwithstanding, the city has blossomed over the decades. Branding itself as the place where the sun, desert and sea meet, Eilat has been thriving as an ideal vacation destination offering a wide range of hotels (12,000 rooms) and an assortment of recreational activities from diving and snorkeling to parasailing and duty-free shopping. Budget conscious Israelis may complain that it is cheaper to take a packaged vacation abroad but Europeans, especially, find the city a good value. Geographically, Eilat is only 170 miles (280 kilometers) from Tel Aviv. Looking out from the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea a visitor can glance simultaneously at the Egyptian Sinai, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Tel Aviv's humidity is replaced by Eilat's dry desert climate. The area is just far enough away from the country's center to be designated as a wartime evacuation point in the event of an all-out war. In the main, the city has been spared wartime violence even during the gruesome second intifada. That said three Israelis were murdered in 2007 in a suicide bombing of a bakery and the city has also been the occasional target of rocket attacks.
Eilat has a small modern pier terminal which accommodates about 10,000 passenger arrivals a year. It's the southern terminus of the 580-mile long Israel Trail, but most visitors come by land transportation. Tens of thousands of European tourists arrive on charter flights to Ovda Airport, part of a military airbase north of the city; others arrive on shuttle flights to Eilat Airport from Ben-Gurion Airport. The IDF is not thrilled to share its airspace with commercial planes and the downtown Eilat field has outgrown its location. So Netanyahu has approved building new airport – to be named after Ilan Ramon – just north of Eilat in the copper mining Timna Valley district, to accommodate both domestic and international arrivals.
Still, even a casual visitor will notice what permanent residents cannot escape. There are an estimated 8,000 illegal immigrants among Eilat's population of 56,000 (7,500 of whom are new immigrants). Hundreds more African workers have been legalized for employment in the hotel industry. One has just become South Sudan's consul in Israel.
To be clear: Most serious crimes in Eilat are committed by Israelis, but with 14 percent of the total population consisting of poverty-stricken Africans, and 80% of the citizenry employed by the tourist industry, Eilat can't afford losing its image as a carefree vacation destination. The municipality is now under criticism from leftwing campaigners for having set up special school for foreign pupils rather than absorbing them somehow in the municipal system. In this context, Eilat's citizens are hoping Netanyahu fulfils his pledge to accelerate construction of a fence along the Negev-Sinai border to block illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration.
Locals will be watching to see what tangible steps the government takes to upgrade roads leading to the city. What is most needed is the government's promised rail link to Eilat via Beersheba from Tel Aviv. Netanyahu has also spoken of a rail link to Ashdod which would mean that passengers (and freight) could move between Israel's Red Sea and Mediterranean ports. "That will change Israel forever," Netanyahu said.
The city has been fortunate to have the support of the organized North American Jewish community which has invested in its school system. Now, 72% of high school students have passed their higher education matriculation exams (up from 27%). In 2002, Ben-Gurion University of Beersheba began operating a local campus serving 700 students with dorm facilities funded by the UJA. Locals who have completed their IDF service are eligible for tuition-free study. Philanthropic support has also enabled Josephtal Hospital to provide state-of-the-art emergency services.
Of course, Eilat is no newcomer to Jewish history. It is mentioned in the Bible (Deut. 2:8) in connection with the wonderings of the Israelites out of Egypt and Solomon's creation of a "navy of ships" (I Kings 9:26;). Jews held on to a hardscrabble existence there possibly until Crusader times.
Netanyahu has pledged to "jump Eilat forward." Not only Eilat, but other development towns settled in the 1950s in border and rural areas up and down Israel are hoping this promise is not made to be broken. At stake is meeting the perennial Zionist challenge of linking, finally, the center to the periphery.
###
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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