Ships, their comings and goings, have lately been a fixation over at Israel's flagship left-wing (sporadically post-Zionist) Haaretz newspaper. Adding a new twist to what it means to be "embedded" with the enemy, one of the paper's stable of advocacy journalists, Amira Hass, has been writing adoringly about hooking-up with a pro-Palestinian flotilla that intends to smash Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
No less earnestly, the paper's front pages have been devoted to beating back challenges to the left's narrative about how the Irgun arms ship Altalena came to be sunk off the coast of Tel-Aviv 63 years ago this month (June 21, 1948) on orders from David Ben-Gurion. Haaretz has been incensed, too, by an Israel Defense Ministry reference to the fallen Irgun members as having been "murdered."
Now, historian Jerold S. Auerbach, author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009) has further undermined the leftist canon with Brothers At War, a succinct, emotive, and levelheaded summation of the Altalena tragedy.
Auerbach frames his Altalena account in terms of what he sees as Israel's ongoing identity struggle – "Jewish state, secular state, democratic state, democratic Jewish state, state of the Jewish people" – and the constraints this lack of clarity places on the legitimacy of massively consequential government decisions.
He asserts that this conundrum actually has ancient origins traceable to Josephus whose laments about the "seditious temper" of the Jewish people erroneously framed history's understanding of Rome's victory over the Jews for the past 2,000 years. In modern times, this dilemma manifested itself in the Altalena; in the 1952 Knesset clash over whether to accept German government reparations for the Holocaust; in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and has yet to find resolution notwithstanding the dreadful assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
It persists still over whether left-wing IDF reservists should be required to serve over the Green Line and whether right-wing Orthodox conscripts ought to be required, contrary to the wishes of their rabbis, to obey orders to dismantle unsanctioned West Bank outposts.
Put another way: Is the bigger threat to the Jewish commonwealth zealous Jews who reject disputed governmental decisions on divisive issues or the chronic failure of successive Israeli governments to foster consensus positions?
Where to begin the telling of Altalena calamity? Auerbach reasonably starts by differentiating the two Zionist camps; one led by Ben-Gurion which controlled Zionist officialdom and was inspired by a Jewish national renewal rooted in notions of socialist utopia; the other motivated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and carried forth by his disciple Menachem Begin whose vision was one of a society based on middle-class entrepreneurial values. Long before the Altalena, Auerbach points out, there was a record of bad blood between the two camps exacerbated by the mysterious murder of Chaim Arlosoroff, bitter disputes over whether and how to confront the heartless British policy of closing the gates of Palestine prior to and during the Holocaust and over how best to respond to Arab brutality against Palestinian Jewry in the years before Israel's independence.
The Altalena (Jabotinsky's pen name) was purchased in America by Irgun operatives and, ultimately, loaded at Marseilles, France with desperately needed weapons and munitions along with a "melting pot" of 940 recruits for the nascent Hebrew fighting force in Palestine. As far as its American Jewish captain knew, his mission had the "acquiescence of the Israeli government."
Begin had indeed been negotiating directly with Ben-Gurion's man, Israel Galili, over how to disburse the ships weapons and troops. The Altalena's mission was unfortunately tracked from the start by various intelligence agencies and its secrecy blatantly exposed in a BBC news broadcast.
A series of disastrous miscommunications, logistical blunders and lack of internal Irgun discipline led to the ship's arrival seemingly at the wrong place and at the wrong time while the Begin-Galili talks were still in progress. In fact, Auerbach writes, Galili informed Begin on June 16: "We [i.e. Ben-Gurion] agree to the arrival of the vessel. As quickly as possible." And in his diary entry that day Ben-Gurion wrote: "Tomorrow or the next day their ship is due to arrive." So it was Ben-Gurion himself who ordered the ship to land at Kfar Vitkin (near Netanya) to avoid UN aerial surveillance.
As the Begin-Galili talks proceeded, some of the weapons and almost all of the personnel on board were unloaded near Netanya. By then, Ben-Gurion had allowed himself to be convinced that Begin was planning a putsch against his authority even as the Irgun leader – perhaps naively – felt certain the weapons negotiations would succeed in the fullness of time. But there was no time. Ben-Gurion edgily ordered the Haganah (now the IDF) to start shooting. Six Irgun men and two soldiers were killed before the ship fled Netanya south and ran aground off the Tel Aviv coast not far from Palmach headquarters!
Ben-Gurion insisted on unconditional surrender or else. Yitzhak Rabin, age 26, was appointed on the spot to command the beach fighting. When the Altalena crew hesitated perhaps because of poor communications with Irgun headquarters, Palmach commanders ordered an all out attack on the ship. Even though the crew raised a white flag, Rabin's snipers continued to pick off targets bobbing in the waters. Begin, who had earlier boarded the ship expecting a deal with Galili, barely escaped with his life. The ship went down along with 300 Bren guns, 500 anti-tank guns, 1,000 grenades and millions of bullets that could have been used during the War of Independence.
Auerbach's conclusion, citing historian Ehud Sprinzak, was that there had been no "mutiny on the right" no intention to defy the legitimate authority of the land and certainly no intention by Begin to challenge Ben-Gurion militarily with a putsch. Begin had only wanted enough men and guns earmarked to carry on the fight for Jerusalem's Old City (which Ben-Gurion had abandoned) and thought he had Galili's tacit approval.
Begin abhorred the idea of a Jewish civil war and ultimately, swallowing his pride, ordered his Irgun men into the IDF on September 20, 1948. It was Ben-Gurion's "quasi-totalitarian" personality that led the socialist leader to "a reprehensible abuse of state power," as Begin later plausibly asserted.
Auerbach's sensitive re-telling of this tragic chapter in Israel's early history concludes with the unhappy, though sadly correct, assertion that Israel's "problem of legitimacy" remains unresolved.
How can Israeli decision makers emphatically steer clear of future Altalena's in implementing wrenching policies that have monumental consequences for the country's survival and character? Auerbach argues simply that they can't. In connection with dismantling settlements, my reading is that he believes the right to disobey orders is scared.
Yet surely for most Israelis, in the unlikely event that a Palestinian leadership emerges ready to make genuine peace, the legitimacy of the deal could be appreciably bolstered and the moral justification of violent disobedience diminished by some combination of Knesset vote plus national referendum.
###
Monday, June 27, 2011
Altalena, Irgun and Ben-Gurion --
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, June 21, 2011
Druse (Druze) in the Arab-Israel Context
A Druse physician from the Golan Heights, who works at an Israeli hospital, was one of 24 members of his community arrested for pummeling IDF troops with rocks during so-called Naksa Day protests. Just a few miles south in Daliyat El-Carmel, located on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, the Israeli Druse community is planning a memorial museum that will tell the stories of the 400 Druse soldiers who fell in defense of the State of Israel. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the Druse leadership has become an essential constituent in the Hezbollah-dominated government.
Just where do Druse loyalties lay?
An understanding of their history can help answer that question. The Druse are a breakaway stream of the Ismaili strain of Shi'ite Islam, followers of an ascetic Egyptian ruler named Al-Hakim (996-1021) in whom they see manifestations of the divine. (Al-Hakim was a descendant of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali revered by the Shi'ites.) Influenced in part by Greek ideas, Al-Hakim's persecuted followers broke away from orthodox Islam and eventually coalesced in the mountainous regions of Lebanon, Syria and Israel awaiting his messianic return and salvation (reincarnation being fundamental to their dogma).
Druse keep their religious practices mostly mysterious. Unlike Muslims, Druse Arabs do not observe Ramadan nor make pilgrimages to Mecca and do not proselytize. They venerate Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses as a main prophet. Marrying-out is considered an unforgivable breach of communal solidarity. Indeed, strong ethnic identity, martial skills and mutual aid are part of the Druse canon. Today, there are perhaps 2.5 million Druse living mostly in Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel with smaller communities dispersed as far away as North America and Australia.
In predominantly Sunni Syria, the Druse are mostly concentrated in the southwest abutting Jordan and between Aleppo and Antioch in the north-west. They comprise perhaps four percent of the population. After the First World War with the arrival of the French, the Druse were encouraged to maintain their own autonomous region. Druse attitudes toward the French were conflicted though the community ultimately embraced emergent Arab nationalism.
Syrian independence in 1946 was accompanied by long decades of political convulsions. During the early 1950s for instance, Adib ibn Hasan Shishakli, the military dictator, pursued a Syrian nationalist line yet violently persecuted the Druse whom he perceived as a threat. Shishakli's overthrow paved the way for yet more turmoil during which factions within the Ba'ath Party competed violently for control.
By the time Hafez al-Assad (Basher's father) took power in 1970, the Druse had been purged from positions of influence in the party, army and security services. However, the Assad dynasty, itself rooted in the Alawite minority, relied on the Druse, and true to form, the Druse displayed remarkable loyalty to the regime. In recent years Bashar may have become more distant from them, perhaps because he wanted to draw closer to the Sunni majority, according to Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. Druse fidelity has begun to crack only as anti-Assad demonstrations have gained inexorable momentum and security forces have targeted the Druse. Kedar speculates that if Syria does disintegrate, the Druse could seek to restore their earlier autonomy.
Watching from the other side of the border, Israeli Druse parliamentarian, Deputy Galilee and Negev Development Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud) has tried to muster Jerusalem's support for some kind of intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition only to be rebuffed. Lately, he's turned to the Turkish authorities asking to be allowed to lead an Israeli aid mission to the Turkish-Syrian border.
On the Golan Heights, a very small number of Druse accepted Israeli citizenship when the Knesset applied Israeli law to the territory in 1981, while most remained loyal to the Assad regime. On the whole, though some Druse have been arrested for spying for Syria, most have simply sought not to fall afoul of either Jerusalem or Damascus knowing that control of the Heights could flip in any peace deal. Israel has been generally sensitive to the Druse predicament. In mid-February, for instance, 12,000 tons of apples grown by Druse farmers near Majdal Shams were exported to Syria despite the de facto state of war between the two countries. At the start of the anti-government protests in Syria, some Golan residents demonstrated in support of Assad. But as the demonstrations gained traction more Golan Druse have turned against Assad and expressed solidarity for the opposition.
The Druse need to coldly calibrate their alliances is nowhere more pronounced than in the failed state of Lebanon. There's been no verifiable census there in decades, but there are believed to be hundreds of thousands of Druse in Lebanon with a stronghold in the Chouf Mountains. After his father Kamal was assassinated (in all likelihood by the Assads), Druse leader Walid Jumblat actually drew closer to Syria. Over the years he has switched sides intermittently most recently in March 2010. Nowadays he backs Lebanon's new hegemon, the Shi'ite Islamist movement Hezbollah, clients of the Assad dynasty though ultimately beholden to Iran.
Emphasizing his Arab credentials, Jumblat has aligned the Druse with Arab "leftists" -- essentially nationalist secularists – through his Progressive Socialist Party. His anti-Israel rhetoric has been unwavering. The Druse have been sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs, permanent "refugees" in Lebanon, and have advocated for them being granted the right to own property. This has not guaranteed the Druse immunity from attack by uncompromising Palestinian Islamists.
All the same, earlier this month Jumblat lauded the Golan Druse who collaborated in Syrian-inspired Palestinian efforts to storm across the Golan boundary with Israel. He has long urged his coreligionists in Israel not to serve in the IDF. Yet as the Assad regime wobbles, possibly weakening Hezbollah, the Lebanese Druse are becoming more assertive. A Druse member of the Hezbollah-dominated new cabinet recently resigned to protest the dearth of patronage posts allocated to his community.
Which brings us back to the 127,000-strong, overwhelmingly loyal, Druse citizens of Israel. Their young men have long been conscripted into the army where many have served with distinction. A Druse journalist, Rafik Halabi, was news director for Israel's Channel 1 during the 1990s. By 2001 a Druse had been named to Israel's cabinet (by Ariel Sharon). Patronage delivered by the Likud to the Druse town of Daliat el-Carmel has encouraged many locals to join the party. However, the acculturation process has not been effortless. Since many Druse schools teach the sciences in Arabic, Israel’s education ministry has been trying to encourage a shift to Hebrew so that graduates can better integrate into Israeli higher education. The Netanyahu has (belatedly) budgeted substantial sums for the socio-economic developing of the community. Efforts are also underway to prepare Druse young people for jobs in Israel's hi-tech sector.
This is not to suggest that Israel could not do much more to reward Druse loyalty or demonstrate greater cultural sensitivity. Earlier this year, the government defused simmering tensions by reaching a compensation deal with Druse landowners whose properties had been confiscated for a planned natural gas pipeline.
The seemingly Machiavellian character of Druse loyalties reflects what it means to be a minority people in a mostly intolerant Muslim Middle East. Just as the Druse have found it strategically prudent to concentrate mostly on high ground away from urban areas, their political strategy toward outside powers has been one of "adaptability and fluidity" according to the University of Haifa's Gabriel Ben-Dor. The Druse prefer to be loyal to the country in which they reside. At the same time, their survival depends on a knack for aligning with what Lee Smith has called the Strong Horse, offering an artful political barometer for gauging the ever-shifting balance of power in the region.
Just where do Druse loyalties lay?
An understanding of their history can help answer that question. The Druse are a breakaway stream of the Ismaili strain of Shi'ite Islam, followers of an ascetic Egyptian ruler named Al-Hakim (996-1021) in whom they see manifestations of the divine. (Al-Hakim was a descendant of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali revered by the Shi'ites.) Influenced in part by Greek ideas, Al-Hakim's persecuted followers broke away from orthodox Islam and eventually coalesced in the mountainous regions of Lebanon, Syria and Israel awaiting his messianic return and salvation (reincarnation being fundamental to their dogma).
Druse keep their religious practices mostly mysterious. Unlike Muslims, Druse Arabs do not observe Ramadan nor make pilgrimages to Mecca and do not proselytize. They venerate Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses as a main prophet. Marrying-out is considered an unforgivable breach of communal solidarity. Indeed, strong ethnic identity, martial skills and mutual aid are part of the Druse canon. Today, there are perhaps 2.5 million Druse living mostly in Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel with smaller communities dispersed as far away as North America and Australia.
In predominantly Sunni Syria, the Druse are mostly concentrated in the southwest abutting Jordan and between Aleppo and Antioch in the north-west. They comprise perhaps four percent of the population. After the First World War with the arrival of the French, the Druse were encouraged to maintain their own autonomous region. Druse attitudes toward the French were conflicted though the community ultimately embraced emergent Arab nationalism.
Syrian independence in 1946 was accompanied by long decades of political convulsions. During the early 1950s for instance, Adib ibn Hasan Shishakli, the military dictator, pursued a Syrian nationalist line yet violently persecuted the Druse whom he perceived as a threat. Shishakli's overthrow paved the way for yet more turmoil during which factions within the Ba'ath Party competed violently for control.
By the time Hafez al-Assad (Basher's father) took power in 1970, the Druse had been purged from positions of influence in the party, army and security services. However, the Assad dynasty, itself rooted in the Alawite minority, relied on the Druse, and true to form, the Druse displayed remarkable loyalty to the regime. In recent years Bashar may have become more distant from them, perhaps because he wanted to draw closer to the Sunni majority, according to Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. Druse fidelity has begun to crack only as anti-Assad demonstrations have gained inexorable momentum and security forces have targeted the Druse. Kedar speculates that if Syria does disintegrate, the Druse could seek to restore their earlier autonomy.
Watching from the other side of the border, Israeli Druse parliamentarian, Deputy Galilee and Negev Development Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud) has tried to muster Jerusalem's support for some kind of intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition only to be rebuffed. Lately, he's turned to the Turkish authorities asking to be allowed to lead an Israeli aid mission to the Turkish-Syrian border.
On the Golan Heights, a very small number of Druse accepted Israeli citizenship when the Knesset applied Israeli law to the territory in 1981, while most remained loyal to the Assad regime. On the whole, though some Druse have been arrested for spying for Syria, most have simply sought not to fall afoul of either Jerusalem or Damascus knowing that control of the Heights could flip in any peace deal. Israel has been generally sensitive to the Druse predicament. In mid-February, for instance, 12,000 tons of apples grown by Druse farmers near Majdal Shams were exported to Syria despite the de facto state of war between the two countries. At the start of the anti-government protests in Syria, some Golan residents demonstrated in support of Assad. But as the demonstrations gained traction more Golan Druse have turned against Assad and expressed solidarity for the opposition.
The Druse need to coldly calibrate their alliances is nowhere more pronounced than in the failed state of Lebanon. There's been no verifiable census there in decades, but there are believed to be hundreds of thousands of Druse in Lebanon with a stronghold in the Chouf Mountains. After his father Kamal was assassinated (in all likelihood by the Assads), Druse leader Walid Jumblat actually drew closer to Syria. Over the years he has switched sides intermittently most recently in March 2010. Nowadays he backs Lebanon's new hegemon, the Shi'ite Islamist movement Hezbollah, clients of the Assad dynasty though ultimately beholden to Iran.
Emphasizing his Arab credentials, Jumblat has aligned the Druse with Arab "leftists" -- essentially nationalist secularists – through his Progressive Socialist Party. His anti-Israel rhetoric has been unwavering. The Druse have been sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs, permanent "refugees" in Lebanon, and have advocated for them being granted the right to own property. This has not guaranteed the Druse immunity from attack by uncompromising Palestinian Islamists.
All the same, earlier this month Jumblat lauded the Golan Druse who collaborated in Syrian-inspired Palestinian efforts to storm across the Golan boundary with Israel. He has long urged his coreligionists in Israel not to serve in the IDF. Yet as the Assad regime wobbles, possibly weakening Hezbollah, the Lebanese Druse are becoming more assertive. A Druse member of the Hezbollah-dominated new cabinet recently resigned to protest the dearth of patronage posts allocated to his community.
Which brings us back to the 127,000-strong, overwhelmingly loyal, Druse citizens of Israel. Their young men have long been conscripted into the army where many have served with distinction. A Druse journalist, Rafik Halabi, was news director for Israel's Channel 1 during the 1990s. By 2001 a Druse had been named to Israel's cabinet (by Ariel Sharon). Patronage delivered by the Likud to the Druse town of Daliat el-Carmel has encouraged many locals to join the party. However, the acculturation process has not been effortless. Since many Druse schools teach the sciences in Arabic, Israel’s education ministry has been trying to encourage a shift to Hebrew so that graduates can better integrate into Israeli higher education. The Netanyahu has (belatedly) budgeted substantial sums for the socio-economic developing of the community. Efforts are also underway to prepare Druse young people for jobs in Israel's hi-tech sector.
This is not to suggest that Israel could not do much more to reward Druse loyalty or demonstrate greater cultural sensitivity. Earlier this year, the government defused simmering tensions by reaching a compensation deal with Druse landowners whose properties had been confiscated for a planned natural gas pipeline.
The seemingly Machiavellian character of Druse loyalties reflects what it means to be a minority people in a mostly intolerant Muslim Middle East. Just as the Druse have found it strategically prudent to concentrate mostly on high ground away from urban areas, their political strategy toward outside powers has been one of "adaptability and fluidity" according to the University of Haifa's Gabriel Ben-Dor. The Druse prefer to be loyal to the country in which they reside. At the same time, their survival depends on a knack for aligning with what Lee Smith has called the Strong Horse, offering an artful political barometer for gauging the ever-shifting balance of power in the region.
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, June 13, 2011
Does Israel's Labor Party Still Live?
Laboring On
Whatever became of Israel's Labor Party some five months after its leader Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly quit to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?
Wracked by infighting, fuming over being tethered to the diplomatic policies of the Netanyahu government, and headed by one of the least popular politicians on the scene, the once-dominant Labor Party seemed moribund. Barak had surprised colleagues in January 2010 by pulling out before they could oust him; taking along four comparatively right-leaning loyalists. Barak got to retain his cabinet seat while Labor ministers Yitzhak Herzog, Avishay Braverman and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had no choice but to go into the opposition. In 2006, Labor lost several luminaries including Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik to Kadima.
Now, tabloid pundits were quick to write Labor's obituary. Yediot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of left-leaning columnists, said the party had actually "died" during Barak's short failed term as prime minister in 2000 but had only now been buried. His colleague Sima Kadmon wrote that "the public doesn't believe the Labor Party can be revived." The perennially caustic Ben Caspit at Ma'ariv adjudged Labor to be "a pile of rubble." Barak had dealt Labor "the final blow" wrote another anti-Netanyahu Ma'ariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi.
These writers had captured the popular sentiment: A poll in Yediot the day after Barak's exit found 53% of Israeli voters thought it heralded "the end of the Labor Party." Yet even then there was a glimmer of hope: the same poll revealed that Labor would manage to retain 8 of its 13 Knesset seats were immediate elections held.
Forecasts of Labor's demise appear to have been exaggerated. Since Barak's leaving the party brought back former general-secretary Micha Harish to be its temporary chairman and tasked him with overseeing Labor's revival. Tens of thousands of new members have been recruited as part of a dynamic race on for the party's leadership. David Ben-Gurion's grandchildren, Orit Etzioni and Moshe Ben-Eliezer, have publicly invested in the movement he once led. Even rudderless, recent polls continue to show the party capturing at least eight seats.
Of course, how Labor will ultimately fare in national elections (expected before 2013 when the current Knesset's term expires) will depend on what position it stakes out on the political spectrum and that, in term, very much depends on who becomes the party's new leader. The field includes MK Isaac Herzog, son of Israel's sixth president Chaim Herzog; MK Shelly Yachimovich, a former left-oriented journalist; Amram Mitzna, a rehabilitated previous party leader; millionaire entrepreneur Erel Margalit; MK Amir Peretz, another renewed former party leader and Shlomo Buhbut, a local government politician.
Labor is hardly likely to ever again become a ruling party. One reason is that its leaders and functionaries continue to shill for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in promoting the message that no diplomatic progress can be made because of the Netanyahu government, and not – as most Israelis believe – through any fault of the Palestinian Arabs.
Each of the leadership contenders claimed to have signed-up thousands of new members ostensibly pledged to vote for them in the September 12th party primary and subsequent run-off contest. By that yardstick, Peretz claims to have brought in the most signatures followed by Herzog and Yachimovich. Assuming the petition claims are true, Labor's membership base could emerge as the second biggest behind Likud.
With a leader – Mitzna, Herzog, Yachimovich or Perez – preliminary polling suggests that Labor could, at least hypothetically, capture 17-19 mandates. Yet when the dust settles much depends on whether the party, which still defines itself as social-democratic, can be positioned at least within shouting distance of the center-left enabling it to pick up votes from Kadima. That will not be easy.
Mitzna says outright that he's returned to politics to mobilize the "peace camp." Perez professes that he would not require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; Yachimovich prefers to take vague stands on security issues and to focus instead on promoting greater government involvement in the economy. Margalit supports an interim Palestinian state now along the parameters of the security barrier. Herzog has been arguably more judicious while still calling for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. All these positions are essentially out of kilter with public sentiment.
So while the obituaries were premature, for Labor to avoid being permanently relegated to the margins of party politics alongside Meretz whoever wins its September primary would be wise to navigate toward Israel's post-Oslo center.
As for Barak's new party, were elections held today, Atzmaut would not to cross the electoral threshold.
###
Whatever became of Israel's Labor Party some five months after its leader Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly quit to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?
Wracked by infighting, fuming over being tethered to the diplomatic policies of the Netanyahu government, and headed by one of the least popular politicians on the scene, the once-dominant Labor Party seemed moribund. Barak had surprised colleagues in January 2010 by pulling out before they could oust him; taking along four comparatively right-leaning loyalists. Barak got to retain his cabinet seat while Labor ministers Yitzhak Herzog, Avishay Braverman and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had no choice but to go into the opposition. In 2006, Labor lost several luminaries including Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik to Kadima.
Now, tabloid pundits were quick to write Labor's obituary. Yediot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of left-leaning columnists, said the party had actually "died" during Barak's short failed term as prime minister in 2000 but had only now been buried. His colleague Sima Kadmon wrote that "the public doesn't believe the Labor Party can be revived." The perennially caustic Ben Caspit at Ma'ariv adjudged Labor to be "a pile of rubble." Barak had dealt Labor "the final blow" wrote another anti-Netanyahu Ma'ariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi.
These writers had captured the popular sentiment: A poll in Yediot the day after Barak's exit found 53% of Israeli voters thought it heralded "the end of the Labor Party." Yet even then there was a glimmer of hope: the same poll revealed that Labor would manage to retain 8 of its 13 Knesset seats were immediate elections held.
Forecasts of Labor's demise appear to have been exaggerated. Since Barak's leaving the party brought back former general-secretary Micha Harish to be its temporary chairman and tasked him with overseeing Labor's revival. Tens of thousands of new members have been recruited as part of a dynamic race on for the party's leadership. David Ben-Gurion's grandchildren, Orit Etzioni and Moshe Ben-Eliezer, have publicly invested in the movement he once led. Even rudderless, recent polls continue to show the party capturing at least eight seats.
Of course, how Labor will ultimately fare in national elections (expected before 2013 when the current Knesset's term expires) will depend on what position it stakes out on the political spectrum and that, in term, very much depends on who becomes the party's new leader. The field includes MK Isaac Herzog, son of Israel's sixth president Chaim Herzog; MK Shelly Yachimovich, a former left-oriented journalist; Amram Mitzna, a rehabilitated previous party leader; millionaire entrepreneur Erel Margalit; MK Amir Peretz, another renewed former party leader and Shlomo Buhbut, a local government politician.
Labor is hardly likely to ever again become a ruling party. One reason is that its leaders and functionaries continue to shill for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in promoting the message that no diplomatic progress can be made because of the Netanyahu government, and not – as most Israelis believe – through any fault of the Palestinian Arabs.
Each of the leadership contenders claimed to have signed-up thousands of new members ostensibly pledged to vote for them in the September 12th party primary and subsequent run-off contest. By that yardstick, Peretz claims to have brought in the most signatures followed by Herzog and Yachimovich. Assuming the petition claims are true, Labor's membership base could emerge as the second biggest behind Likud.
With a leader – Mitzna, Herzog, Yachimovich or Perez – preliminary polling suggests that Labor could, at least hypothetically, capture 17-19 mandates. Yet when the dust settles much depends on whether the party, which still defines itself as social-democratic, can be positioned at least within shouting distance of the center-left enabling it to pick up votes from Kadima. That will not be easy.
Mitzna says outright that he's returned to politics to mobilize the "peace camp." Perez professes that he would not require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; Yachimovich prefers to take vague stands on security issues and to focus instead on promoting greater government involvement in the economy. Margalit supports an interim Palestinian state now along the parameters of the security barrier. Herzog has been arguably more judicious while still calling for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. All these positions are essentially out of kilter with public sentiment.
So while the obituaries were premature, for Labor to avoid being permanently relegated to the margins of party politics alongside Meretz whoever wins its September primary would be wise to navigate toward Israel's post-Oslo center.
As for Barak's new party, were elections held today, Atzmaut would not to cross the electoral threshold.
###
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, June 06, 2011
Public Opinion & the US - Israel Relationship
Liking Israel
The depth of empathy for the Jewish state among ordinary Americans -- persistently critical media coverage of Israel's West Bank, settlement and security policies notwithstanding – ought to be cause for positive amazement.
In stark contrast to strikingly negative European attitudes, a far-reaching CNN poll released May 31 presents an uplifting picture on American public opinion toward Israel: 65 percent of those surveyed had a generally favorable attitude. Equally heartening is a recent Rasmussen poll which found that 71% of Americans want the Palestinian Arabs to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
What regular folks think about foreign policy has often been disparaged. Winston Churchill warned politicians against keeping their ears to the ground because it would be hard for the public "to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture." Moreover, a vast swath of the American public remains blissfully ignorant about current affairs.
Be that as it may, the 24/7 news cycle and a ubiquitous Internet means that foreign affairs can hardly be conducted beyond the purview of public scrutiny as it would have been in the Victorian era.
Mass attitudes on foreign policy tend to be malleable, shaped – rather than followed – by opinion "mobilizers" in the government, media and academia. Plainly, there is a connection between what is covered and what people become interested in. But whether they are interested or not, the American public is fed a heavy diet of Middle East and Palestinian-Israeli conflict news.
In the last week of May, for example, a whopping 10 percent of all coverage was Mideast related compared to 12 percent for the troubled U.S. economy. No surprise then that nearly 18% of Americans say they follow the Arab-Israel conflict "very closely." That's only two percent less than those who say they are tracking the 2012 presidential election campaign.
Positive attitudes toward Israel have held steady through the second intifada and wars in Lebanon and Gaza. In the CNN survey, 44% of respondents identified Israel as an ally, only Britain (at 64%) scored higher. Asked where their sympathies lay 67% said Israel against 16% with the Palestinian Arabs; contrast this to 1988 when 37% were sympathetic toward Israel.
This increased level support was roughly the same across educational background, income and political affiliation though backing among those who define themselves as conservative was more robust at 83%. Within the Tea Party movement, 36% identified themselves as "very favorable" against just 6% who were "very unfavorable." Separately, we also know that there is a well-spring of support for Israel among believing Christians.
That said, most Americans (65%) would rather Washington not take sides at all. This reflects an always present and now growing trend in favor of U.S. isolationism in world affairs.
Moreover, despite near-saturation coverage ignorance about the conflict remains deep-seated as evidenced by a survey conducted by Arab-American pollster John Zogby which found "a plurality" for the so-called Palestinian "the right of return" to what is today Israel and for dismantling "settlements."
On the other hand, lack of knowledge probably doesn't explain why 51% of the "political class" (those who take strong and active interest in politics and often exercise power) in the Rasmussen survey were optimistic about the peace process in contrast to 87% of the presumably less informed "mainstream" who thought progress unlikely.
No less important is the backing Israel has within the heterogeneous U.S. Jewish community. A recent Frank Luntz poll found strong (61%) support for a united Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction and implied solid support for the retention of consensus or strategic settlement blocs in any peace deal.
Despite intensified campaigns by subversive groups within the community to redefine the essence of the conflict and what it means to be pro-Israel, fully 75% of U.S. Jews recognized that the ultimate Arab goal is the destruction of Israel; 94% wanted the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state thereby signaling an end to further claims. On the political front, a massive 85% thought that under President Barack Obama US-Israel relations were not going well. Which makes the next series of findings as disconcerting as they are seemingly incoherent: 55% of U.S. Jews sided with the administration even though 57% approved of the Netanyahu government's handling of relations; and 48% favor a Palestinian state "in the current situation."
The Luntz poll also illuminated the character of the community: more Democratic (50%) and independent (32%) than Republican (15%); heavily identified with the liberal streams of Judaism (52%) or "just Jewish" (37%) – whatever that means – than Orthodox (10%). Yet regardless of these distinctions, just 15% said Israel was not very important in their lives.
What does all this add up to? When it comes to the perpetual Palestinian war against Israel, rank-and-file Americans may have only a slim grasp of the complexities, yet they display an innate appreciation for the justice of Israel's cause. This is providential because no other nation is more dependent on the goodwill of Americans than Israel. The more solid that support, the greater the political constraints on any president whose pro-Israel sentiments are ambivalent. And the more apt is an Israel-friendly Congress to dispute White House pressure on Israel.
George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State in the late 1940s, observed that, "No policy -- foreign or domestic – can succeed without public support."
In the face of encouraging polling data, it behooves Israeli policymakers to shun complacency and to never, never, take the benevolence of the American people for granted.
###
The depth of empathy for the Jewish state among ordinary Americans -- persistently critical media coverage of Israel's West Bank, settlement and security policies notwithstanding – ought to be cause for positive amazement.
In stark contrast to strikingly negative European attitudes, a far-reaching CNN poll released May 31 presents an uplifting picture on American public opinion toward Israel: 65 percent of those surveyed had a generally favorable attitude. Equally heartening is a recent Rasmussen poll which found that 71% of Americans want the Palestinian Arabs to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
What regular folks think about foreign policy has often been disparaged. Winston Churchill warned politicians against keeping their ears to the ground because it would be hard for the public "to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture." Moreover, a vast swath of the American public remains blissfully ignorant about current affairs.
Be that as it may, the 24/7 news cycle and a ubiquitous Internet means that foreign affairs can hardly be conducted beyond the purview of public scrutiny as it would have been in the Victorian era.
Mass attitudes on foreign policy tend to be malleable, shaped – rather than followed – by opinion "mobilizers" in the government, media and academia. Plainly, there is a connection between what is covered and what people become interested in. But whether they are interested or not, the American public is fed a heavy diet of Middle East and Palestinian-Israeli conflict news.
In the last week of May, for example, a whopping 10 percent of all coverage was Mideast related compared to 12 percent for the troubled U.S. economy. No surprise then that nearly 18% of Americans say they follow the Arab-Israel conflict "very closely." That's only two percent less than those who say they are tracking the 2012 presidential election campaign.
Positive attitudes toward Israel have held steady through the second intifada and wars in Lebanon and Gaza. In the CNN survey, 44% of respondents identified Israel as an ally, only Britain (at 64%) scored higher. Asked where their sympathies lay 67% said Israel against 16% with the Palestinian Arabs; contrast this to 1988 when 37% were sympathetic toward Israel.
This increased level support was roughly the same across educational background, income and political affiliation though backing among those who define themselves as conservative was more robust at 83%. Within the Tea Party movement, 36% identified themselves as "very favorable" against just 6% who were "very unfavorable." Separately, we also know that there is a well-spring of support for Israel among believing Christians.
That said, most Americans (65%) would rather Washington not take sides at all. This reflects an always present and now growing trend in favor of U.S. isolationism in world affairs.
Moreover, despite near-saturation coverage ignorance about the conflict remains deep-seated as evidenced by a survey conducted by Arab-American pollster John Zogby which found "a plurality" for the so-called Palestinian "the right of return" to what is today Israel and for dismantling "settlements."
On the other hand, lack of knowledge probably doesn't explain why 51% of the "political class" (those who take strong and active interest in politics and often exercise power) in the Rasmussen survey were optimistic about the peace process in contrast to 87% of the presumably less informed "mainstream" who thought progress unlikely.
No less important is the backing Israel has within the heterogeneous U.S. Jewish community. A recent Frank Luntz poll found strong (61%) support for a united Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction and implied solid support for the retention of consensus or strategic settlement blocs in any peace deal.
Despite intensified campaigns by subversive groups within the community to redefine the essence of the conflict and what it means to be pro-Israel, fully 75% of U.S. Jews recognized that the ultimate Arab goal is the destruction of Israel; 94% wanted the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state thereby signaling an end to further claims. On the political front, a massive 85% thought that under President Barack Obama US-Israel relations were not going well. Which makes the next series of findings as disconcerting as they are seemingly incoherent: 55% of U.S. Jews sided with the administration even though 57% approved of the Netanyahu government's handling of relations; and 48% favor a Palestinian state "in the current situation."
The Luntz poll also illuminated the character of the community: more Democratic (50%) and independent (32%) than Republican (15%); heavily identified with the liberal streams of Judaism (52%) or "just Jewish" (37%) – whatever that means – than Orthodox (10%). Yet regardless of these distinctions, just 15% said Israel was not very important in their lives.
What does all this add up to? When it comes to the perpetual Palestinian war against Israel, rank-and-file Americans may have only a slim grasp of the complexities, yet they display an innate appreciation for the justice of Israel's cause. This is providential because no other nation is more dependent on the goodwill of Americans than Israel. The more solid that support, the greater the political constraints on any president whose pro-Israel sentiments are ambivalent. And the more apt is an Israel-friendly Congress to dispute White House pressure on Israel.
George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State in the late 1940s, observed that, "No policy -- foreign or domestic – can succeed without public support."
In the face of encouraging polling data, it behooves Israeli policymakers to shun complacency and to never, never, take the benevolence of the American people for granted.
###
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.
Israeli Soldiers Shoot at WHOM on Syrian Border?
Israeli Soldiers Shoot at Protesters on Syrian Border?
At what point do those who, in the words of the article,
"crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence"
become rioters or invaders?
It's an interesting question for the headline writers at the Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp
and at the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/palestinian-protesters-attempt-to-cross-at-golan-heights-israeli-troops-open-fire/2011/06/05/AG7nUWJH_story.html?hpid=z2
and at the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13660311
At what point do those who, in the words of the article,
"crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence"
become rioters or invaders?
It's an interesting question for the headline writers at the Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp
and at the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/palestinian-protesters-attempt-to-cross-at-golan-heights-israeli-troops-open-fire/2011/06/05/AG7nUWJH_story.html?hpid=z2
and at the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13660311
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, June 03, 2011
Jews and Capitalism
Why are some Jews uncomfortable with capitalism? Not merely the cliché of capitalism as rapacious speculation and exploitative profiteering, but the mere idea of organizing the economy along free-market lines. While Jewish poverty is still with us chances are most Jews are more embarrassed by Jewish wealth. Perhaps the connection between power and money is the problem. Wealth is certainly one more excuse for anti-Semitism. Yet Jews would probably not have survived into the post-modern era without their genius for making money.
Free market countries tend to foster the kind of liberty and tolerance that have enabled Jews to thrive. Yet many Jews are inclined against political ideologies that champion the free market. A conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies on "Free Markets and Social Progress" held in Jerusalem on May 29 sought to come to grips with, among other things, this apparent discomfiture with capitalism.
Perhaps it’s a matter of branding. Promoting smaller government in order that voters can keep more of their own money is unappealing because it's perceived as boorishly self-centered, unfair, and for Jews the antithesis of tikkun olam, Russell Roberts of George Mason University argued. He sees hanging the free market idea on low taxes and small government in isolation as a mistake. Instead, people need to understand that the collective interest is manifested not in government but in a "subtle emergent order of cooperation" that transcends even market forces. For instance, in America – unlike Israel – government does not regulate religion with the result that America has a vibrant market place of religious ideas. In contrast, Judaism in Israel has been buffeted by being tethered to the state.
For Roberts the value of smaller government is that allows for informal bottom-up collective decision making that "just happens." Citing The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, Roberts argued that it is not the pursuit of wealth that makes people happy – "being loved and being lovely does."
People want to do good because they want to be liked. Capitalism understands that humans are self interested though they need not be selfish. Smaller government won't make people rich but it could make them freer and empower them to do better for themselves and their fellow human beings. Roberts believes that when left to their own devices people won't just give charity they'll cooperate with each other in ways that go beyond commerce. Therefore, those who fret over small government actually show a distain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make their own moral decisions.
What does Judaism have to say about the place of charity and generosity in the free market? Most scholars would say that the liberty inherent in the free market system encourages both these values. Provocatively, philosopher Joseph Isaac Lifshitz of the Shalem Center prefers to emphasize a distinction rooted in Jewish thought between purely altruistic charity, which he sees as laying "outside the market" in contrast to helping others enter the market which he terms "generosity."
Judaism accepts that in any choice between an individual and their neighbor putting the self first is perfectly all right. In fact, there can be no genuine fulfillment of the Biblical command to "love thy neighbor" without a healthy dose of self-interest. Lifshitz would like us to think of investment – specifically on the micro-level – as a normative good. An investor may profit but what matters morally is setting their fellow man on the path toward financial self-sufficiency.
Jewish survival, moreover, has depended not on individual charity but on communal prosperity, precisely the kind fostered by investment that is propelled not by self-abnegation but by healthy self-interest. "It is this type of political virtue that generates political power from bottom up," Lifshitz maintains. The higher moral good, then, is the "generosity" of investment rather than charity.
But how can Jews – or anyone else for that matter – fail to be discomfited by the upheaval resulting from the global financial meltdown? Isn't this the ultimate indictment of the free market and proof par excellence that society needs more economic regulation? Sam Peltzman, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago doesn't think so. He told the conference, counter-intuitively, that efforts to regulate economic conduct actually induced the very behavior that contributed to the financial crisis.
Bankers and CEOs, he said, will invariably behave in ways that offset the intended effects of any regulation. Such "offsetting behavior" begets more regulations, which beget even more offsetting behavior. The human proclivity for risk-taking can't be suppressed by bureaucratic regulations. Put plainly, economic life is far too complex to regulate. Moreover, the U.S. government's willingness to bailout banks and big corporations serves to reward rather than deter appalling economic decisions. Only the sobering prospect that bad business decisions will have bad consequences for those who make them can deter reckless risk-taking.
The views aired at the conference might seem iconoclastic only because they receive scant exposure in the media. To the extent that we give economics any thought at all, most of us adhere to conventional thinking. Jews like others prefer to adopt fashionable views on politics and economics rather than gravitate toward positions that have little resonance in the liberal newspapers we read, the public radio we listen to and the kind of television we watch.
Finally, historian Paul Johnson has pointed out, nomenclature may be another aspect of the problem. "Capitalism is an unfortunate name" for what is "not an ideology dreamed up by an economic philosopher" but a way of life that simply evolved "from the free and uncoordinated transactions and unimpeded movements of countless unknown individuals."
###
Free market countries tend to foster the kind of liberty and tolerance that have enabled Jews to thrive. Yet many Jews are inclined against political ideologies that champion the free market. A conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies on "Free Markets and Social Progress" held in Jerusalem on May 29 sought to come to grips with, among other things, this apparent discomfiture with capitalism.
Perhaps it’s a matter of branding. Promoting smaller government in order that voters can keep more of their own money is unappealing because it's perceived as boorishly self-centered, unfair, and for Jews the antithesis of tikkun olam, Russell Roberts of George Mason University argued. He sees hanging the free market idea on low taxes and small government in isolation as a mistake. Instead, people need to understand that the collective interest is manifested not in government but in a "subtle emergent order of cooperation" that transcends even market forces. For instance, in America – unlike Israel – government does not regulate religion with the result that America has a vibrant market place of religious ideas. In contrast, Judaism in Israel has been buffeted by being tethered to the state.
For Roberts the value of smaller government is that allows for informal bottom-up collective decision making that "just happens." Citing The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, Roberts argued that it is not the pursuit of wealth that makes people happy – "being loved and being lovely does."
People want to do good because they want to be liked. Capitalism understands that humans are self interested though they need not be selfish. Smaller government won't make people rich but it could make them freer and empower them to do better for themselves and their fellow human beings. Roberts believes that when left to their own devices people won't just give charity they'll cooperate with each other in ways that go beyond commerce. Therefore, those who fret over small government actually show a distain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make their own moral decisions.
What does Judaism have to say about the place of charity and generosity in the free market? Most scholars would say that the liberty inherent in the free market system encourages both these values. Provocatively, philosopher Joseph Isaac Lifshitz of the Shalem Center prefers to emphasize a distinction rooted in Jewish thought between purely altruistic charity, which he sees as laying "outside the market" in contrast to helping others enter the market which he terms "generosity."
Judaism accepts that in any choice between an individual and their neighbor putting the self first is perfectly all right. In fact, there can be no genuine fulfillment of the Biblical command to "love thy neighbor" without a healthy dose of self-interest. Lifshitz would like us to think of investment – specifically on the micro-level – as a normative good. An investor may profit but what matters morally is setting their fellow man on the path toward financial self-sufficiency.
Jewish survival, moreover, has depended not on individual charity but on communal prosperity, precisely the kind fostered by investment that is propelled not by self-abnegation but by healthy self-interest. "It is this type of political virtue that generates political power from bottom up," Lifshitz maintains. The higher moral good, then, is the "generosity" of investment rather than charity.
But how can Jews – or anyone else for that matter – fail to be discomfited by the upheaval resulting from the global financial meltdown? Isn't this the ultimate indictment of the free market and proof par excellence that society needs more economic regulation? Sam Peltzman, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago doesn't think so. He told the conference, counter-intuitively, that efforts to regulate economic conduct actually induced the very behavior that contributed to the financial crisis.
Bankers and CEOs, he said, will invariably behave in ways that offset the intended effects of any regulation. Such "offsetting behavior" begets more regulations, which beget even more offsetting behavior. The human proclivity for risk-taking can't be suppressed by bureaucratic regulations. Put plainly, economic life is far too complex to regulate. Moreover, the U.S. government's willingness to bailout banks and big corporations serves to reward rather than deter appalling economic decisions. Only the sobering prospect that bad business decisions will have bad consequences for those who make them can deter reckless risk-taking.
The views aired at the conference might seem iconoclastic only because they receive scant exposure in the media. To the extent that we give economics any thought at all, most of us adhere to conventional thinking. Jews like others prefer to adopt fashionable views on politics and economics rather than gravitate toward positions that have little resonance in the liberal newspapers we read, the public radio we listen to and the kind of television we watch.
Finally, historian Paul Johnson has pointed out, nomenclature may be another aspect of the problem. "Capitalism is an unfortunate name" for what is "not an ideology dreamed up by an economic philosopher" but a way of life that simply evolved "from the free and uncoordinated transactions and unimpeded movements of countless unknown individuals."
###
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, May 23, 2011
MORALITY, TERROR and JUDAISM
The Jewish Way in War
How can democracies – Israel in particular – acting under the conventions of international law defeat Islamist terrorists operating by their own benighted rules? How when U.N. members states are prepared to enable the terrorists by perverting the rules of war and of human rights? This perennial dilemma was addressed at a symposium last week at Bar-Ilan University.
The war between democracies and terror organizations is inherently asymmetrical with conventional forces arrayed against terrorists embedded among their own civilian population. The liberal position articulated by the renowned Princeton University political thinker Michael Walzer, is that soldiers may not increase risks to civilians to save themselves. Even warning civilians to vacate an area prior to striking – as the IDF routinely did during the 2008-09 Gaza war – is for Walzer morally insufficient.
Caught between such fanciful liberal ideals and the cynical machinations of intergovernmental bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council that have shamelessly, discriminatorily and obsessively scapegoated Israel for opprobrium, Israeli theoreticians of war are not only insisting that international law not be misrepresented but they are also mining Jewish tradition for a moral reality check.
What does Judaism have to say about the rules of war? My colleague Aryeh Tepper pointed out here that post-Biblical Judaism was mostly silent on the subject until Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) composed a code of Jewish military law for the modern Jewish commonwealth.
Israel's war guidelines have been partly extrapolated from preexisting Jewish civil and criminal codes. The "rodef" concept, for instance, had long made it obligatory to kill someone who is "pursuing" another with murderous intent. What is warfare if not "rodef" writ-large? Similarly, the law of "pikuah nefesh" the saving of a Jewish life (in the first stance) has primacy when confronting just about any moral/legal/religious conundrum. For example, writing at the beginning of the second intifada, Rabbi David Golinkin, the leading halachic authority of Israel's Conservative movement, appears to countenance lethal measures against deadly stone throwers.
Since 1973, all of Israel's wars have involved asymmetrical combat, pitting the IDF against Arab irregulars entrenched among civilians. Jewish tradition does not seem to distinguish greatly between conventional and asymmetrical warfare. The basic rules appear the same. What is important in Judaism is to distinguish between obligatory zero-sum wars forced upon Israel and wars of choice waged for political ends. The former requires full mobilization and all-out war; the latter are subject to various checks and balances.
Would eradicating Hamas and Hezbollah fall under the category of obligatory war? The command to utterly destroy Israel's enemies, some halachic authorities citing Maimonides maintain, applied exclusively to the seven Canaanite nations that inhabited the Land of Israel in Biblical times. However, some right-wing theologians argue that those who are committed to Israel's destruction today are metaphysical remnants of its ancient eternal enemies and that the biblical laws apply.
Addressing the symposium, Prof. Stuart A. Cohen, of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan recalled the theological and moral storm that broke out in 2010 with the publication of Hebrew monograph The King’s Torah by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, dean of the Od Yosef Chai seminary at Yitzhar, a settlement in Samaria. Shapira's starting point was to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish life in time of war. Does Jewish law permit killing the children of a terrorist leader in order to pressure him? What if he uses his family as human shields? The rabbi concluded that they could be considered fair targets. Issues of proportionality and collateral damage simply would not matter in obligatory wars waged by Jews against non-Jews. Rabbis from across the theological and political spectrum challenged Shapira's strict constructionist interpretation of Halachic sources on the grounds that egregious behavior by Israeli soldiers would transgress the commandment not to bring shame unto God (hillul ha-Shem) and could, moreover, endanger Diaspora Jews (pikuah nefesh). Police briefly arrested Shapira; copies of his halachic-academic work were confiscated and are now near impossible to obtain.
Among those in the vanguard of crafting sensible 21st century war guidelines for the Israel Defense Forces is political philosopher Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also addressed the Bar-Ilan conference, argued that the ethical starting point for Israel's behavior needs to be the responsibilities the Jewish state has to its own soldiers and citizens – not what it may or may not do to foreigners. In weighing the life-and-death scales between protecting Israel's citizen-soldiers and those of enemy non-combatants, Kasher argued that there is nothing moral about jeopardizing your own soldiers to protect an enemy population – provided proper precautions have been taken to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties.
If democracies are to defeat the forces of violent intolerance they will need to develop strategies to take back international law from those who have perverted it. Kasher believes that Israel has a front line role in helping the enlightened world develop the legal and moral tools to confront the scourge of terrorism. If salvaged, international law has the potential of becoming a binding part of Israel's religio-legal fabric, an idea championed by the late Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli of the national-religious camp. For now, accompanied by the distress they ought to feel at the thought that they may be forced to kill, Israeli soldiers should know that they have the moral authority to defend their country.
###
May 23, 2011
How can democracies – Israel in particular – acting under the conventions of international law defeat Islamist terrorists operating by their own benighted rules? How when U.N. members states are prepared to enable the terrorists by perverting the rules of war and of human rights? This perennial dilemma was addressed at a symposium last week at Bar-Ilan University.
The war between democracies and terror organizations is inherently asymmetrical with conventional forces arrayed against terrorists embedded among their own civilian population. The liberal position articulated by the renowned Princeton University political thinker Michael Walzer, is that soldiers may not increase risks to civilians to save themselves. Even warning civilians to vacate an area prior to striking – as the IDF routinely did during the 2008-09 Gaza war – is for Walzer morally insufficient.
Caught between such fanciful liberal ideals and the cynical machinations of intergovernmental bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council that have shamelessly, discriminatorily and obsessively scapegoated Israel for opprobrium, Israeli theoreticians of war are not only insisting that international law not be misrepresented but they are also mining Jewish tradition for a moral reality check.
What does Judaism have to say about the rules of war? My colleague Aryeh Tepper pointed out here that post-Biblical Judaism was mostly silent on the subject until Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) composed a code of Jewish military law for the modern Jewish commonwealth.
Israel's war guidelines have been partly extrapolated from preexisting Jewish civil and criminal codes. The "rodef" concept, for instance, had long made it obligatory to kill someone who is "pursuing" another with murderous intent. What is warfare if not "rodef" writ-large? Similarly, the law of "pikuah nefesh" the saving of a Jewish life (in the first stance) has primacy when confronting just about any moral/legal/religious conundrum. For example, writing at the beginning of the second intifada, Rabbi David Golinkin, the leading halachic authority of Israel's Conservative movement, appears to countenance lethal measures against deadly stone throwers.
Since 1973, all of Israel's wars have involved asymmetrical combat, pitting the IDF against Arab irregulars entrenched among civilians. Jewish tradition does not seem to distinguish greatly between conventional and asymmetrical warfare. The basic rules appear the same. What is important in Judaism is to distinguish between obligatory zero-sum wars forced upon Israel and wars of choice waged for political ends. The former requires full mobilization and all-out war; the latter are subject to various checks and balances.
Would eradicating Hamas and Hezbollah fall under the category of obligatory war? The command to utterly destroy Israel's enemies, some halachic authorities citing Maimonides maintain, applied exclusively to the seven Canaanite nations that inhabited the Land of Israel in Biblical times. However, some right-wing theologians argue that those who are committed to Israel's destruction today are metaphysical remnants of its ancient eternal enemies and that the biblical laws apply.
Addressing the symposium, Prof. Stuart A. Cohen, of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan recalled the theological and moral storm that broke out in 2010 with the publication of Hebrew monograph The King’s Torah by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, dean of the Od Yosef Chai seminary at Yitzhar, a settlement in Samaria. Shapira's starting point was to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish life in time of war. Does Jewish law permit killing the children of a terrorist leader in order to pressure him? What if he uses his family as human shields? The rabbi concluded that they could be considered fair targets. Issues of proportionality and collateral damage simply would not matter in obligatory wars waged by Jews against non-Jews. Rabbis from across the theological and political spectrum challenged Shapira's strict constructionist interpretation of Halachic sources on the grounds that egregious behavior by Israeli soldiers would transgress the commandment not to bring shame unto God (hillul ha-Shem) and could, moreover, endanger Diaspora Jews (pikuah nefesh). Police briefly arrested Shapira; copies of his halachic-academic work were confiscated and are now near impossible to obtain.
Among those in the vanguard of crafting sensible 21st century war guidelines for the Israel Defense Forces is political philosopher Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also addressed the Bar-Ilan conference, argued that the ethical starting point for Israel's behavior needs to be the responsibilities the Jewish state has to its own soldiers and citizens – not what it may or may not do to foreigners. In weighing the life-and-death scales between protecting Israel's citizen-soldiers and those of enemy non-combatants, Kasher argued that there is nothing moral about jeopardizing your own soldiers to protect an enemy population – provided proper precautions have been taken to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties.
If democracies are to defeat the forces of violent intolerance they will need to develop strategies to take back international law from those who have perverted it. Kasher believes that Israel has a front line role in helping the enlightened world develop the legal and moral tools to confront the scourge of terrorism. If salvaged, international law has the potential of becoming a binding part of Israel's religio-legal fabric, an idea championed by the late Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli of the national-religious camp. For now, accompanied by the distress they ought to feel at the thought that they may be forced to kill, Israeli soldiers should know that they have the moral authority to defend their country.
###
May 23, 2011
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, May 16, 2011
Canadian Relations With Israel
The Canadian Exception
Geography, history, economics and necessity have made the U.S. and Canada allies, though Americans tend to take their good neighbor to the north for granted. Israel, six-thousand miles away, has every reason not to follow the American example.
Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, Canada's friendship toward Israel has stood in contradistinction to the treatment Jerusalem has gotten from its fair-weather European allies and a fickle Obama administration. In May 2nd elections, to Israelis' delight, Harper won a resounding electoral and ideological victory giving him a clear majority in parliament.
None of this was preordained. The trajectory of Israel's relations with Canada essentially mirrored those it has had with Western Europe – starting out warm and turning increasingly frosty. In 1947 Canada's Minister for External Affairs Lester Pearson, an internationalist liberal supported the partition of Palestine. The Zionists were grateful; the Arabs utterly rejected the two-state solution, went to war and lost.
During the 1956 Sinai Campaign France and Britain were allied with Israel as Canada sought to placate both London and a fuming Eisenhower administration. Afterwards, Ottawa's adhered to a pro-Israel stance through the 1967 Six Day War wobbling only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Pierre Trudeau in power (1968-1979 and again from 1980-1984). The 1973 Arab oil embargo, PLO airliner hijackings and terrorist outrages, such as the massacre of twenty-one Israeli schoolchildren at Ma'alot on May 15, 1974, swayed Europe and Canada against Israel.
In 1975, Trudeau postponed a UN conference slated to take place in Canada with Yasir Arafat's participation only under pressure from the Jewish community. As soon as Canada's Jewish leadership abandoned the issue, Trudeau's inhibitions about having his diplomats sit with the PLO disappeared along with any interest in opposing the Arab economic boycott of Israel.
Talk about moving Canada's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was shelved as a self-deluded Canadian government, press and intellectual elite emphatically embraced an Arab line that negated Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria. Canada, like Europe, said settlements not unremitting Arab rejectionism was the obstacle to peace.
No surprise then that Ottawa showed no understanding of Israel's predicament leading up to and during the 1982 Lebanon War. By the mid-1980s, under Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Canada had formalized its pro-Arab course. Clark called for a Palestinian "homeland" long before Arafat even feigned recognition of Israel's right to exist and pressed Washington to exploit the political environment during the 1991 Gulf War to force Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the start of the first intifada (1987–1993) Clark ignored Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting that would ultimately take over 1,100 Arab lives, overlooked Palestinian brutality against Jews that would claim 421 Israeli victims, and leveled his criticism primarily on Israel. Similarly, Canadian media coverage portrayed Israel as a Goliath striking down purportedly "unarmed" Palestinian protestors. Even the Canadian labor movement turned against Israel.
Only in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Islamist terror attacks and Arafat's unleashing of the second intifada that would take hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli lives did Canada begin, under Paul Martin (2003 – 2006), to slow its anti-Israel drift as exemplified by Ottawa's abstention on a UN vote against Israel's life-saving security barrier.
With Harper's election in 2006 the drift was halted and reversed. The new Canadian government became the first to cut ties with Palestinian Authority after radical Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. In July 2006, Harper courageously stood with Israel against Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. In 2009 Ottawa led the way in opposing a repeat performance of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001 as well as other Arab efforts to perversely exploit the UN Human Rights Council as a battering ram against Israel.
What explains this Canadian exceptionalism? Canadian political analysts insist that Harper's attitude toward the Jewish state is a matter of personal conviction and shared, moreover, by other party leaders including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney. They see Israel for what it is: an unwavering island of democracy and a bastion of Western values in a perilous unstable region. The reconstituted Conservative party Harper now leads came into existence only in 2003 and does not carry the anti-Israel baggage of its predecessor.
Though it continues to import petroleum, Canada is actually the fifth largest energy producer in the world; third in gas; seventh in oil. Such energy independence lessens the penchant toward moral and diplomatic myopia suffered by Europe.
Harper's principled stance is by no means politically risk-free. Of the main national newspapers that delve into global affairs the National Post is editorially sympathetic to Israel though it relies on occasionally tendentious wire services for its Middle East coverage. The Globe & Mail which endorsed Harper is somewhat less supportive and its Israel bureau chief Patrick Martin has been a strident anti-Israel critic. And while Canadians are not particularly interested in foreign affairs, Harper's support for Israel hardly panders to popular opinion. A recent BBC World Service poll found that fifty-two percent of Canadians still view Israel unfavorably. During the Second Lebanon War only 45 percent agreed with Harper's pro-Israel position. In Quebec, historically less friendly to Jews and Israel, there has been even greater dissatisfaction with the government's stand.
Still, in Harper's core constituency, which includes Christian supporters of Israel, his willingness to go against the grain is valued. Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews in key Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver electoral "ridings" where they are sufficiently concentrated to hold sway have abandoned Liberal for Conservative candidates. Even the famously pro-Israel Liberal MP Irwin Cutler barely won reelection in a heavily Jewish district against his pro-Israel Conservative opponent. Unlike their co-religionists to the south, Canada's 350,000 Jews (out of a 34 million population) see themselves as part of a multicultural mosaic not a melting pot; they tend to be traditionally oriented with a large proportion having actually visited Israel. And they are far less prone to anchor their "Jewish identity" in criticizing Israeli policies.
Exactly fifty years ago, in May 1961, David Ben-Gurion became the first Prime Minister of Israel to make an official visit to Canada. Which brings us to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to Washington later this month. Would it not be menschlich if he made it a point to stopover in Ottawa to personally express Israel's gratitude to Harper and the Canadian electorate for their refreshingly sincere and unqualified friendship?
###
-- May 2, 2011
Geography, history, economics and necessity have made the U.S. and Canada allies, though Americans tend to take their good neighbor to the north for granted. Israel, six-thousand miles away, has every reason not to follow the American example.
Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, Canada's friendship toward Israel has stood in contradistinction to the treatment Jerusalem has gotten from its fair-weather European allies and a fickle Obama administration. In May 2nd elections, to Israelis' delight, Harper won a resounding electoral and ideological victory giving him a clear majority in parliament.
None of this was preordained. The trajectory of Israel's relations with Canada essentially mirrored those it has had with Western Europe – starting out warm and turning increasingly frosty. In 1947 Canada's Minister for External Affairs Lester Pearson, an internationalist liberal supported the partition of Palestine. The Zionists were grateful; the Arabs utterly rejected the two-state solution, went to war and lost.
During the 1956 Sinai Campaign France and Britain were allied with Israel as Canada sought to placate both London and a fuming Eisenhower administration. Afterwards, Ottawa's adhered to a pro-Israel stance through the 1967 Six Day War wobbling only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Pierre Trudeau in power (1968-1979 and again from 1980-1984). The 1973 Arab oil embargo, PLO airliner hijackings and terrorist outrages, such as the massacre of twenty-one Israeli schoolchildren at Ma'alot on May 15, 1974, swayed Europe and Canada against Israel.
In 1975, Trudeau postponed a UN conference slated to take place in Canada with Yasir Arafat's participation only under pressure from the Jewish community. As soon as Canada's Jewish leadership abandoned the issue, Trudeau's inhibitions about having his diplomats sit with the PLO disappeared along with any interest in opposing the Arab economic boycott of Israel.
Talk about moving Canada's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was shelved as a self-deluded Canadian government, press and intellectual elite emphatically embraced an Arab line that negated Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria. Canada, like Europe, said settlements not unremitting Arab rejectionism was the obstacle to peace.
No surprise then that Ottawa showed no understanding of Israel's predicament leading up to and during the 1982 Lebanon War. By the mid-1980s, under Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Canada had formalized its pro-Arab course. Clark called for a Palestinian "homeland" long before Arafat even feigned recognition of Israel's right to exist and pressed Washington to exploit the political environment during the 1991 Gulf War to force Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the start of the first intifada (1987–1993) Clark ignored Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting that would ultimately take over 1,100 Arab lives, overlooked Palestinian brutality against Jews that would claim 421 Israeli victims, and leveled his criticism primarily on Israel. Similarly, Canadian media coverage portrayed Israel as a Goliath striking down purportedly "unarmed" Palestinian protestors. Even the Canadian labor movement turned against Israel.
Only in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Islamist terror attacks and Arafat's unleashing of the second intifada that would take hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli lives did Canada begin, under Paul Martin (2003 – 2006), to slow its anti-Israel drift as exemplified by Ottawa's abstention on a UN vote against Israel's life-saving security barrier.
With Harper's election in 2006 the drift was halted and reversed. The new Canadian government became the first to cut ties with Palestinian Authority after radical Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. In July 2006, Harper courageously stood with Israel against Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. In 2009 Ottawa led the way in opposing a repeat performance of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001 as well as other Arab efforts to perversely exploit the UN Human Rights Council as a battering ram against Israel.
What explains this Canadian exceptionalism? Canadian political analysts insist that Harper's attitude toward the Jewish state is a matter of personal conviction and shared, moreover, by other party leaders including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney. They see Israel for what it is: an unwavering island of democracy and a bastion of Western values in a perilous unstable region. The reconstituted Conservative party Harper now leads came into existence only in 2003 and does not carry the anti-Israel baggage of its predecessor.
Though it continues to import petroleum, Canada is actually the fifth largest energy producer in the world; third in gas; seventh in oil. Such energy independence lessens the penchant toward moral and diplomatic myopia suffered by Europe.
Harper's principled stance is by no means politically risk-free. Of the main national newspapers that delve into global affairs the National Post is editorially sympathetic to Israel though it relies on occasionally tendentious wire services for its Middle East coverage. The Globe & Mail which endorsed Harper is somewhat less supportive and its Israel bureau chief Patrick Martin has been a strident anti-Israel critic. And while Canadians are not particularly interested in foreign affairs, Harper's support for Israel hardly panders to popular opinion. A recent BBC World Service poll found that fifty-two percent of Canadians still view Israel unfavorably. During the Second Lebanon War only 45 percent agreed with Harper's pro-Israel position. In Quebec, historically less friendly to Jews and Israel, there has been even greater dissatisfaction with the government's stand.
Still, in Harper's core constituency, which includes Christian supporters of Israel, his willingness to go against the grain is valued. Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews in key Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver electoral "ridings" where they are sufficiently concentrated to hold sway have abandoned Liberal for Conservative candidates. Even the famously pro-Israel Liberal MP Irwin Cutler barely won reelection in a heavily Jewish district against his pro-Israel Conservative opponent. Unlike their co-religionists to the south, Canada's 350,000 Jews (out of a 34 million population) see themselves as part of a multicultural mosaic not a melting pot; they tend to be traditionally oriented with a large proportion having actually visited Israel. And they are far less prone to anchor their "Jewish identity" in criticizing Israeli policies.
Exactly fifty years ago, in May 1961, David Ben-Gurion became the first Prime Minister of Israel to make an official visit to Canada. Which brings us to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to Washington later this month. Would it not be menschlich if he made it a point to stopover in Ottawa to personally express Israel's gratitude to Harper and the Canadian electorate for their refreshingly sincere and unqualified friendship?
###
-- May 2, 2011
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.
WHAT IF BEN-GURION WERE MEETING OBAMA AND NOT NETANYAHU
What Would Ben-Gurion Do?
Here is a hypothetical being asked around Israel: How would David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel's first prime minister and a founding father, handle himself if it were he and not Benjamin Netanyahu who was scheduled to meet President Barack Obama on Friday (May 20), address AIPAC on Monday (May 23) and speak before a joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday (May 24)? Ben-Gurion's own meeting – precisely fifty years ago this month – with President John F. Kennedy provides some context about the limits of prime ministerial charisma and the constraints on Israel's freedom of action.
Start with U.S. Jewry. Even before he set out for America, Ben-Gurion found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Nahum Goldmann and Irving Miller, top American Jewish leaders, over Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion began the row by saying that a Jew could only be a Zionist by making aliya – immigrating to Israel. The Jewish leaders insisted that one could be a perfectly good Zionist by aiding Israel from afar and by unifying Jews behind Israel as the civilizational core of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion further antagonized Goldmann and Miller by having issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, which affirmed that Israel would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Diaspora and stipulating that aliya was a matter of personal choice.
Ben-Gurion well knew that the AJC in those days identified itself as non-Zionist and had pointedly stayed out of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in which Goldmann and Miller were leaders. Goldmann, who later became a vehement critic of the very Jewish establishment he helped create, lambasted Ben-Gurion for undermining the unity of American Jewry by fixing Israel-Diaspora relations with what Goldmann termed an "unrepresentative" AJC. One can only imagine Goldmann's and Miller's apoplectic reaction when they learned that while he was in the U.S. Ben-Gurion went so far as to meet with Lessing Rosenwald head of the stridently anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism.
Ben-Gurion departed Israel on May 24, 1961 travelling first to see Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At last, on May 30 at 4:45PM he was ushered into the presidential suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Hotel for his private meeting with Kennedy. The official explanation for the venue was that JFK would be leaving from New York for a summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, the administration did not want to antagonize the Arab states by officially hosting Ben-Gurion at the White House. The premier, accompanied by Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman, was described as tense heading into the meeting which included Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community and Phil Talbot from the State Department.
In a remark that Ben-Gurion later told intimates he found uncouth, JFK began by saying: "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York" – indeed he had garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide in his razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections – and that he felt obliged to "do something" in return. Taken aback, Ben-Gurion replied, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
There were three main items on the president's agenda. He knew that Ben-Gurion would be asking to purchase HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. Kennedy's State Department was decidedly opposed; the Pentagon was indifferent. Next, Kennedy wanted to get Ben-Gurion's assurance that Israel would not use its Dimona nuclear reactor – just visited by international inspectors who returned with a favorable report – for military purposes. And finally, Kennedy wanted Ben-Gurion to make a gesture to the Arabs on the refugee issue.
Ben-Gurion first implied that the Eisenhower administration had been inclined to sell Israel the HAWKS. When he saw this tack wasn't working he made a fresh case on the merits: The Soviets were supplying Egypt with advanced MIG-19s warplanes and the purely defensive HAWKS were needed to counter this threat. Not wanting to introduce missiles into the region – or leave Israel in a position that invited attack – JFK pledged to "continue to review the missile situation." Ben-Gurion didn't get a "yes" but he found JFK far more sympathetic than his predecessor. Indeed, in August 1962, following a meeting between 39 year-old Shimon Peres, director-general of the Defense Ministry, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration agreed to sell the anti-aircraft system to Israel.
On Dimona, Ben-Gurion had already told Diefenbaker just days earlier that as a matter of survival Israel might be forced to develop a nuclear capability. Kennedy talked in a friendly way about the recently completed international inspection at Dimona and said that there must not be even the appearance that Israel was pursing nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion replied that for now the facility was indeed engaged in peaceful nuclear pursuits but that were Israel faced with an existential threat it would keep its future options open. Much depended on the Soviet and Egyptian threat. The signals from Gamal Nasser were more than discouraging. Ben-Gurion told JFK: "If they should defeat us they would do to the Jews what Hitler did."
Kennedy next wanted to talk about the Palestinian Arab refugees. The premier said that Nasser did not really care what happened to them. The Israeli position was that the refugees should be resettled and absorbed in Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and in Lebanon. JFK asked Israel to take back a token number of refugees saying it would help the US in trying to mediate between the parties. Ben-Gurion predicted that the initiative would fail, but Kennedy responded that Washington would rather see the onus of rejectionism rest with the Arabs. So Ben-Gurion agreed that the initiative was "worth trying" and following the meeting told the press that he and JFK were in agreement on a refugee initiative. Either the two men did not understand one other or the U.S. toughened its stance, but when UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson later detailed the specifics of the repatriation proposal to Israeli officials it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what Israel could live with and what Washington wanted.
By 6 P.M. the Ben-Gurion-JFK confab had concluded.
The next day, the New York Times led its coverage with the "problem of the Palestine Arab refugees."
Before leaving for London on his way back to Israel, Ben-Gurion met with the Conference of Presidents and with former president Harry S Truman, to thank him for his previous support He also saw former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ambassador Stevenson, and Labor leader George Meany.
Anticipating criticism of the meeting, the State Department had sent diplomatic notes in JFK's name to Arab countries pledging that America would be an "honest broker" and continue to press Israel on the refugees. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted Washington wanted to remain impartial on the Arab-Israel conflict.
None of this, however, placated the likes of Lebanese-born Ahmad Shukeiri, then serving as a Saudi diplomat to the U.N. and later to become the founding head of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was established by the Arab League in 1964. The administration's unappreciated efforts at "impartiality" nevertheless brought it in conflict with Congress which sought to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
In grappling with the "What would Ben-Gurion Do?" question, journalist Amnon Lord, speaking recently on Israel's Knesset Channel, bemoaned the sense prevalent in Israel today that its fate is no longer in its hands; its independence seems to be dissipating. Who would have thought, he asked, that a Netanyahu government would have imposed a de facto freeze on new housing construction in Jerusalem?
Actually, Netanyahu's position is not spectacularly different from Ben-Gurion's. Granted, Obama is more of an Eisenhower than a JFK, but the options available to an Israeli premier haven't changed all that much. Ben-Gurion employed suasion on the HAWKS and succeeded; on existential questions of survival – what the future might hold for Dimona – he exhibited requisite toughness; and on the refugee issue he first tried diplomatic accommodation before digging in his heels. Fifty years on, Israel's standing with U.S. Jewry is no less complicated; its security predicament no less threatened; its international standing no less tenuous.
So Israelis would be well served if Netanyahu managed to emulate "the Old Man" by employing just the right combination of suasion, toughness and diplomacy.
###
-- May 16, 2011
Here is a hypothetical being asked around Israel: How would David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel's first prime minister and a founding father, handle himself if it were he and not Benjamin Netanyahu who was scheduled to meet President Barack Obama on Friday (May 20), address AIPAC on Monday (May 23) and speak before a joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday (May 24)? Ben-Gurion's own meeting – precisely fifty years ago this month – with President John F. Kennedy provides some context about the limits of prime ministerial charisma and the constraints on Israel's freedom of action.
Start with U.S. Jewry. Even before he set out for America, Ben-Gurion found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Nahum Goldmann and Irving Miller, top American Jewish leaders, over Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion began the row by saying that a Jew could only be a Zionist by making aliya – immigrating to Israel. The Jewish leaders insisted that one could be a perfectly good Zionist by aiding Israel from afar and by unifying Jews behind Israel as the civilizational core of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion further antagonized Goldmann and Miller by having issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, which affirmed that Israel would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Diaspora and stipulating that aliya was a matter of personal choice.
Ben-Gurion well knew that the AJC in those days identified itself as non-Zionist and had pointedly stayed out of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in which Goldmann and Miller were leaders. Goldmann, who later became a vehement critic of the very Jewish establishment he helped create, lambasted Ben-Gurion for undermining the unity of American Jewry by fixing Israel-Diaspora relations with what Goldmann termed an "unrepresentative" AJC. One can only imagine Goldmann's and Miller's apoplectic reaction when they learned that while he was in the U.S. Ben-Gurion went so far as to meet with Lessing Rosenwald head of the stridently anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism.
Ben-Gurion departed Israel on May 24, 1961 travelling first to see Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At last, on May 30 at 4:45PM he was ushered into the presidential suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Hotel for his private meeting with Kennedy. The official explanation for the venue was that JFK would be leaving from New York for a summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, the administration did not want to antagonize the Arab states by officially hosting Ben-Gurion at the White House. The premier, accompanied by Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman, was described as tense heading into the meeting which included Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community and Phil Talbot from the State Department.
In a remark that Ben-Gurion later told intimates he found uncouth, JFK began by saying: "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York" – indeed he had garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide in his razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections – and that he felt obliged to "do something" in return. Taken aback, Ben-Gurion replied, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
There were three main items on the president's agenda. He knew that Ben-Gurion would be asking to purchase HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. Kennedy's State Department was decidedly opposed; the Pentagon was indifferent. Next, Kennedy wanted to get Ben-Gurion's assurance that Israel would not use its Dimona nuclear reactor – just visited by international inspectors who returned with a favorable report – for military purposes. And finally, Kennedy wanted Ben-Gurion to make a gesture to the Arabs on the refugee issue.
Ben-Gurion first implied that the Eisenhower administration had been inclined to sell Israel the HAWKS. When he saw this tack wasn't working he made a fresh case on the merits: The Soviets were supplying Egypt with advanced MIG-19s warplanes and the purely defensive HAWKS were needed to counter this threat. Not wanting to introduce missiles into the region – or leave Israel in a position that invited attack – JFK pledged to "continue to review the missile situation." Ben-Gurion didn't get a "yes" but he found JFK far more sympathetic than his predecessor. Indeed, in August 1962, following a meeting between 39 year-old Shimon Peres, director-general of the Defense Ministry, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration agreed to sell the anti-aircraft system to Israel.
On Dimona, Ben-Gurion had already told Diefenbaker just days earlier that as a matter of survival Israel might be forced to develop a nuclear capability. Kennedy talked in a friendly way about the recently completed international inspection at Dimona and said that there must not be even the appearance that Israel was pursing nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion replied that for now the facility was indeed engaged in peaceful nuclear pursuits but that were Israel faced with an existential threat it would keep its future options open. Much depended on the Soviet and Egyptian threat. The signals from Gamal Nasser were more than discouraging. Ben-Gurion told JFK: "If they should defeat us they would do to the Jews what Hitler did."
Kennedy next wanted to talk about the Palestinian Arab refugees. The premier said that Nasser did not really care what happened to them. The Israeli position was that the refugees should be resettled and absorbed in Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and in Lebanon. JFK asked Israel to take back a token number of refugees saying it would help the US in trying to mediate between the parties. Ben-Gurion predicted that the initiative would fail, but Kennedy responded that Washington would rather see the onus of rejectionism rest with the Arabs. So Ben-Gurion agreed that the initiative was "worth trying" and following the meeting told the press that he and JFK were in agreement on a refugee initiative. Either the two men did not understand one other or the U.S. toughened its stance, but when UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson later detailed the specifics of the repatriation proposal to Israeli officials it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what Israel could live with and what Washington wanted.
By 6 P.M. the Ben-Gurion-JFK confab had concluded.
The next day, the New York Times led its coverage with the "problem of the Palestine Arab refugees."
Before leaving for London on his way back to Israel, Ben-Gurion met with the Conference of Presidents and with former president Harry S Truman, to thank him for his previous support He also saw former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ambassador Stevenson, and Labor leader George Meany.
Anticipating criticism of the meeting, the State Department had sent diplomatic notes in JFK's name to Arab countries pledging that America would be an "honest broker" and continue to press Israel on the refugees. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted Washington wanted to remain impartial on the Arab-Israel conflict.
None of this, however, placated the likes of Lebanese-born Ahmad Shukeiri, then serving as a Saudi diplomat to the U.N. and later to become the founding head of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was established by the Arab League in 1964. The administration's unappreciated efforts at "impartiality" nevertheless brought it in conflict with Congress which sought to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
In grappling with the "What would Ben-Gurion Do?" question, journalist Amnon Lord, speaking recently on Israel's Knesset Channel, bemoaned the sense prevalent in Israel today that its fate is no longer in its hands; its independence seems to be dissipating. Who would have thought, he asked, that a Netanyahu government would have imposed a de facto freeze on new housing construction in Jerusalem?
Actually, Netanyahu's position is not spectacularly different from Ben-Gurion's. Granted, Obama is more of an Eisenhower than a JFK, but the options available to an Israeli premier haven't changed all that much. Ben-Gurion employed suasion on the HAWKS and succeeded; on existential questions of survival – what the future might hold for Dimona – he exhibited requisite toughness; and on the refugee issue he first tried diplomatic accommodation before digging in his heels. Fifty years on, Israel's standing with U.S. Jewry is no less complicated; its security predicament no less threatened; its international standing no less tenuous.
So Israelis would be well served if Netanyahu managed to emulate "the Old Man" by employing just the right combination of suasion, toughness and diplomacy.
###
-- May 16, 2011
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, May 04, 2011
EGYPT-ISRAEL RELATIONS AFTER MUBARAK: THE STATE OF PLAY SO FAR
New Egypt
As Israelis watched with unease Egypt's revolution unfolding they were told by European and American liberals to stop sulking; that Hosni Mubarak's February 12th departure had not been provoked by "Palestine" or "Allah;" that the chants in Tahrir Square of “Up with Egypt" more than drowned out those of “down with Israel."
Now, just short of three months into the new regime a sober assessment of Egyptian attitudes would suggest that it may be time to start worrying. The Hamas-Fatah reconciliation engineered by Egypt, regardless of its doubtful longevity, was enabled by changes in Cairo's approach toward the Islamist fanatics. Where the old regime assigned intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to deal with them as a security problem, his replacement Murad Muwafi, backed by Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi, has been dealing with Hamas as a diplomatic partner. Mubarak distrusted Hamas -- the Gaza arm of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood -- and nominally aligned Cairo with Fatah. Now, Hamas is getting the kind of treatment terrorists crave – respect. Its "military commander" Ahmed Ja'abari is now no less welcome in Cairo than the movement's co-founder and theoretician Mahmoud al-Zahar or its Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas, now poised to join a restructured Palestine Liberation Organization, will reportedly open a mission in Cairo.
Egypt's concurrent decision to throw open its Rafah border with the Gaza Strip will make it far easier for Hamas to send its gunmen to Iran for specialized training and to bring in ever more lethal weaponry for use against Israel. Egypt's military chief General Sami Anan preempted Jerusalem's protests by letting it be known that the decision was purely Egypt's internal affair.
Meanwhile, Egyptians have held protests on a bridge overlooking the Israeli Embassy in Cairo demanding their government sever ties with Israel, and stop exporting natural gas to the Jewish state. The export of Egyptian gas to Israel has been portrayed as yet another manifestation of the old regime's corruption with claims that Mubarak's illicit wealth was generated by his conspiring with Israel to provide gas at below market rates at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Oddly, the pipeline carrying gas to Israel (and Jordan) has been twice sabotaged since the revolution and is now inoperative. This does not trouble Finance Minister Samir Radwan who remarked that the peace agreement does not obligate Egypt to sell gas to Israel.
Scapegoating Israel has never been bad politics in Egypt so it is predictable that the new regime is riding the ubiquitous crest of antipathy toward the Jewish state. A Pew opinion survey found that 54 percent of Egyptians want the peace treaty with Israel scrapped (another 10% "don't know."). And no one hates Israel more than the Muslim Brotherhood which is viewed favorably by a whopping 75% of Egyptians. In an apparent arrangement with the ruling junta, it has pledged to compete for half the seats in forthcoming parliamentary elections. With Egyptian political conditions so unsettled and expectations bound to outstrip any incoming regime's capacity to deliver, the Brothers have prudently concluded that they are not yet ready to rule.
Perhaps they are worried that they cannot provide jobs at a time of regional upheaval when remittances and tourism are down. What would they do, for instance, about populist pressure for a minimum wage? The Brotherhood is, astonishingly, the most left-leaning of eight Salafist groups active in Egypt and may simply prefer to follow the Bolshevik approach of not seizing power until conditions are ripe. They can afford to bide their time. Already 62% of Egyptians say they want to live under a political system in which adherence to the Koran is "strict;" another 27% favor a milder form of theocratic rule. Of course, even the sliver of the population that had identified itself with Mubarak's liberal opposition is no less hostile toward Israel.
At home, like in the old Soviet Union, Egyptians have complete liberty to lament the corruption of the old regime. But open criticism of the new supreme military council is cause for immediate arrest. Some 5,000 citizens face trial in military courts for unlawful behavior during the revolution.
Abroad, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Hussein Tantawi has been keeping a close eye on the unfolding Syrian situation which could influence Cairo's posture toward Jerusalem. Tantawi sought to limit criticism of the Assad regime's crackdown on protesters at the UN Human Rights Council. Concurrently, Tantawi's government-by-the-army has bolstered its legitimacy by turning the temperature of Mubarak's already "cold peace" down a few degrees.
Still, he can be expected to keep the relationship on minimal life-support if for no other reason than to avoid the ire of the U.S. government which sends $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt and is now making billions more "potentially available."
Moreover, given all that is on his plate, he would not want to spook the IDF into accelerating existing plans to augment its capabilities on the Egyptian front.
Israeli emissaries have been discreetly meeting with the new regime in Cairo, but Jerusalem's opposition to the Hamas-Fatah deal was rejected. Were Tantawi at all interested in allaying Israeli concerns about Egyptian intentions he could earn major points by leveraging Egypt's new relationship with Hamas to facilitate the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. In the interim, he could instruct foreign minister el-Arabi, who plans a visit to Ramallah, to meet Israeli officials while he's in the area.
Positive gestures would be welcome, but Israeli officials are plainly troubled by what appears to be a strategic shift in Cairo's orientation, one that in the most optimistic analysis replicates Turkey turn against Israel. Egypt's ultimate trajectory is impossible to forecast. The evidence so far suggests that no matter what government formally replaces Mubarak's the broad outlines of the new regime's approach toward Israel are already ominously discernable.
###
-- May 2, 2011
As Israelis watched with unease Egypt's revolution unfolding they were told by European and American liberals to stop sulking; that Hosni Mubarak's February 12th departure had not been provoked by "Palestine" or "Allah;" that the chants in Tahrir Square of “Up with Egypt" more than drowned out those of “down with Israel."
Now, just short of three months into the new regime a sober assessment of Egyptian attitudes would suggest that it may be time to start worrying. The Hamas-Fatah reconciliation engineered by Egypt, regardless of its doubtful longevity, was enabled by changes in Cairo's approach toward the Islamist fanatics. Where the old regime assigned intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to deal with them as a security problem, his replacement Murad Muwafi, backed by Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi, has been dealing with Hamas as a diplomatic partner. Mubarak distrusted Hamas -- the Gaza arm of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood -- and nominally aligned Cairo with Fatah. Now, Hamas is getting the kind of treatment terrorists crave – respect. Its "military commander" Ahmed Ja'abari is now no less welcome in Cairo than the movement's co-founder and theoretician Mahmoud al-Zahar or its Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas, now poised to join a restructured Palestine Liberation Organization, will reportedly open a mission in Cairo.
Egypt's concurrent decision to throw open its Rafah border with the Gaza Strip will make it far easier for Hamas to send its gunmen to Iran for specialized training and to bring in ever more lethal weaponry for use against Israel. Egypt's military chief General Sami Anan preempted Jerusalem's protests by letting it be known that the decision was purely Egypt's internal affair.
Meanwhile, Egyptians have held protests on a bridge overlooking the Israeli Embassy in Cairo demanding their government sever ties with Israel, and stop exporting natural gas to the Jewish state. The export of Egyptian gas to Israel has been portrayed as yet another manifestation of the old regime's corruption with claims that Mubarak's illicit wealth was generated by his conspiring with Israel to provide gas at below market rates at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Oddly, the pipeline carrying gas to Israel (and Jordan) has been twice sabotaged since the revolution and is now inoperative. This does not trouble Finance Minister Samir Radwan who remarked that the peace agreement does not obligate Egypt to sell gas to Israel.
Scapegoating Israel has never been bad politics in Egypt so it is predictable that the new regime is riding the ubiquitous crest of antipathy toward the Jewish state. A Pew opinion survey found that 54 percent of Egyptians want the peace treaty with Israel scrapped (another 10% "don't know."). And no one hates Israel more than the Muslim Brotherhood which is viewed favorably by a whopping 75% of Egyptians. In an apparent arrangement with the ruling junta, it has pledged to compete for half the seats in forthcoming parliamentary elections. With Egyptian political conditions so unsettled and expectations bound to outstrip any incoming regime's capacity to deliver, the Brothers have prudently concluded that they are not yet ready to rule.
Perhaps they are worried that they cannot provide jobs at a time of regional upheaval when remittances and tourism are down. What would they do, for instance, about populist pressure for a minimum wage? The Brotherhood is, astonishingly, the most left-leaning of eight Salafist groups active in Egypt and may simply prefer to follow the Bolshevik approach of not seizing power until conditions are ripe. They can afford to bide their time. Already 62% of Egyptians say they want to live under a political system in which adherence to the Koran is "strict;" another 27% favor a milder form of theocratic rule. Of course, even the sliver of the population that had identified itself with Mubarak's liberal opposition is no less hostile toward Israel.
At home, like in the old Soviet Union, Egyptians have complete liberty to lament the corruption of the old regime. But open criticism of the new supreme military council is cause for immediate arrest. Some 5,000 citizens face trial in military courts for unlawful behavior during the revolution.
Abroad, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Hussein Tantawi has been keeping a close eye on the unfolding Syrian situation which could influence Cairo's posture toward Jerusalem. Tantawi sought to limit criticism of the Assad regime's crackdown on protesters at the UN Human Rights Council. Concurrently, Tantawi's government-by-the-army has bolstered its legitimacy by turning the temperature of Mubarak's already "cold peace" down a few degrees.
Still, he can be expected to keep the relationship on minimal life-support if for no other reason than to avoid the ire of the U.S. government which sends $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt and is now making billions more "potentially available."
Moreover, given all that is on his plate, he would not want to spook the IDF into accelerating existing plans to augment its capabilities on the Egyptian front.
Israeli emissaries have been discreetly meeting with the new regime in Cairo, but Jerusalem's opposition to the Hamas-Fatah deal was rejected. Were Tantawi at all interested in allaying Israeli concerns about Egyptian intentions he could earn major points by leveraging Egypt's new relationship with Hamas to facilitate the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. In the interim, he could instruct foreign minister el-Arabi, who plans a visit to Ramallah, to meet Israeli officials while he's in the area.
Positive gestures would be welcome, but Israeli officials are plainly troubled by what appears to be a strategic shift in Cairo's orientation, one that in the most optimistic analysis replicates Turkey turn against Israel. Egypt's ultimate trajectory is impossible to forecast. The evidence so far suggests that no matter what government formally replaces Mubarak's the broad outlines of the new regime's approach toward Israel are already ominously discernable.
###
-- May 2, 2011
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, April 27, 2011
Ford Foundation & Israel
'The Road Ahead' Without Ford
With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has declared victory and prepared for a phased withdrawal from its long, largely inconspicuous campaign to influence Israeli politics. News reports have focused mostly on the foundation's 23-year-long patronage of the New Israel Fund which, in addition to some laudable activities, has funded opaque groups that have exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some NIF-backed pressure groups including B’Tselem, HaMoked and Adalah self-righteously colluded with the now discredited Goldstone Commission Report.
But Ford's involvement in Israel's affairs goes well beyond the New Israel Fund. The Foundation, today with $10.2 billion in assets, was created in 1936 by automobile magnate Henry Ford's son Edsel. Since then it has disbursed a staggering $16 billion in grants worldwide. While Henry was a notorious Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite, the foundation his money helped endow transmogrified into a quintessentially "progressive" entity devoted to promoting "social change worldwide."
In 1953 the foundation began making apolitical grants that benefited research in Israel. Then, on the very day Israel claimed victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson recalled McGeorge Bundy, his former foreign policy aide, newly ensconced at the helm of the Ford Foundation, to explore ways to coax Israel out of the just liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bundy did not produce any tangible results though in hindsight his involvement can be seen as having driven the foundation's fixation with changing Israeli policies.
Ford became a benefactor of writers, researchers and pressure groups devoted to ending the "occupation" notwithstanding Arab intentions. Judging by where it puts its money, Ford views Israel as an oppressor state that routinely victimizes its Palestinian Arab minority.
By the 1980s it had helped bankroll Meron Benvenisti's West Bank Data Project campaign which sullied as ineluctably in the wrong Jewish life beyond the Green Line. When the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat declared a state – the first time around on November 15, 1988 in Tunis – it was thanks to a blueprint drafted by Prof. Jerome Segal who was later rewarded as a Ford grantee. Ford supported Stephen P. Cohen's Institute for Middle East Peace and Development which gave him the institutional heft that allowed his chum, New York Times advocacy journalist Tom Friedman to incessantly cite Cohen as a "Middle East expert" in promoting their shared views critical of Israeli policies.
Ian Lustick, the intellectual godfather of efforts to "redefine" pro-Israelism and to dissociate American Jewish backing for Israel from support for its West Bank and security policies would also go on to work for Ford. The foundation remained on the periphery of an interlocking directorate of agencies including the Foundation for Peace in the Middle East and the Tides Foundation that conducted a withering pressure campaign to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
The now defunct International Center for Peace in the Middle East provided the organizational front for disaffected Israeli and Americans Jewish actors such as Abba Eban and Rita Hauser as they campaigned for precipitate U.S. recognition of Arafat's PLO.
Ford also become a major funder of Arab and far-Left groups behind the virulently anti-Israel 2001 UN sponsored Durban Conference and with a few degrees of separation continued to back the malevolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Whether by backing innocuous-sounding groups like One Voice and Peres Center for Peace or by supporting tendentious polling on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, Ford's efforts have weakened Israel's ability to reach a negotiated solution.
Like Peace Now, the Geneva Initiative is so well-funded by European governments that it simply does not need Ford's money. But Ford has gone on to lend moral support for J-Street as it takes Lustick's crusade to redefine pro-Israelism to ever more absurd heights.
Looking back, Ford's directors can feel vindicated that the fund's heavy investment in artfully stoking a multi-layered campaign to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice boundaries – irrespective of Palestinian belligerence – has gained inexorable momentum. Ford's outlay has helped leave Israel's security damaged, its international standing weakened and its domestic divisions worsened. As for the New Israel Fund's ability to carry on Ford's work alone after 2013, that will depend on how successful it is in branding itself dedicated to "creating a better Israel" even as it obfuscates the, shall we say, awkward activities of its dependent NGOs.
###
-- April 24, 2011
With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has declared victory and prepared for a phased withdrawal from its long, largely inconspicuous campaign to influence Israeli politics. News reports have focused mostly on the foundation's 23-year-long patronage of the New Israel Fund which, in addition to some laudable activities, has funded opaque groups that have exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some NIF-backed pressure groups including B’Tselem, HaMoked and Adalah self-righteously colluded with the now discredited Goldstone Commission Report.
But Ford's involvement in Israel's affairs goes well beyond the New Israel Fund. The Foundation, today with $10.2 billion in assets, was created in 1936 by automobile magnate Henry Ford's son Edsel. Since then it has disbursed a staggering $16 billion in grants worldwide. While Henry was a notorious Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite, the foundation his money helped endow transmogrified into a quintessentially "progressive" entity devoted to promoting "social change worldwide."
In 1953 the foundation began making apolitical grants that benefited research in Israel. Then, on the very day Israel claimed victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson recalled McGeorge Bundy, his former foreign policy aide, newly ensconced at the helm of the Ford Foundation, to explore ways to coax Israel out of the just liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bundy did not produce any tangible results though in hindsight his involvement can be seen as having driven the foundation's fixation with changing Israeli policies.
Ford became a benefactor of writers, researchers and pressure groups devoted to ending the "occupation" notwithstanding Arab intentions. Judging by where it puts its money, Ford views Israel as an oppressor state that routinely victimizes its Palestinian Arab minority.
By the 1980s it had helped bankroll Meron Benvenisti's West Bank Data Project campaign which sullied as ineluctably in the wrong Jewish life beyond the Green Line. When the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat declared a state – the first time around on November 15, 1988 in Tunis – it was thanks to a blueprint drafted by Prof. Jerome Segal who was later rewarded as a Ford grantee. Ford supported Stephen P. Cohen's Institute for Middle East Peace and Development which gave him the institutional heft that allowed his chum, New York Times advocacy journalist Tom Friedman to incessantly cite Cohen as a "Middle East expert" in promoting their shared views critical of Israeli policies.
Ian Lustick, the intellectual godfather of efforts to "redefine" pro-Israelism and to dissociate American Jewish backing for Israel from support for its West Bank and security policies would also go on to work for Ford. The foundation remained on the periphery of an interlocking directorate of agencies including the Foundation for Peace in the Middle East and the Tides Foundation that conducted a withering pressure campaign to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
The now defunct International Center for Peace in the Middle East provided the organizational front for disaffected Israeli and Americans Jewish actors such as Abba Eban and Rita Hauser as they campaigned for precipitate U.S. recognition of Arafat's PLO.
Ford also become a major funder of Arab and far-Left groups behind the virulently anti-Israel 2001 UN sponsored Durban Conference and with a few degrees of separation continued to back the malevolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Whether by backing innocuous-sounding groups like One Voice and Peres Center for Peace or by supporting tendentious polling on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, Ford's efforts have weakened Israel's ability to reach a negotiated solution.
Like Peace Now, the Geneva Initiative is so well-funded by European governments that it simply does not need Ford's money. But Ford has gone on to lend moral support for J-Street as it takes Lustick's crusade to redefine pro-Israelism to ever more absurd heights.
Looking back, Ford's directors can feel vindicated that the fund's heavy investment in artfully stoking a multi-layered campaign to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice boundaries – irrespective of Palestinian belligerence – has gained inexorable momentum. Ford's outlay has helped leave Israel's security damaged, its international standing weakened and its domestic divisions worsened. As for the New Israel Fund's ability to carry on Ford's work alone after 2013, that will depend on how successful it is in branding itself dedicated to "creating a better Israel" even as it obfuscates the, shall we say, awkward activities of its dependent NGOs.
###
-- April 24, 2011
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, April 20, 2011
WHAT DOES THE LIKUD PARTY STAND FOR?
Between Idealism and Pragmatism
The Likud Party faithful who gathered in Tel Aviv on April 14 for a pre-Passover holiday toast heard party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu announce that he would amplify Israel’s security and peace principles for negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs before a joint session of the U.S. Congress next month.
As he surveyed the crowd from the podium Prime Minister Netanyahu was no doubt reassured by a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he also would have known that 10,000 party recruits had newly been signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. To keep the Likud unified and in the center of Israel's political mainstream, Netanyahu's mission will be to bridge the gap between ideological purism and pragmatism, the religious settlers and centrist hawks, the needs of security and the quest for peace.
In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of party founder Menachem Begin, according to Hebrew University political scientist Abraham Diskin, editor of From the Altalena to the Present Day, a newly published political history (Hebrew) of the movement and its transition from Herut to Likud.
Menachem Begin's decision to form the Herut party (Likud's antecedent) on May 14, 1948, the day the state was declared, can be seen as a victory of pragmatism over ideological zeal. All too often when underground factions compete -- such as Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi and David Ben-Gurion's Haganah – in a liberation struggle they have gone on to fight one another after independence, as Herzl Makov, chairman the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem pointed out in the book's preface. Begin, however, was determined that there would be no Zionist civil war even after the Haganah fired upon and sank the Irgun arms ship Altalena off Tel Aviv on June 6, 1948 with Begin on board. From that dark day on, in the face of relentless campaigning by Ben-Gurion to marginalize and delegitimize the Herut party, Begin steadfastly committed the movement to the ever-shifting center-right of Israel's parliamentary democracy.
From the beginning, the political deck had been stacked against Begin. Ben-Gurion's Labor movement had dominated the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and Histadrut workers federation so it was no surprise that his Mapai faction captured a 46 seat plurality in the first Knesset elections on January 25, 1949 against 14 mandates for Herut. Ben-Gurion then formed the country's first coalition government as his movement continued to dominate all subsequent governments until 1977.
Not only did Ben-Gurion rule out a political reconciliation between the Begin-led Jabotinsky camp and his own Laborites, the Mapai boss pledged to forever ostracize Herut by keeping it out of any Labor-led government. His animosity ran so deep that Ben-Gurion wouldn't even deign to utter Begin's name in the Knesset referring to him instead as "the man sitting next to Dr. Yohanan Bader."
Paradoxically, it was Begin's quest to surmount Ben-Gurion's blacklisting that contributed mightily to his determination to keep Herut in the political mainstream. But in crystallizing Herut's ideology, diluting Jabotinsky's ideas and replacing them with his own, Begin had also to overcome the opposition of the Revisionist Zionists party, which claimed to be the true standard-bearer of Jabotinsky's ideology. Under the leadership of Herzl Rosenblum and Aryeh Altman, Ben-Gurion had welcomed the party into the Provisional State Council, though it failed to cross the one-percent electoral threshold in the first elections and would ultimately be absorbed into Herut. The Freedom Fighters for Israel (Stern Group) also ran independently for the first Knesset garnering one seat. Only in 1973, with Yitzhak Shamir's entry into Gahal, would the remnant of Abraham Stern's followers rejoin the Jabotinsky movement under Begin.
Begin's fiery 1952 orations against Israel accepting Holocaust reparations from West Germany were portrayed by Ben-Gurion's supporters as indicative of his innate right-wing extremism. In truth, opposition to taking "blood money" from the Germans was hardly limited to the right. And in any event, Herut picked up one additional mandate in the next elections.
Ben-Gurion's political quarantine on Begin began to disintegrate in 1954 as a result of the political fallout following a botched Israeli intelligence operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. With the Laborites bickering among themselves and Ben-Gurion out of power, in 1964 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol permitted Jabotinsky's remains to be brought to Israel and interred on Mount Herzl not far from the gravesite of the Zionist movement's founder. This, too, subtly contributed to Herut's legitimacy as a mainstream party. Next, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal Party, which had fallen out with the Laborites over the Lavon Affair, to form Gahal which garnered 26 mandates in the 1965 elections. As a classical liberal, Begin's principled opposition to maintaining military law over Israel's Arab citizens (rescinded in1966) further chipped away at Labor's defamation of Herut.
But it was Gahal's entry into the Labor-led national unity government just before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War that permanently shattered Begin's political isolation. He became a minister without-portfolio and in that capacity rejoiced over the IDF's liberation of Judea and Samaria. In due course, Begin quit the government, now headed by Gold Meir, to protest its acceptance of the 1969 Roger's Plan.
After the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War, with Labor's authority to rule increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to orchestrate the emergence of the Likud from Gahal (and several smaller factions). Begin's sacrifice of ideology for pragmatism bore fruit in the Likud's smashing 1977 electoral victory overturned Labor's monopoly on power. Begin had pulled together settlers, security hawks, predominantly Ashkenazi proponents of a free market economy, and working class Sephardim tethered to the welfare state. It was an amalgamation that he further reinforced in 1981 during his second administration by solidifying Orthodox backing. The glue that held it all together was an overriding distrust of Arab intentions.
In government, Begin redefined Jabotinsky's line on Greater Israel, according to the Jabotinsky Institute's Prof. Arye Naor, a contributor to From the Altalena to the Present Day and Begin's former cabinet secretary. The political center in Israel had shifted and Begin was determined to attune his leadership accordingly even if it required jettisoning ideological purism. In 1979, Begin came under bitter criticism from former comrades-in-arms Shmuel Katz, a Jabotinsky biographer and movement ideologue for trading Sinai land in return for peace with Egypt and from Geula Cohen who broke away from Likud to help form Techiya. Begin's alliance with the Orthodox parties was yet a further deviation from Jabotinsky's preference for a separation of religion from politics. When Begin went to the polls in 1981 it was under the banner: "Better the Difficulties of Peace Than the Pains of War."
Some saw his decision in December 1981 to have the Knesset suddenly annex the Golan Heights as a manifestation of his Jabotinsky ideology, but the case can be made that it was more the result of Begin's justifiable pique at the Reagan administration. After all, the Syrian's had let it be known that they would not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians did; Washington was in the process of selling advanced military weapons to Saudi Arabia while threatening to embargo military aid to Israel over the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor; and the State Department had infuriatingly criticized an Israeli retaliatory raid against PLO facilities in Beirut. Begin had had enough, asking rhetorically of America: "Are we a vassal-state of yours? Are we a banana republic?"
In a nut shell, all subsequent Likud prime ministers have grappled with the same tensions between pragmatism and ideology. Under Yitzhak Shamir, Likud demonstrated far more ideological steadfastness yet even his government could not avoid being dragged under U.S. pressure to the 1991 Madrid talks which were aimed at achieving a permanent resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his first administration, Netanyahu far from renouncing Israel's commitments to the fatally flawed 1993 Oslo Accords actually carried out a partial Hebron pullback in 1997. In the midst of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon campaigned in 2003 elections as a "Leader for Peace" and in May 2003 accepted the Quartet's Road Map whose endgame was the establishment of a Palestinian state. When the Likud rank-and-file repeatedly voted not to support his unilateral Gaza disengagement plan, Sharon defected in 2005 to form Kadima.
Netanyahu has now been back in power for the past two years juggling the demands of his right-wing coalition against those of Israel's fickle international allies. If From the Altalena to the Present Day is any guide, he will continue to navigate the Likud toward the political center – where most voters are – espousing strength on security along with pliability on the diplomatic front and striving, like his predecessors, to bridge the gap between idealism and pragmatism.
###
-- April 18, 2011
The Likud Party faithful who gathered in Tel Aviv on April 14 for a pre-Passover holiday toast heard party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu announce that he would amplify Israel’s security and peace principles for negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs before a joint session of the U.S. Congress next month.
As he surveyed the crowd from the podium Prime Minister Netanyahu was no doubt reassured by a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he also would have known that 10,000 party recruits had newly been signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. To keep the Likud unified and in the center of Israel's political mainstream, Netanyahu's mission will be to bridge the gap between ideological purism and pragmatism, the religious settlers and centrist hawks, the needs of security and the quest for peace.
In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of party founder Menachem Begin, according to Hebrew University political scientist Abraham Diskin, editor of From the Altalena to the Present Day, a newly published political history (Hebrew) of the movement and its transition from Herut to Likud.
Menachem Begin's decision to form the Herut party (Likud's antecedent) on May 14, 1948, the day the state was declared, can be seen as a victory of pragmatism over ideological zeal. All too often when underground factions compete -- such as Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi and David Ben-Gurion's Haganah – in a liberation struggle they have gone on to fight one another after independence, as Herzl Makov, chairman the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem pointed out in the book's preface. Begin, however, was determined that there would be no Zionist civil war even after the Haganah fired upon and sank the Irgun arms ship Altalena off Tel Aviv on June 6, 1948 with Begin on board. From that dark day on, in the face of relentless campaigning by Ben-Gurion to marginalize and delegitimize the Herut party, Begin steadfastly committed the movement to the ever-shifting center-right of Israel's parliamentary democracy.
From the beginning, the political deck had been stacked against Begin. Ben-Gurion's Labor movement had dominated the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and Histadrut workers federation so it was no surprise that his Mapai faction captured a 46 seat plurality in the first Knesset elections on January 25, 1949 against 14 mandates for Herut. Ben-Gurion then formed the country's first coalition government as his movement continued to dominate all subsequent governments until 1977.
Not only did Ben-Gurion rule out a political reconciliation between the Begin-led Jabotinsky camp and his own Laborites, the Mapai boss pledged to forever ostracize Herut by keeping it out of any Labor-led government. His animosity ran so deep that Ben-Gurion wouldn't even deign to utter Begin's name in the Knesset referring to him instead as "the man sitting next to Dr. Yohanan Bader."
Paradoxically, it was Begin's quest to surmount Ben-Gurion's blacklisting that contributed mightily to his determination to keep Herut in the political mainstream. But in crystallizing Herut's ideology, diluting Jabotinsky's ideas and replacing them with his own, Begin had also to overcome the opposition of the Revisionist Zionists party, which claimed to be the true standard-bearer of Jabotinsky's ideology. Under the leadership of Herzl Rosenblum and Aryeh Altman, Ben-Gurion had welcomed the party into the Provisional State Council, though it failed to cross the one-percent electoral threshold in the first elections and would ultimately be absorbed into Herut. The Freedom Fighters for Israel (Stern Group) also ran independently for the first Knesset garnering one seat. Only in 1973, with Yitzhak Shamir's entry into Gahal, would the remnant of Abraham Stern's followers rejoin the Jabotinsky movement under Begin.
Begin's fiery 1952 orations against Israel accepting Holocaust reparations from West Germany were portrayed by Ben-Gurion's supporters as indicative of his innate right-wing extremism. In truth, opposition to taking "blood money" from the Germans was hardly limited to the right. And in any event, Herut picked up one additional mandate in the next elections.
Ben-Gurion's political quarantine on Begin began to disintegrate in 1954 as a result of the political fallout following a botched Israeli intelligence operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. With the Laborites bickering among themselves and Ben-Gurion out of power, in 1964 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol permitted Jabotinsky's remains to be brought to Israel and interred on Mount Herzl not far from the gravesite of the Zionist movement's founder. This, too, subtly contributed to Herut's legitimacy as a mainstream party. Next, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal Party, which had fallen out with the Laborites over the Lavon Affair, to form Gahal which garnered 26 mandates in the 1965 elections. As a classical liberal, Begin's principled opposition to maintaining military law over Israel's Arab citizens (rescinded in1966) further chipped away at Labor's defamation of Herut.
But it was Gahal's entry into the Labor-led national unity government just before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War that permanently shattered Begin's political isolation. He became a minister without-portfolio and in that capacity rejoiced over the IDF's liberation of Judea and Samaria. In due course, Begin quit the government, now headed by Gold Meir, to protest its acceptance of the 1969 Roger's Plan.
After the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War, with Labor's authority to rule increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to orchestrate the emergence of the Likud from Gahal (and several smaller factions). Begin's sacrifice of ideology for pragmatism bore fruit in the Likud's smashing 1977 electoral victory overturned Labor's monopoly on power. Begin had pulled together settlers, security hawks, predominantly Ashkenazi proponents of a free market economy, and working class Sephardim tethered to the welfare state. It was an amalgamation that he further reinforced in 1981 during his second administration by solidifying Orthodox backing. The glue that held it all together was an overriding distrust of Arab intentions.
In government, Begin redefined Jabotinsky's line on Greater Israel, according to the Jabotinsky Institute's Prof. Arye Naor, a contributor to From the Altalena to the Present Day and Begin's former cabinet secretary. The political center in Israel had shifted and Begin was determined to attune his leadership accordingly even if it required jettisoning ideological purism. In 1979, Begin came under bitter criticism from former comrades-in-arms Shmuel Katz, a Jabotinsky biographer and movement ideologue for trading Sinai land in return for peace with Egypt and from Geula Cohen who broke away from Likud to help form Techiya. Begin's alliance with the Orthodox parties was yet a further deviation from Jabotinsky's preference for a separation of religion from politics. When Begin went to the polls in 1981 it was under the banner: "Better the Difficulties of Peace Than the Pains of War."
Some saw his decision in December 1981 to have the Knesset suddenly annex the Golan Heights as a manifestation of his Jabotinsky ideology, but the case can be made that it was more the result of Begin's justifiable pique at the Reagan administration. After all, the Syrian's had let it be known that they would not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians did; Washington was in the process of selling advanced military weapons to Saudi Arabia while threatening to embargo military aid to Israel over the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor; and the State Department had infuriatingly criticized an Israeli retaliatory raid against PLO facilities in Beirut. Begin had had enough, asking rhetorically of America: "Are we a vassal-state of yours? Are we a banana republic?"
In a nut shell, all subsequent Likud prime ministers have grappled with the same tensions between pragmatism and ideology. Under Yitzhak Shamir, Likud demonstrated far more ideological steadfastness yet even his government could not avoid being dragged under U.S. pressure to the 1991 Madrid talks which were aimed at achieving a permanent resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his first administration, Netanyahu far from renouncing Israel's commitments to the fatally flawed 1993 Oslo Accords actually carried out a partial Hebron pullback in 1997. In the midst of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon campaigned in 2003 elections as a "Leader for Peace" and in May 2003 accepted the Quartet's Road Map whose endgame was the establishment of a Palestinian state. When the Likud rank-and-file repeatedly voted not to support his unilateral Gaza disengagement plan, Sharon defected in 2005 to form Kadima.
Netanyahu has now been back in power for the past two years juggling the demands of his right-wing coalition against those of Israel's fickle international allies. If From the Altalena to the Present Day is any guide, he will continue to navigate the Likud toward the political center – where most voters are – espousing strength on security along with pliability on the diplomatic front and striving, like his predecessors, to bridge the gap between idealism and pragmatism.
###
-- April 18, 2011
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, April 12, 2011
DRIFTING APART - NEW GERMANY AND NETANYAHU'S ISRAEL
The news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman were in Germany last week was overshadowed in Israel by coverage of Hamas's anti-tank missile attack on a lumbering yellow school bus that left one Israeli youngster fighting for his life.
At the de rigueur joint news conference in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netanyahu described Germany as a "great friend of Israel" saying that the talks had taken place in an atmosphere of mutual trust and friendship. Yet any sober assessment of the German-Israel relationship would reveal that Berlin is no longer Jerusalem's most dependable ally inside the EU. Germans have grown increasingly -- sometimes unreasonably – disenchanted with Israeli policies. As a German friend working in Israel recently told me, "We just don't understand Israelis anymore."
German's bristle at being told they are naïve. Their faith in the two-state solution, and by implication in Mahmoud Abbas's goodwill, is unshakeable. Germany is Europe's biggest financial backer of the Palestinian Authority. For Germans a solution to the Palestinian issue is practically a prerequisite for regional stability and they blame Israel – definitely not the Palestinians – for the current diplomatic stalemate. Germans myopically view settlements as the alpha and omega of conflict: Israel's refusal to peremptorily capitulate on settlements all but justifies Abbas's intransigence.
But the fissures extend to just about every facet of Israeli behavior. While most Israelis have not forgiven Turkey for its role in the Mavi Marmara affair, the Bundestag unanimously blamed Israel not Ankara or the violent Islamist radicals on board. Israel behaves as if it has no respect for international law, say Germans. Outrageously, 47.7 percent of Germans surveyed believed “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”
Sitting next to Merkel, Netanyahu was prompted to comment on the upheaval in the Arab world. He said Israel wanted to see its neighbors move toward democracy, "but we can't be sure" whether the transformations underway were a harbinger of the positive change Europe experienced in 1989 or that left Iran a mullahtocracy in 1979 "and we have to fashion our policies to that effect."
But many Germans have been infuriated by Netanyahu's attitude. On Egypt, for example, my German friend said Israelis ought to be cheering on the protestors and trying to form positive relationships with this new generation of potential leaders. In the face of the democracies they sense to be blooming, Germans see Israelis' obsessing over the Islamist menace as cynical and counter-productive.
On the diplomatic front, Germany supported a Security Council resolution promoted by the Arabs in February that demanded Israel cease all "settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory" including metropolitan Jerusalem, and termed any Jewish presence anywhere over the Green Line "illegal." Only a US-veto blocked passage. In the old days, Germany would have justified its infidelity toward Israel by citing the obligation to vote with other EU members. (Actually, the German's broke ranks with the EU by abstaining on the Libyan "no-fly zone" in the council.) When Netanyahu telephoned Merkel to protest the German vote on settlements, she turned the tables on him complaining that he had not followed through on a promised new peace overture.
To give Merkel her due, she did assure Netanyahu last week that Berlin would not agree to any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. This commitment takes on added significance because Germany has just begun a two-year term on the Security Council. Even so, there are persistent reports that Germany, France and Britain have been egging on the Quartet toward imposing a solution on Israel – hardly any better than Palestinian unilateralism in Israeli eyes
In 2008, Merkel told the Knesset that Germany would "never abandon Israel" and would "remain a loyal partner and friend." At the press conference with Netanyahu she declared that Iran's nuclear program is "a greater threat now than ever before" and that everything possible must be done to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But Merkel's kinship toward Israel wins her few points even in her inner circle. Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sentimental notions of historic responsibility are mostly balanced by realpolitik and Euro-left political culture.
That may be the context in which to understand Berlin's €4 billion annual trade with genocide-advocating Iran. To be fair, doing business with Iran is not illegal anywhere in the EU so long as it does not directly aid the mullahs' quest for nuclear weapons. Berlin, unlike Washington, professes to be unconvinced that the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank is in fact a financial conduit for Iran’s nuclear proliferation. Anyway, Germans are big believers in engagement and say that punishing sanctions would mostly hurt innocent Iranians while paving the way for China and Russia to exploit the business vacuum created by Europe's departure.
Despite a sense of disillusionment that is increasingly mutual, it would be reckless to minimize Jerusalem's need for good relations with Germany. Germany is one of Israel's most important trade partners and its largest trading partner in Europe. Berlin has financed half the costs of three custom designed Dolphin-class submarines for the Israeli navy; two more are on order (negotiations over subsidizing a sixth are foundering). The subs are crucially vital to Israel's strategic deterrence against Iran. Germany's Interior minister was in Israel last month and held meetings with intelligence officials as part of the ongoing security relationship.
Netanyahu acknowledged in Berlin that Israel's existential security is one of Merkel's paramount concerns. Unique among EU leaders, she unequivocally refers to Israel as "the Jewish state" when promoting the two-state solution. For now, and under this Chancellor, the foundation of the German-Israel partnership remains solid even if, plainly, the façade is starting to crumble.
###
-- April 12, 2011
At the de rigueur joint news conference in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netanyahu described Germany as a "great friend of Israel" saying that the talks had taken place in an atmosphere of mutual trust and friendship. Yet any sober assessment of the German-Israel relationship would reveal that Berlin is no longer Jerusalem's most dependable ally inside the EU. Germans have grown increasingly -- sometimes unreasonably – disenchanted with Israeli policies. As a German friend working in Israel recently told me, "We just don't understand Israelis anymore."
German's bristle at being told they are naïve. Their faith in the two-state solution, and by implication in Mahmoud Abbas's goodwill, is unshakeable. Germany is Europe's biggest financial backer of the Palestinian Authority. For Germans a solution to the Palestinian issue is practically a prerequisite for regional stability and they blame Israel – definitely not the Palestinians – for the current diplomatic stalemate. Germans myopically view settlements as the alpha and omega of conflict: Israel's refusal to peremptorily capitulate on settlements all but justifies Abbas's intransigence.
But the fissures extend to just about every facet of Israeli behavior. While most Israelis have not forgiven Turkey for its role in the Mavi Marmara affair, the Bundestag unanimously blamed Israel not Ankara or the violent Islamist radicals on board. Israel behaves as if it has no respect for international law, say Germans. Outrageously, 47.7 percent of Germans surveyed believed “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”
Sitting next to Merkel, Netanyahu was prompted to comment on the upheaval in the Arab world. He said Israel wanted to see its neighbors move toward democracy, "but we can't be sure" whether the transformations underway were a harbinger of the positive change Europe experienced in 1989 or that left Iran a mullahtocracy in 1979 "and we have to fashion our policies to that effect."
But many Germans have been infuriated by Netanyahu's attitude. On Egypt, for example, my German friend said Israelis ought to be cheering on the protestors and trying to form positive relationships with this new generation of potential leaders. In the face of the democracies they sense to be blooming, Germans see Israelis' obsessing over the Islamist menace as cynical and counter-productive.
On the diplomatic front, Germany supported a Security Council resolution promoted by the Arabs in February that demanded Israel cease all "settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory" including metropolitan Jerusalem, and termed any Jewish presence anywhere over the Green Line "illegal." Only a US-veto blocked passage. In the old days, Germany would have justified its infidelity toward Israel by citing the obligation to vote with other EU members. (Actually, the German's broke ranks with the EU by abstaining on the Libyan "no-fly zone" in the council.) When Netanyahu telephoned Merkel to protest the German vote on settlements, she turned the tables on him complaining that he had not followed through on a promised new peace overture.
To give Merkel her due, she did assure Netanyahu last week that Berlin would not agree to any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. This commitment takes on added significance because Germany has just begun a two-year term on the Security Council. Even so, there are persistent reports that Germany, France and Britain have been egging on the Quartet toward imposing a solution on Israel – hardly any better than Palestinian unilateralism in Israeli eyes
In 2008, Merkel told the Knesset that Germany would "never abandon Israel" and would "remain a loyal partner and friend." At the press conference with Netanyahu she declared that Iran's nuclear program is "a greater threat now than ever before" and that everything possible must be done to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But Merkel's kinship toward Israel wins her few points even in her inner circle. Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sentimental notions of historic responsibility are mostly balanced by realpolitik and Euro-left political culture.
That may be the context in which to understand Berlin's €4 billion annual trade with genocide-advocating Iran. To be fair, doing business with Iran is not illegal anywhere in the EU so long as it does not directly aid the mullahs' quest for nuclear weapons. Berlin, unlike Washington, professes to be unconvinced that the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank is in fact a financial conduit for Iran’s nuclear proliferation. Anyway, Germans are big believers in engagement and say that punishing sanctions would mostly hurt innocent Iranians while paving the way for China and Russia to exploit the business vacuum created by Europe's departure.
Despite a sense of disillusionment that is increasingly mutual, it would be reckless to minimize Jerusalem's need for good relations with Germany. Germany is one of Israel's most important trade partners and its largest trading partner in Europe. Berlin has financed half the costs of three custom designed Dolphin-class submarines for the Israeli navy; two more are on order (negotiations over subsidizing a sixth are foundering). The subs are crucially vital to Israel's strategic deterrence against Iran. Germany's Interior minister was in Israel last month and held meetings with intelligence officials as part of the ongoing security relationship.
Netanyahu acknowledged in Berlin that Israel's existential security is one of Merkel's paramount concerns. Unique among EU leaders, she unequivocally refers to Israel as "the Jewish state" when promoting the two-state solution. For now, and under this Chancellor, the foundation of the German-Israel partnership remains solid even if, plainly, the façade is starting to crumble.
###
-- April 12, 2011
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, April 04, 2011
Was Mohandas Gandhi a Zionist? Not quite.
A Saint for 'Palestine'
A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) by Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, has set off stormy protests in India because it implies that the country's iconic founding father was bisexual.
In “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Lelyveld recalls Gandhi's relationship with a well-to-do German-Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), though makes no explicit assertion of a sexual angle. That claim was made by British historian Andrew Roberts in his cutting review for the Wall Street Journal. Roberts said Lelyveld's account provides enough material to conclude that Gandhi was "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist."
The book will likely find readers in Israel not only because of the titillating possibility that Gandhi's homoerotic interest was a Jew, the suicidal counsel he proffered Jews facing Hitler and his hardhearted opposition to Jewish national self-determination, but also because Indian elites relied on his teachings to frame their country's foreign policy toward Israel. Gandhi's ideas greatly influenced the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nowadays, Gandhi's memory is being repeatedly invoked by Palestinian Arabs and their cultish international supporters to reinvigorate the 60 year-old Arab boycott of Israel.
His "legacy of peace" has also become a family franchise for two grandsons, Arun and Rajmohan Gandhi, who make appearances in Bil'in the site of ferocious weekly demonstrations by Palestinian Arabs and foreign radicals against Israel's life-saving security barrier. Anna Baltzer, winner of the "Rachel Corrie Prize" is one of many Jewish "activists" who has invoked Gandhi legacy in her "reportage."
Another is filmmaker Julian Schnabel who paid tribute to the Gandhi myth in an interview about his recent Israel-exploitation film Miral. In awarding the perfidious ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappe their Honorary Guide Title, even a group devoted to belief in extraterrestrials cited Pappe's attachment to Gandhi.
In this way, the mahatma, or great soul, has also become a fuzzy icon for the history-challenged.
Palestinian Arabs have drawn parallels between Gandhi's imaginary support for black Africans and their own cause. In truth, during the 21 years he lived in Africa, Gandhi was not particularly sympathetic toward black liberation. Instead, the Hindu solicitor became an indispensable go-between for the Muslim Indian business elite and the authorities. A proponent of race purity, he was known to complain that "the Indian [was] being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir."
It was, incidentally, during this period that Gandhi left his wife to live with Kallenbach.
Later, back in India, this saint of the underdog went on his first hunger strike in 1932 to oppose granting low-caste "untouchables" political representation in the Indian parliament. Though media-savvy Palestinian Muslims have adopted Gandhi as their a hero, his inept handling of relations with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan's first leader, helped set the stage for the break-up of the Indian subcontinent into warring Hindu and Muslim states.
Like Africans, Jews have little reason to place Gandhi on a pedestal. "My sympathies," he wrote in late November 1938 after Kristallnacht, "are with the Jews." No doubt, in a peculiar sense, this was true. He valued Jews like Sonja Schlesin, his loyal secretary in South Africa and Henry Polak his soul mate and right hand man.
Such sympathy notwithstanding, in 1937 and again in 1939, Kallenbach visited Gandhi in India endeavoring to elicit his support for the Zionist enterprise to no avail. Gandhi wrote about it in a 1939 letter: "I happen to have a Jewish friend living with me. He has an intellectual belief in non-violence…I do not quarrel with him over his anger [against the Nazis]. He wants to be non-violent, but the sufferings of his fellow-Jews are too much for him to bear." Gandhi acknowledged that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had no parallel in history. Nevertheless, Gandhi's resolute counsel to Jews facing the Nazis was non-violent civil disobedience – and forgiveness.
In contrast, to his own followers he taught that "war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil." He even blessed a provincial Hindu nawab who had given orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state.
Whatever their mutual affections, Kallenbach, a utopian Zionist who served on the Executive of the South African Zionist Federation, was unable to convert Gandhi to the cause. "The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me," he confessed. Why couldn't the Jews think of Palestine as a kind of biblical metaphor and let that suffice. He dismissed international commitments for a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. If they must settle in Palestine, Gandhi told the Jews, they should do so only with Arab goodwill.
If worse comes to worse, the Jews should allow themselves to be "thrown into the Dead Sea." Any other course to preserve their survival would make them the guilty party. Even after the destruction of European Jewry and a litany of Arab atrocities in Palestine, Gandhi held firm: the Jews must practice non-violence.
No doubt Gandhi was a complicated historical figure yet this much is straightforward. He was not the liberal humanist many in the American civil rights movement imagined him to be. He was no friend of Africa; certainly no lover of Zion. In the stark judgment of historian Paul Johnson, his teachings didn't even have much relevance to India's problems. Upon further reflection, perhaps it's fitting that a fraudulent Palestinian "narrative" has appropriated the Gandhi phenomenon to its century long and comprehensive war against the Jewish return to Israel.
###
A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) by Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, has set off stormy protests in India because it implies that the country's iconic founding father was bisexual.
In “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Lelyveld recalls Gandhi's relationship with a well-to-do German-Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), though makes no explicit assertion of a sexual angle. That claim was made by British historian Andrew Roberts in his cutting review for the Wall Street Journal. Roberts said Lelyveld's account provides enough material to conclude that Gandhi was "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist."
The book will likely find readers in Israel not only because of the titillating possibility that Gandhi's homoerotic interest was a Jew, the suicidal counsel he proffered Jews facing Hitler and his hardhearted opposition to Jewish national self-determination, but also because Indian elites relied on his teachings to frame their country's foreign policy toward Israel. Gandhi's ideas greatly influenced the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nowadays, Gandhi's memory is being repeatedly invoked by Palestinian Arabs and their cultish international supporters to reinvigorate the 60 year-old Arab boycott of Israel.
His "legacy of peace" has also become a family franchise for two grandsons, Arun and Rajmohan Gandhi, who make appearances in Bil'in the site of ferocious weekly demonstrations by Palestinian Arabs and foreign radicals against Israel's life-saving security barrier. Anna Baltzer, winner of the "Rachel Corrie Prize" is one of many Jewish "activists" who has invoked Gandhi legacy in her "reportage."
Another is filmmaker Julian Schnabel who paid tribute to the Gandhi myth in an interview about his recent Israel-exploitation film Miral. In awarding the perfidious ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappe their Honorary Guide Title, even a group devoted to belief in extraterrestrials cited Pappe's attachment to Gandhi.
In this way, the mahatma, or great soul, has also become a fuzzy icon for the history-challenged.
Palestinian Arabs have drawn parallels between Gandhi's imaginary support for black Africans and their own cause. In truth, during the 21 years he lived in Africa, Gandhi was not particularly sympathetic toward black liberation. Instead, the Hindu solicitor became an indispensable go-between for the Muslim Indian business elite and the authorities. A proponent of race purity, he was known to complain that "the Indian [was] being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir."
It was, incidentally, during this period that Gandhi left his wife to live with Kallenbach.
Later, back in India, this saint of the underdog went on his first hunger strike in 1932 to oppose granting low-caste "untouchables" political representation in the Indian parliament. Though media-savvy Palestinian Muslims have adopted Gandhi as their a hero, his inept handling of relations with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan's first leader, helped set the stage for the break-up of the Indian subcontinent into warring Hindu and Muslim states.
Like Africans, Jews have little reason to place Gandhi on a pedestal. "My sympathies," he wrote in late November 1938 after Kristallnacht, "are with the Jews." No doubt, in a peculiar sense, this was true. He valued Jews like Sonja Schlesin, his loyal secretary in South Africa and Henry Polak his soul mate and right hand man.
Such sympathy notwithstanding, in 1937 and again in 1939, Kallenbach visited Gandhi in India endeavoring to elicit his support for the Zionist enterprise to no avail. Gandhi wrote about it in a 1939 letter: "I happen to have a Jewish friend living with me. He has an intellectual belief in non-violence…I do not quarrel with him over his anger [against the Nazis]. He wants to be non-violent, but the sufferings of his fellow-Jews are too much for him to bear." Gandhi acknowledged that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had no parallel in history. Nevertheless, Gandhi's resolute counsel to Jews facing the Nazis was non-violent civil disobedience – and forgiveness.
In contrast, to his own followers he taught that "war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil." He even blessed a provincial Hindu nawab who had given orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state.
Whatever their mutual affections, Kallenbach, a utopian Zionist who served on the Executive of the South African Zionist Federation, was unable to convert Gandhi to the cause. "The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me," he confessed. Why couldn't the Jews think of Palestine as a kind of biblical metaphor and let that suffice. He dismissed international commitments for a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. If they must settle in Palestine, Gandhi told the Jews, they should do so only with Arab goodwill.
If worse comes to worse, the Jews should allow themselves to be "thrown into the Dead Sea." Any other course to preserve their survival would make them the guilty party. Even after the destruction of European Jewry and a litany of Arab atrocities in Palestine, Gandhi held firm: the Jews must practice non-violence.
No doubt Gandhi was a complicated historical figure yet this much is straightforward. He was not the liberal humanist many in the American civil rights movement imagined him to be. He was no friend of Africa; certainly no lover of Zion. In the stark judgment of historian Paul Johnson, his teachings didn't even have much relevance to India's problems. Upon further reflection, perhaps it's fitting that a fraudulent Palestinian "narrative" has appropriated the Gandhi phenomenon to its century long and comprehensive war against the Jewish return to Israel.
###
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, March 28, 2011
THE NEXT GAZA WAR -- WHAT ISRAEL MUST DO
Gaza Endgame
The weekend meeting in Ramallah between Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and an unofficial delegation of West Bank Hamas "parliamentarians" was not just about reconciling the two factions.
Abbas told his visitors that long months of Palestinian diplomacy were being jeopardized by Hamas's bellicosity.
Fatah is on the cusp of gaining United Nations backing for a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, without having conceded the "right of return," or recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or addressing a single of Israel's security needs.
If the Palestinians played their cards right they could bring Yassir Arafat's June 1974 plan for the destruction of Israel in phases massively closer to realization. But another Gaza war now, Abbas warned, would only highlight Palestinian disunity and prove Israel's claim that an imposed international solution would leave Jews and Arabs still killing each other.
Abbas might have told his visitors that in the West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians can hurl rocks at Israeli motorists or ambulances, attack soldiers without provocation, or riot against the security barrier without negative consequences to Palestinian interests simply by invoking the "occupation."
Some in the media had even downplayed the slaughter of a Jewish family at Itamar as having been provoked by "settlements." He might have agreed that Palestinian diplomacy was not adversely affected by Israel having interdicted a ship laden with weapons bound for Gaza "militants," and that no one seems perturbed over foiled Hamas terror efforts to tunnel into Israel from Gaza.
Still, some recent "resistance" activities had risked Fatah's strides at the UN. What was the point of pummeling Israel from Gaza with 50 mortars in 15 minutes back on March 19th? Or take the recent bus-stop bombing in "west" Jerusalem which almost claimed a British television reporter and killed a visiting Christian bible scholar? How are Fatah's diplomats to explain the bombardment of Beersheba and Ashdod by Grad missiles?
A direct hit on some Jewish kindergarten could setback painstaking PLO diplomacy.
Had they been in a position to speak frankly the Hamas men would have acknowledged that they, too, have an interest in seeing Abbas succeed at the U.N. After all, a diplomatic victory for Fatah today will accrue to Hamas tomorrow – as the Islamists fully expect to one day assume control over a reunited Palestinian polity.
For now, however, Hamas's calculations are anything but straightforward. The popular uprisings now sweeping the Arab world have shaken Hamas's confidence as demonstrated by the brutally with which its thugs have crushed Gazans' protests. What better way to redirect criticism of the regime than by instigating a conflict with Israel?
Moreover, Hamas is not monolithic. There are divisions between the hard-line armed faction led Ahmed Ja'abari and the purportedly more moderate "government" led by Ismail Haniyeh. He wants to be seen as open to reconciliation with Abbas; Ja'abari makes no such pretense. There are also tensions between the Damascus-based leadership, buffeted by the upheavals in Syria, and Hamas chiefs in Gaza.
In this environment, it may be that Hamas is having trouble imposing its will on other extremist factions in the Strip. For only hours after Hamas announced that Gaza terror groups were ready to return to a de facto ceasefire with Israel, two Islamic Jihad gunmen were liquidated by the Israeli air force on their way to launch rockets against Israel. (Curiously, for its own Machiavellian reasons, Islamic Jihad has been advocating Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.)
Add to this mix uncertainty over the future of Syria and by implication, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and it's no wonder that Hamas would rather Palestinians vent their spleen against Israel.
That is precisely why Israel has no interest in shifting the attention of the Arab street onto itself. By demolishing the headquarters of the Hamas government in Gaza, continuing pinpoint targeting of terrorists engaged in attacks, deploying the imperfect Iron Dome anti-rocket defensive shield, and signaling that targeted killings of Hamas leaders was on the agenda, Jerusalem is endeavoring to deter Gaza violence in a prudent and calibrated manner.
What if, nevertheless, a terror attack resulting in mega casualties leaves Israel with no choice but to go to war? If an Operation Cast Lead II becomes obligatory, Israel will obviously strive to avoid the mistakes of the first Gaza war. But it must do more.
This time Israel needs a coherent mission: ending Hamas rule. That would require a strategy of unremitting attack against the movement's leaders, structures and symbols regardless of whether they are political or military so that Hamas loses the ability to command and control events in the Strip.
With its back to the wall Hamas can be expected to unleash its entire arsenal. To win, the IDF will need to be led with élan. A broad based national unity cabinet would need to inspire heretofore elusive solidarity on a besieged home-front. The country's diplomats would have to argue convincingly that with Hamas looking over his shoulder, Abbas has been petrified to make necessary compromises for peace and has turned, instead, to a morally obtuse international community to deliver Israel prostrate.
What would the impact of destroying the Hamas government be on Abbas's diplomatic campaign?
With Hamas vanquished and the Palestinian Authority presumably back in Gaza, Abbas will be faced with a dilemma: make real peace with Israel or continue down Arafat's falsehearted path. The big unknown is whether the Obama administration and those EU countries not pledged to Arab cause robot-like will press Abbas to choose wisely.
Defeating Hamas would be no panacea, but as Max Singer, a Senior Fellow at the BESA Institute of Bar Ilan University has argued, an Israeli willingness to defeat a Palestinian army and destroy a Palestinian government can serve as an important deterrent, signaling that the Jewish state will not tolerate a belligerent regime anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
###
March 28, 2011
The weekend meeting in Ramallah between Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and an unofficial delegation of West Bank Hamas "parliamentarians" was not just about reconciling the two factions.
Abbas told his visitors that long months of Palestinian diplomacy were being jeopardized by Hamas's bellicosity.
Fatah is on the cusp of gaining United Nations backing for a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, without having conceded the "right of return," or recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or addressing a single of Israel's security needs.
If the Palestinians played their cards right they could bring Yassir Arafat's June 1974 plan for the destruction of Israel in phases massively closer to realization. But another Gaza war now, Abbas warned, would only highlight Palestinian disunity and prove Israel's claim that an imposed international solution would leave Jews and Arabs still killing each other.
Abbas might have told his visitors that in the West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians can hurl rocks at Israeli motorists or ambulances, attack soldiers without provocation, or riot against the security barrier without negative consequences to Palestinian interests simply by invoking the "occupation."
Some in the media had even downplayed the slaughter of a Jewish family at Itamar as having been provoked by "settlements." He might have agreed that Palestinian diplomacy was not adversely affected by Israel having interdicted a ship laden with weapons bound for Gaza "militants," and that no one seems perturbed over foiled Hamas terror efforts to tunnel into Israel from Gaza.
Still, some recent "resistance" activities had risked Fatah's strides at the UN. What was the point of pummeling Israel from Gaza with 50 mortars in 15 minutes back on March 19th? Or take the recent bus-stop bombing in "west" Jerusalem which almost claimed a British television reporter and killed a visiting Christian bible scholar? How are Fatah's diplomats to explain the bombardment of Beersheba and Ashdod by Grad missiles?
A direct hit on some Jewish kindergarten could setback painstaking PLO diplomacy.
Had they been in a position to speak frankly the Hamas men would have acknowledged that they, too, have an interest in seeing Abbas succeed at the U.N. After all, a diplomatic victory for Fatah today will accrue to Hamas tomorrow – as the Islamists fully expect to one day assume control over a reunited Palestinian polity.
For now, however, Hamas's calculations are anything but straightforward. The popular uprisings now sweeping the Arab world have shaken Hamas's confidence as demonstrated by the brutally with which its thugs have crushed Gazans' protests. What better way to redirect criticism of the regime than by instigating a conflict with Israel?
Moreover, Hamas is not monolithic. There are divisions between the hard-line armed faction led Ahmed Ja'abari and the purportedly more moderate "government" led by Ismail Haniyeh. He wants to be seen as open to reconciliation with Abbas; Ja'abari makes no such pretense. There are also tensions between the Damascus-based leadership, buffeted by the upheavals in Syria, and Hamas chiefs in Gaza.
In this environment, it may be that Hamas is having trouble imposing its will on other extremist factions in the Strip. For only hours after Hamas announced that Gaza terror groups were ready to return to a de facto ceasefire with Israel, two Islamic Jihad gunmen were liquidated by the Israeli air force on their way to launch rockets against Israel. (Curiously, for its own Machiavellian reasons, Islamic Jihad has been advocating Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.)
Add to this mix uncertainty over the future of Syria and by implication, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and it's no wonder that Hamas would rather Palestinians vent their spleen against Israel.
That is precisely why Israel has no interest in shifting the attention of the Arab street onto itself. By demolishing the headquarters of the Hamas government in Gaza, continuing pinpoint targeting of terrorists engaged in attacks, deploying the imperfect Iron Dome anti-rocket defensive shield, and signaling that targeted killings of Hamas leaders was on the agenda, Jerusalem is endeavoring to deter Gaza violence in a prudent and calibrated manner.
What if, nevertheless, a terror attack resulting in mega casualties leaves Israel with no choice but to go to war? If an Operation Cast Lead II becomes obligatory, Israel will obviously strive to avoid the mistakes of the first Gaza war. But it must do more.
This time Israel needs a coherent mission: ending Hamas rule. That would require a strategy of unremitting attack against the movement's leaders, structures and symbols regardless of whether they are political or military so that Hamas loses the ability to command and control events in the Strip.
With its back to the wall Hamas can be expected to unleash its entire arsenal. To win, the IDF will need to be led with élan. A broad based national unity cabinet would need to inspire heretofore elusive solidarity on a besieged home-front. The country's diplomats would have to argue convincingly that with Hamas looking over his shoulder, Abbas has been petrified to make necessary compromises for peace and has turned, instead, to a morally obtuse international community to deliver Israel prostrate.
What would the impact of destroying the Hamas government be on Abbas's diplomatic campaign?
With Hamas vanquished and the Palestinian Authority presumably back in Gaza, Abbas will be faced with a dilemma: make real peace with Israel or continue down Arafat's falsehearted path. The big unknown is whether the Obama administration and those EU countries not pledged to Arab cause robot-like will press Abbas to choose wisely.
Defeating Hamas would be no panacea, but as Max Singer, a Senior Fellow at the BESA Institute of Bar Ilan University has argued, an Israeli willingness to defeat a Palestinian army and destroy a Palestinian government can serve as an important deterrent, signaling that the Jewish state will not tolerate a belligerent regime anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
###
March 28, 2011
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, March 21, 2011
IS TURKEY A MODEL FOR ARAB AND ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
One best case scenario to the current upheaval in the Arab world foresees the emergence of Turkish-style political systems in places like Egypt and Tunisia in the event Islamic parties come to power by democratic means. In Egypt, a plebiscite over the weekend approved amending the constitution in a way that strengthens the prospects of the Moslem Brotherhood in forthcoming parliamentary elections. As for the depth of Turkey's own commitment to democratic principles, that may only begin to clarify itself after elections on June 12th.
Polls predict the Islamic AKP (Justice and Development Party) will easily achieve its third consecutive victory. AKP's strongest challenger, the CHP (Republican People's Party) is not expected to garner more than 20 percent of the vote. The CHP and its new leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu carry the mantle of the country's founder and architect of Turkey's secular path Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. AKP's platform pledges to amend Turkey's constitution, but doing so could further entrench Islamist control. Customarily, the Turkish army had served as a (self-interested) guarantor of the country's faithfulness to Ataturk's path.
Paradoxically, as Turkey became more democratic, more committed to joining the EU, as its government became more religiously parochial, the principle that the army had a homeostatic role to play if the nation drifted from Ataturk's ways has become delegitimized.
Meanwhile, the AKP's go slow, Islam-friendly, conservative approach begs the question: What is its ultimate destination? It has deftly reworked the ideas of the late Necmettin Erbakan, who trailblazed non-violent Islamist participation in Turkish politics; breaking with his anti-free-market principles – by, for instance, favoring accession to the EU – while modulating his anti-Western, though less so his anti-Zionist, line.
At a recent conference at Hebrew University's Truman Institute to discuss the Middle East in transition, Prof. Umit Cizre of Istanbul University pooh-poohed concerns that AKP had a hidden Islamist agenda or intended to introduce Sharia law. Instead, she criticized Turkey's secularists for harping on the Islamist threat without presenting a coherent political platform of their own. Yet Cizre described the AKP as having "deliberately" positioned itself "ambiguously" on the political spectrum.
Why, though, is the secular camp so weak? Voters are uncomfortable with hard-line secularism. A new class of Islamic business elites has arisen alongside their secularist counterparts. Also, secularists have also been blamed for mishandling their management of the state when they were in charge. Moreover, while the moderate tone pursued by AKP has made it difficult to mobilize non-Islamists, ideological and personal differences have riven the secularist camp.
It may also be true that nowadays secularists are less committed to pure democracy than the Isalmists. Last but not least, secularists have been undermined by the so-called Ergenekon affair, which the government asserts has exposed a vast plot by the military and their allies in the media to overthrow the regime. A good number of serving generals have been arrested on "flimsy" even "fabricated" evidence, say the generals' defenders.
No one disputes that the AKP has helped make Turkey a success story and engineered the world's 15th largest economy. Unparalleled political stability has contributed to economic boom; GDP is up to $10,000 compared to $3,000 at the start of the decade. Turkey's economy would be still better if it didn't need to import 95% of its energy needs.
As befitting a regional power with grand aspirations, Turkey recently hosted an alternative "political" Davos in Istanbul. Unfortunately for Erdogan and his political rival President Abdullah Gül the gathering was a complete flop as unrest at home kept expected guests – including Syria's leader Bashar Assad and Egypt's Gamal Mubarak (invited before his father was ousted from the presidency) from attending. Even Spain's Socialist Workers' Party Premier Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is in the forefront of an effort to paper-over differences between Western civilization and the Islamists, was a no-show.
Abroad, Turkey's distancing from Israel exemplified by Erdogan's periodically staged outbursts against the Jewish state and by a sharp deterioration in bilateral relations in all fields -- save trade -- is now a well established feature of Ankara's foreign policy.
Turkey may claim that its warmth toward Hamas and its instigation of the Gaza flotilla crisis is intended to somehow promote peace. But Israelis can't imagine how and wonder if Erdogan is tapping into the kind of anti-Semitic sentiment that has propelled such despicable films as Valley of the Wolves into blockbusters.
Actually, foreign policy signals out of Turkey are jumbled. For instance, Turkey opted not to stop the Victoria from leaving its port bound for Gaza via Egypt with Iranian weapons in its hold. But it grounded two Iranian planes in search for arms. Ankara denounced the Itamar massacre but in the same breath asserted the community's existence was a breach of international law. So far, it has had nothing to say about Hamas's intensified bombardment of Israel.
Other aspects of Turkey's foreign policy are equally troubling. Erdogan's chauvinism and Islamic assertiveness has led him to accuse Germany of pushing its 3.5-million-strong Turkish minority too hard toward acculturating into their adopted country. Teach your children Turkish before German, he told a Dusseldorf rally.
But with countries it borders, including Iran, Syria and Iraq, Ankara professes to pursue a "zero problems" policy. Sure enough there has been a substantial increase in trade and exchange of high-ranking visitors with Iran and mutual cooperation against the Kurds. Nevertheless, the geo-strategic rivalry between Iran and Turkey is undeniable even if camouflaged by talk of pan-Islamic solidarity. Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss, a Turkish foreign policy specialist at Tel Aviv University told the Truman conference that the Turks see a nuclear-armed Iran as destabilizing. Nor is it a coincidence that an Erdogan visit inevitably follows one by Ahmadinejad around the globe. The two countries are destined to balance each other's power. For instance, while Iran will oppose a Syrian peace with Israel, Turkey favors one (albeit on Syria's terms). Or take Turkey's warning that it would not "remain silent" if the IDF retaliated against Lebanon for Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Some analysts interpret this as a challenge to Teheran's hegemony over Beirut as much as a cheap jab against Jerusalem.
Indeed, Lindenstrauss makes the case that if any country can pull Syria away from Iran it will be Turkey. Sure enough, Ankara, which was once on the brink of war with Damascus, now helps train the Syrian military. As for Iraq, Turkey is now its number one trading partner and recently opened a consulate in the Kurdish city of Erbil. And while Iran wants a Iraq weak, Turkey prefers Iraq to remain unified and stable.
At home, Turkey is still a free country where television can show a series about Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that jars Islamic sensibilities, but not without a warning from regulators at the Radio and Television Supreme Council.
Freedom of the press is mostly unfettered but secular voices have been increasingly targeted; some have been arrested in connection with the Ergenekon conspiracy and one journalist critical of the regime was murdered in 2007 under suspicious circumstances. The AKP has not even hinted at imposing Sharia law, but the authority that oversees religious affairs is coming under greater government control and there are signs it is moving in a more traditionalist direction.
So is the Turkish model a paradigm for democratic rule in Moslem-majority countries? The jury is still out but the signs are not encouraging. In advance of Turkey's elections, one thing is for sure, in the words of the Turkey-sympathetic Economist: Erdogan "is getting bossier and less tolerant by the day."
###
-- March 21, 2010
Polls predict the Islamic AKP (Justice and Development Party) will easily achieve its third consecutive victory. AKP's strongest challenger, the CHP (Republican People's Party) is not expected to garner more than 20 percent of the vote. The CHP and its new leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu carry the mantle of the country's founder and architect of Turkey's secular path Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. AKP's platform pledges to amend Turkey's constitution, but doing so could further entrench Islamist control. Customarily, the Turkish army had served as a (self-interested) guarantor of the country's faithfulness to Ataturk's path.
Paradoxically, as Turkey became more democratic, more committed to joining the EU, as its government became more religiously parochial, the principle that the army had a homeostatic role to play if the nation drifted from Ataturk's ways has become delegitimized.
Meanwhile, the AKP's go slow, Islam-friendly, conservative approach begs the question: What is its ultimate destination? It has deftly reworked the ideas of the late Necmettin Erbakan, who trailblazed non-violent Islamist participation in Turkish politics; breaking with his anti-free-market principles – by, for instance, favoring accession to the EU – while modulating his anti-Western, though less so his anti-Zionist, line.
At a recent conference at Hebrew University's Truman Institute to discuss the Middle East in transition, Prof. Umit Cizre of Istanbul University pooh-poohed concerns that AKP had a hidden Islamist agenda or intended to introduce Sharia law. Instead, she criticized Turkey's secularists for harping on the Islamist threat without presenting a coherent political platform of their own. Yet Cizre described the AKP as having "deliberately" positioned itself "ambiguously" on the political spectrum.
Why, though, is the secular camp so weak? Voters are uncomfortable with hard-line secularism. A new class of Islamic business elites has arisen alongside their secularist counterparts. Also, secularists have also been blamed for mishandling their management of the state when they were in charge. Moreover, while the moderate tone pursued by AKP has made it difficult to mobilize non-Islamists, ideological and personal differences have riven the secularist camp.
It may also be true that nowadays secularists are less committed to pure democracy than the Isalmists. Last but not least, secularists have been undermined by the so-called Ergenekon affair, which the government asserts has exposed a vast plot by the military and their allies in the media to overthrow the regime. A good number of serving generals have been arrested on "flimsy" even "fabricated" evidence, say the generals' defenders.
No one disputes that the AKP has helped make Turkey a success story and engineered the world's 15th largest economy. Unparalleled political stability has contributed to economic boom; GDP is up to $10,000 compared to $3,000 at the start of the decade. Turkey's economy would be still better if it didn't need to import 95% of its energy needs.
As befitting a regional power with grand aspirations, Turkey recently hosted an alternative "political" Davos in Istanbul. Unfortunately for Erdogan and his political rival President Abdullah Gül the gathering was a complete flop as unrest at home kept expected guests – including Syria's leader Bashar Assad and Egypt's Gamal Mubarak (invited before his father was ousted from the presidency) from attending. Even Spain's Socialist Workers' Party Premier Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is in the forefront of an effort to paper-over differences between Western civilization and the Islamists, was a no-show.
Abroad, Turkey's distancing from Israel exemplified by Erdogan's periodically staged outbursts against the Jewish state and by a sharp deterioration in bilateral relations in all fields -- save trade -- is now a well established feature of Ankara's foreign policy.
Turkey may claim that its warmth toward Hamas and its instigation of the Gaza flotilla crisis is intended to somehow promote peace. But Israelis can't imagine how and wonder if Erdogan is tapping into the kind of anti-Semitic sentiment that has propelled such despicable films as Valley of the Wolves into blockbusters.
Actually, foreign policy signals out of Turkey are jumbled. For instance, Turkey opted not to stop the Victoria from leaving its port bound for Gaza via Egypt with Iranian weapons in its hold. But it grounded two Iranian planes in search for arms. Ankara denounced the Itamar massacre but in the same breath asserted the community's existence was a breach of international law. So far, it has had nothing to say about Hamas's intensified bombardment of Israel.
Other aspects of Turkey's foreign policy are equally troubling. Erdogan's chauvinism and Islamic assertiveness has led him to accuse Germany of pushing its 3.5-million-strong Turkish minority too hard toward acculturating into their adopted country. Teach your children Turkish before German, he told a Dusseldorf rally.
But with countries it borders, including Iran, Syria and Iraq, Ankara professes to pursue a "zero problems" policy. Sure enough there has been a substantial increase in trade and exchange of high-ranking visitors with Iran and mutual cooperation against the Kurds. Nevertheless, the geo-strategic rivalry between Iran and Turkey is undeniable even if camouflaged by talk of pan-Islamic solidarity. Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss, a Turkish foreign policy specialist at Tel Aviv University told the Truman conference that the Turks see a nuclear-armed Iran as destabilizing. Nor is it a coincidence that an Erdogan visit inevitably follows one by Ahmadinejad around the globe. The two countries are destined to balance each other's power. For instance, while Iran will oppose a Syrian peace with Israel, Turkey favors one (albeit on Syria's terms). Or take Turkey's warning that it would not "remain silent" if the IDF retaliated against Lebanon for Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Some analysts interpret this as a challenge to Teheran's hegemony over Beirut as much as a cheap jab against Jerusalem.
Indeed, Lindenstrauss makes the case that if any country can pull Syria away from Iran it will be Turkey. Sure enough, Ankara, which was once on the brink of war with Damascus, now helps train the Syrian military. As for Iraq, Turkey is now its number one trading partner and recently opened a consulate in the Kurdish city of Erbil. And while Iran wants a Iraq weak, Turkey prefers Iraq to remain unified and stable.
At home, Turkey is still a free country where television can show a series about Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that jars Islamic sensibilities, but not without a warning from regulators at the Radio and Television Supreme Council.
Freedom of the press is mostly unfettered but secular voices have been increasingly targeted; some have been arrested in connection with the Ergenekon conspiracy and one journalist critical of the regime was murdered in 2007 under suspicious circumstances. The AKP has not even hinted at imposing Sharia law, but the authority that oversees religious affairs is coming under greater government control and there are signs it is moving in a more traditionalist direction.
So is the Turkish model a paradigm for democratic rule in Moslem-majority countries? The jury is still out but the signs are not encouraging. In advance of Turkey's elections, one thing is for sure, in the words of the Turkey-sympathetic Economist: Erdogan "is getting bossier and less tolerant by the day."
###
-- March 21, 2010
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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