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.

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-- April 18, 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.

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-- April 12, 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.

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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.


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March 28, 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."

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-- March 21, 2010

Bar-Ilan 2.0 -- Does Israel Need a Peace Plan?

Earthquakes, tsunamis and a nuclear meltdown in Japan top the news pushing aside mad Muammar Gaddafi, upheaval throughout the Arab world, and the butchery of five members of a Jewish family in their sleep by Palestinian Arabs at Itamar. Rest assured, however, that in short order Israel's wobbly friends in Europe and the U.S. will be back to press Jerusalem to "do something" about what Washington sees as the "unsustainable" stalemate in the "peace process" over which German Chancellor Angela Merkel scolded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.”

Not a single step?

Israel's lifting of 400 security checkpoints up and down the West Bank including near Itamar, its ten-month moratorium on most settlement building, its willingness to extend the freeze another three months, and Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan University address have, to be sure, not had much of a diplomatic shelf-life. In the Topsy Turvy world of Mideast peacemaking, because none of these moves enticed Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian faction to end their two-year boycott of negotiations, Israel is blamed for the impasse.

Abbas – recklessly impelled, initially at least, by President Barack Obama – has adhered to the position that the Palestinians simply can't negotiate so long as any Jewish construction continues anywhere beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines. Of course, the West Bank settlements issue would be resolved were Abbas willing to negotiate permanent boundaries with Israel. But why should he have to compromise in direct negotiations with Netanyahu when his internationally backed intransigence promises to deliver an Israeli withdrawal to the euphemistically called "1967 border."

Netanyahu, under withering pressure to somehow assuage the smoldering irritation of Israel settlement-obsessed Europeans and Americans, has reportedly been planning a major address to expand upon his Bar-Ilan "vision of peace" for "two peoples" speech. Yet it is difficult to see what Netanyahu could say or do – short of capitulating to all of Abbas's demands – to win lasting EU and Obama administration acclaim.

With the Hamas-led Palestinian faction in Gaza explicitly, unalterably, committed to the destruction of the Zionist enterprise; with Abbas refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, compromise on refuges, and resolutely committed to an internationally imposed solution that would completely disregard Israel's legitimate territorial rights and basic security needs, what realistically could Netanyahu offer?

Put another way: Can Israel placate its irritated allies while not committing national suicide?

No sooner had Netanyahu's office leaked the prospect that he would present (either to the Quartet or in a Washington speech) a new plan that would promote an interim arrangement with the Palestinians by recognizing a Palestinian state within temporary borders then Abbas utterly rejected the idea.

To complicate matters, if nascent pressure from young Palestinians for Fatah-Hamas reconciliation were to gain traction the result would undoubtedly be yet a further hardening of the Palestinian position rather than a softening of the Islamist one. No one in Fatah is talking about Hamas recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and adhering to previous diplomatic agreements signed by the PLO, the requisite demands by the Quartet for Hamas to join a Palestinian unity government.

Netanyahu's predicament recalls Ariel Sharon's whose disengagement plan announced in 2003 was partly intended to head-off pressure from President George W. Bush, who during the height of second intifada terror in 2002 "envisioned" a roadmap to a Palestinian state. Sharon was also profoundly worried about growing international support for the EU-backed Geneva Initiative and, notwithstanding Palestinian violations, for the Quartet's Road Map. All these schemes were designed to push Israel back to the old, hard to defend, armistice lines. Essentially, by "doing something" Sharon had sought to buy time, reap diplomatic approval and garner an American commitment for strategic settlement blocs in the West Bank. All these gains proved ephemeral.

Given this experience and the fact that any Netanyahu peace offering would be dead on arrival, is this really the time for him to present a new Israeli peace plan?


Yes and no.

Israel does need to put forth a coherent plan – to its own citizenry. Netanyahu should turn inward to broaden the domestic consensus on what the Jewish state can realistically offer the Palestinians and what it must expect in return. Fortunately, the fundamentals have already been laid out by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon (now Minister for Strategic Affairs).

Rather than take chances with Israel's security, Netanyahu needs to take personal political risks. He should appoint Ya'alon defense minister and together present a revised, fully detailed version of Ya'alon's blueprint to the electorate. If need be, Netanyahu should call for new elections seeking a clear mandate for the Ya'alon plan.

In coalition negotiations, Israel's mainstream political parties would likely have no trouble embracing Ya'alon's outline, but if they expect to – let them explain why to the electorate.

Instead of allowing Europe and the Obama administration to railroad him into proffering concessions that will not deliver peace and security – or even short-term diplomatic breathing space – Israel's best bet is to have a forthright internal dialogue aimed at building domestic cohesion for Ya'alon's plan that can offer the Palestinian Arabs a state and Israel security.

Areas that Israel needs to retain in any peace accord should not be subject to a any building freeze. Israelis living in Judea and Samaria have a right to know which parts of the Jewish heartland will one day be abandoned in the event an Arab partner for peace emerges.

Were Israeli decision makers -- with a clear electoral mandate -- to speak coherently and consistently, the country could garner support in Washington outside the administration and in fair-minded EU countries.

###

-- March 14, 2010

Let the Arab League Enforce the No-Fly Zone

I see that the Arab League called on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.

Once it does, how about if Arab air-forces enforce the no-fly zone?

There are some 21 Arab air-forces represented in the League.

Many have the latest US equipment including F-15s.

Why should NATO have to carry this burden?

Why should all eyes be turning to Washington and Europe?

Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin...

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ARAB MODERATES GONE?

Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin.
-- News Report, April 5, 2011

What made Shahbaz Bhatti the moderate Pakistani minister assassinated by Islamist "militants" for campaigning against the country's blasphemy law unique was that he was – a Christian. Muslim extremists tend to invest the bulk of their homicidal energies in slaughtering their own coreligionists.

Mass casualty suicide bombings, now obscenely routine and carried out by Muslims against Muslims mostly in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have engendered pathological responses.

Yet no less devastating in their impact on Muslim civilization have been pinpoint assassinations intended to obliterate individual moderates. In fact, the term assassin dates back to an 11th century Persian Shi'ite sect that first employed the systematic use of murder as a political weapon, according to historian Bernard Lewis.

Bhatti's murder followed on the heels of the assassination in January of Salman Taseer, the cosmopolitan governor of Punjab province. His killing was the most devastating assassination of a moderate politician since the 2007 murder of former premier Benazir Bhutto.

Political assassinations intended to eradicate moderates are no less rampant among Arab Muslims. Take the 1951 killing of Jordan's King Abdullah, suspected of being willing to make peace with Israel; he was shot at the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem. Or Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, murdered in 1981 for having made peace with the Jewish state.

The litany includes Algerian president Mohamed Boudiaf, shot dead in 1992 by an Islamist bodyguard and Lebanon's Sunni Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, killed in 2005 by the Shi'ite Hezbollah network. Lebanon's Christian president Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in 1982 for meeting with Israel's premier Menachem Begin to discuss a possible peace treaty.

While no one would accuse Hariri of wanting to make peace with Israel, he apparently did not kowtow with sufficient obsequiousness to Hezbollah's masters in Iran's. Teheran also has a bloody history of assassinating its own moderates including former premier Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991.

Even the U.S. has not been immune to the phenomenon of radicals murdering comparative moderates.

This month marks the (February 21, 1965) 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, the African American radical who was killed after he broke with Elijah Muhammad's xenophobic Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam.

But it is the Palestinian Arabs who have made a morbid fetish of murdering those of their own suspected of being ready to compromise for peace.

Twenty-five years ago this week, (March 3, 1986) Zafer Al-Masri, the forty-four year-old mayor of Nablus was assassinated on the doorsteps to city hall by Palestinian gunmen. Tarred as "an Israeli collaborator," he was said to have close ties to Jordan which at the time was seeking West Bank Palestinians willing to negotiate with Israel under its auspices.

Palestinian Arab society had historically been divided between fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, former mufti of Jerusalem, and relative moderates, who included notable families such as the Nashashibis. They moderates had reluctantly concluded that the Zionists could not be defeated and that coexistence was a Palestinian interest.

Already by the time Israel was established in 1948, hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian moderates had been murdered. Moderation came to be treated as treason and punished by death. That is how the Husseini camp came to dominate Palestinian politics and created an intransigent political culture which would ultimately spawn both Fatah and Hamas.

This brings us to the supposedly moderate Palestinians running the West Bank today. Saeb Erekat – one of the most accommodating figures in the PLO hierarchy – confidentially assured Western diplomats that the Palestinians were prepared to compromise on the issue of refugees.

Publicly, however, he continued to insist on the so-called right of return for "seven million" refugees and their descendents to Israel proper as "absolutely necessary for the stability of peace" – a death knell to resolving the conflict. Whatever the motivation for Erekat's duplicitous statements the net effect has been that the Palestinian masses remain unprepared for requisite compromise.

Lately, the only point of consensus between Hamas and Fatah is that Western-backed "moderate" Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – widely credited for developing political institutions his people will need for statehood – must go. Despite the fact that he spearheaded a boycott against Jewish products manufactured in the West Bank, Fayyad is suspected of sincerity in professing acceptance of a two-state solution.

The systematic slaughter of genuine moderates has necessitated redefining moderation. Only by the Hobbesian yardstick of Palestinian politics, where the lives of peacemakers have been brutishly cut short, can an obdurate Mahmoud Abbas, now two years into his boycott of negotiations with Israel, be pronounced a "moderate."


-- March 7, 2011

BYE BYE J STREET?

On the face of it, J-Street appears to be a success story.

In a little over three years, the lobby has either supplanted or co-opted Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, New Israel Fund and other likeminded outfits to emerge as the preeminent Jewish force committed to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines irrespective of what the Palestinians do. This remarkable achievement by executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami is attributable to the branding of J Street as "passionately and unapologetically pro-Israel.”

A neophyte to the American Jewish political scene could be forgiven for taking him at his word. After all, J Street's just concluded policy conference drew 1,500 "pro-peace, pro-Israel" conventioneers, 500 animated college students, junketeering opposition Knesset members, progressive rabbis, advocacy journalists and even a welcoming letter from Kadima party head Tzipi Livni.

Without doubt, most of the attendees came in good faith convinced that they were bolstering the two-state solution. Had they appreciated J-Street's disingenuously cloaked agenda, utterly reckless policy prescriptions and deeply troubling ethical lapses, many would, presumably, have stayed home. That they did not is a tribute to artful political manipulation practiced by J Street's strategists.

J-Street has capitalized on the "fatigue" many liberal Jewish Americans feel in having to defend unpopular Israeli positions on campus, in the media, and around the office water cooler. J Street promotes the fanciful notion that public criticism of Israel has been inhibited by a monolithic Jewish "establishment" (headed by AIPAC) and that its "dissent" is somehow gutsy.

In truth, discomfiture with this or that Israeli policy has been a factor in the Israel-Diaspora relationship dating back to Nahum Goldmann's break with David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and was reaffirmed by the precipitate flirtation by Breira and the New Jewish Agenda with the pre-Oslo PLO in the 1970s and 80s. What's more, with the 1977 election of Menachem Begin, Israel's first nationalist prime minister, major American Jewish leaders have routinely lambasted Israel's West Bank settlement policies.

J-Street's more savvy defenders claim its saving grace is that it offers ashamed liberal Jewish undergraduates besieged by virulent campus anti-Zionism (of the Tony Judt strain) with a way of joining the bandwagon of criticism while remaining "pro-Israel."

Regrettably, J-Street does more than criticize Israel; it actively lobbies the U.S. Congress to take steps that would undermine Israeli security and it serves as an enabler to an unsympathetic Obama administration whose misguided policies have impeded the peace process and hardened the already intransigent positions of the Palestinian Authority.

In fact, J Street relishes the role of providing domestic political cover for White House pressure on Israel. J Street stands apart from other Jewish critics of Israel for its ability to legally raise money and give it away to candidates who share its redefinition of pro-Israelism.

Making no substantive demands on the Arabs, J-Street blames Israel solely for the breakdown in negotiations. It claims to support Israel's right to self-defense; yet since its founding J Street has opposed every measure Israel has taken to defend its citizens. It is against the security barrier which has kept suicide bombers at bay.

It opposed military action to stop Hamas's bombardment of the Negev. It abandoned Israel in the face of the Turkish flotilla hullabaloo. And it had to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace even mild sanctions against Iran.

J-Street professes to oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. In practice, it has partnered with BDS proponents and some of its supporters believe in selective sanctions. It has shown no scruples about aligning with the vociferously anti-Zionist U.S. Council of Churches. Rather than discrediting Judge Richard Goldstone's lawfare campaign to enfeeble Israel's right to self-defense, J-Street staffers actually promoted his appearances in Congress. J Street has even provided cover for the crusade to delegitimize Israel by the U.N.'s so-called "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People."

In fact, one is hard put to discern any policy differences between the Palestinian Authority's stated positions and those of J-Street. This explains why the PLO ambassador in Washington was glad to address J Street's 2011 policy conference while Israel's ambassador stayed away.

Both J Street and the PLO oppose any and all Jewish presence over the Green Line, metropolitan Jerusalem included. Both oppose Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish State.” Both back efforts to turn the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood into sovereign Palestine thus endangering access to the nearby Hebrew University campus on Mt Scopus. The PLO and J-Street's partners, the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, want to see the Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Authority abolished because, in the words of Sara Benninga, a Sheikh Jarrah activist and J-Street honoree, ending the "occupation" is not enough.

Both J-Street and the PLO support the Trojan horse Arab Peace Initiative which Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu, have all sensibly rebuffed. Like the PLO, J Street brazenly – albeit unsuccessfully – prodded the administration not to veto the recent UN Security Council resolution terming any Jewish presence over the Green Line as "illegal."

What, unadorned, does J-Street advocate?

In face-to-face negotiations, the Palestinians would be expected to compromise on boundaries, refugees and security. Consequently, J-Street advocates that the U.S. impose a solution. But what motivates such behavior? One clue comes from J Street co-founder Daniel Levy who has said that Israel's creation was "wrong." That is in line with the Arab view that Israel's "original sin" was to have been born; it furthermore illuminates why elements in J Street's base favor a one state solution.

This year's policy conference may be J Street's last hurrah.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), a leading Congressional dove has acrimoniously broken with the group prompting Ben-Ami to ruefully acknowledge that he had overplayed his hand. Taglit-Birthright has rebuffed J Street's cheeky request to co-sponsor a trip to Israel. But it is the momentous upheaval in the Arab world, along with Iran's newly revealed ramped-up quest for the atom bomb that may prove to be J Street's ultimate undoing.

No amount of wordplay will convince the Diaspora's mainstream that J-Street's scapegoating of Netanyahu and its drive to push Israel back to indefensible borders now is even remotely "pro-Israel."


###
-- Monday, Feb. 28, 2011

Will Egypt and Iran Now Be Friends?

Add bilateral relations between Teheran and Cairo in the post-Mubarak era to the already boiling Mideast cauldron. The request of two Iranian warships bound for Syria to transit the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has met with telling indecisiveness on the part of Egypt's ruling military council.

One barometer of where Sunni Arab Egypt is heading will be the evolution of its bilateral relations with Shi'ite Persian Iran. Another will be the latitude Cairo gives Iran's Hamas-client in Gaza. It is surely not a good omen that the exiled old anti-Semite and anti-Zionist, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Jazeera's rabble-rousing preacher and darling of the Moslem Brotherhood, was granted a platform to address the multitudes at Friday prayers in Tahrir Square.

The Jewish state has long been a bone of contention in Iran-Egypt relations. Iran's 1950 de facto recognition of Israel was put on ice the following year by the newly appointed premier Mohammed Mossadegh; and resumed in 1953 with his downfall. The Arab League, instigated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, retaliated against Iran, now directly ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, and imposed sanctions. Against the canvass of the Cold War, Nasser aligned with the Soviet Union while the Shah sided with the West. Yet both men felt threatened by the Islamists. Nasser executed Moslem Brotherhood theologian Sayyid Qutb, while the Shah merely exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Attitudes toward Jews also differed. The Shah (who happened to be married to the deposed Egyptian King Farouk's sister) protected his country's 80,000 Jews so that there was little overt anti-Semitism. Far from the institutionalized Holocaust denial of the Islamist-era, Iran's press under the Shah openly covered the Eichmann trial of 50 years ago. Even today, the Iranian Jewish population numbers some 11,000 souls. By the late-1960s, in contrast, Egypt's Jewish community had ceased to exist.
Under Anwar Sadat cordial bilateral relations were finally established. These ended, however, after Iran's 1979 Islamist revolution, reflecting Khomeini's unbendable antagonism toward the Egypt-Israel peace treaty and his temper at Sadat for having granted the Shah temporary asylum. In 1981, the shameless mullahs would dedicate a street to Sadat's assassin.

Despite overtures by Iran on pan-Islamic grounds, Hosni Mubarak remained suspicious of their intentions, convinced that Teheran was organizing insurrection inside Egypt and seeking to influence events in the Sudan and Gaza – Egypt's backyard.

The Mubarak regime had been of two minds about Iran's quest for the atom bomb. In June 2009, Mubarak allowed an Israeli submarine to traverse the canal sending an implicit message that Egypt was committed to stopping the Iranian bomb. Yet Egyptian diplomats simultaneously led the UN mob in claiming that Israel was the real nuclear threat in the region. In November 2009, for example, the Mubarak government criticized an IAEA resolution that required Iran to cease construction of its enrichment facility near Qom. Egypt vacillated; sometimes abstaining at IAEA votes critical of Iran, other times calling on Teheran to cooperate with the international community.

Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met in 2008; the two countries established interest sections in each other's capitals. Yet relations remained strained as Mubarak blamed Iran for Egypt's failure to reconcile Fatah and Hamas. When Cairo barred an Iranian weapons ship from the Suez Canal, Ahmadinejad accused Egypt of selling out the Palestinians in favor of relations with the Zionists. In 2009, when a Hezbollah cell was uncovered preparing to carry out attacks inside Egypt, Mubarak saw further proof that Iran had designs on the Sunni Arab world. (The cell's imprisoned leader escaped during the anti-Mubarak upheaval to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon.) Mubarak watched warily as the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood, along with its Hamas affiliate, built ecumenical bridges to Shi'ite Iran rooted in their mutual loathing of Israel and disdain for the West.

With all that, toward the end of the Mubarak era, Iran had secured Egypt's agreement for the resumption of direct flights between their respective capitals. Perhaps to delink Cairo from Washington, Iran offered not only to help Egypt develop its nuclear power industry but also to provide it with wheat to cover shortages and ameliorate rising bread prices.

Where are bilateral relations heading? Iranian leaders are positing that the anti-Mubarak uprising was inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Anyhow, the Muslim Brotherhood is an essential part of the dialogue between the opposition and the ruling junta. Moreover, two probable presidential candidates, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa and ex-IAEA chief Mohammad ElBarade are both known for their warm ties to Iran. As far as Jerusalem is concerned, this is almost beside the point since even the liberal opposition figure Ayman Nour has called for reassessing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

Iran certainly expects relations with Egypt to become "more balanced" and, most likely, for a resumption of full diplomatic relations. But a genuine strategic alliance between the two countries would be unprecedented. After all, Iran, Egypt and Turkey have traditionally been geostrategic rivals. A thin veneer of pan-Islamic solidarity may not be able to overcome the deep-seated patterns of history.
The biggest wildcard is whether the contagion of popular uprisings sweeping the region, notwithstanding the mullahs' utter ruthlessness in putting down dissent, may yet lead to the toppling of Iran's benighted regime and a truly new Middle East.

###

--Feb 24, 2011

My Recent Radio Appearance

Listen to David Parsons of the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and I discuss the implications of events in Egypt on Christian radio, "FrontPage Jerusalem," broadcast throughout the US and online at:

http://www.frontpagejerusalem.com/site/index.php

February 14 (web broadcast date)

(Our discussion is five minutes into the program...)

The show is co-hosted in the US by one of Israel's most selfless friends, Earl Cox.

Thankless Task at Turtle Bay

After more than six-months of squabbling, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Beitenu) have, at last, agreed to dispatch veteran diplomat Ron Prosor as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. Meron Reuben had been saddled with the unenviable task of holding down the fort while the politicians bickered.

But what, realistically, can any Israeli ambassador hope to achieve at the UN where over 118 members identify with the farcically labeled "non-aligned" bloc, an interlocking directorate that includes 57 Organization of the Islamic Conference countries, 22 members of the Arab League, and Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and North Korea, states that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. As if this wasn't bad enough, the European Union nowadays rarely takes any initiative to defend Israel's right to self-defense. And even Washington has been known to express its diplomatic pique by occasionally throwing Jerusalem to the jackals.

From the beginning, Israel's first UN ambassador Abba Eban (1949-1959) essentially disregarded his immediate diplomatic audience to address his "language and emotion to the wider world beyond." Eban served concurrently as ambassador to Washington and to the UN. His successor Michael Comay (1960-1967) became one of Israel's leading representatives to American Jewry. In the lead up to the Six Day War, Gideon Rafael (1967-1968) transmitted diplomatic messages from US decision makers interpreted by the Israeli cabinet as providing a green light for a preemptive attack by the IDF against massed Arab forces.

Not much, however, could be done inside the UN. To PLO chief Yasir Arafat's gun-toting inaugural General Assembly speech in November 1974, Yosef Tekoa (1968-1975) could best direct his rebuttal to Israel's friends outside the auditorium. Similarly, Chaim Herzog (1975-1978) took to the General Assembly podium and demonstrably tore apart resolution 3379 which odiously equated Zionism as “a form of racism." But, he too, was speaking to the civilized world beyond.

Renowned jurist Yehuda Blum (1978-1984) bluntly declared that the UN had become an arena that "fanned the flames of Arab-Israel conflict." And while helping to fight off attempts to deny Israel's credentials at the General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu (1984-1988) focused his polemical talents at the American popular press. As chargé d’Affaires, Johanan Bein (1988-1990) could do nothing to stop the General Assembly from relocating to Geneva to again provide Arafat with a platform. "As I prepare to leave the post," he would later write in The New York Times, "I…ask myself … if my country's predicament at the U.N. is permanent."

Yoram Aridor (1990-1992) was fortunate to see the "Zionism is racism resolution" rescinded under US pressure, yet could then do nothing about, what the Times called "the harshest criticism of Israeli policies ever made at the Security Council" by the George H.W. Bush administration over Israel's deportation of 12 Palestinian terrorists to Lebanon during the first intifada. Gad Yaacobi (1992-1996) represented Israel during the Oslo-era but, he too, could not dissuade the US from joining the Security Council majority in a sweeping condemnation of Israel in the wake of Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Arab worshippers in Hebron.

The first US-born Israeli to be appointed ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold (1997-1999) was effective at public diplomacy, but could not sway the General Assembly against voting 131 to 3 to condemn Israel for housing construction in Jerusalem. During the barbaric Palestinian violence of the second intifada, Yehuda Lancry (1999-2002) endured shameless UN condemnations against "the excessive use of force" by Israel.

Dan Gillerman (2002-2008) was, arguably, the most thriving recent ambassador: Promulgating the first Israeli resolutions ever adopted by the United Nations; elected vice-president of the assembly one year, and impelling secretary-general Kofi Annan to speak out against the GA's ad nauseam attacks against Israel as counterproductive.

Finally, though she established rapport with a not unsympathetic UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Gabriela Shalev (2008-2010) was powerless as Judge Richard Goldstein led a lawfare campaign against Israel's right to defend its civilian population along the Gaza border.

Plainly, the labors of Israeli ambassadors take on a Sisyphean almost fatalistic character. So, why bother? Simply because the UN is where the family of nations, such as it is, comes together to make consequential collective decision.
In any event, Prosor's main role will be to represent Israel beyond the UN's corridors; most prominently to the global media and the U.S. Jewish community, a task he will partly share with Michael Oren, Jerusalem's ambassador in Washington (whose primary mission is focused on the US-Israel relationship).

Yet their public diplomacy roles have been made near-impossible because official Israel does not speak with one voice. Should Israeli ambassadors take Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech as their marching orders? Or the contradictory line articulated by Lieberman at his 2010 UN address? To further complicate matters, today's Internet offers a competing cacophony of dissenting voices all claiming to know what's best for Israel.

Prosor's advantage is that he is a compelling figure with superior communications skills and diplomatic heft to credibly present Israel's positions in both public and confidential settings. The rest depends on the two men who belatedly sent him. Not only must Prosor have unfettered access to the foreign minister and premier, he must be encouraged to provide them with unvarnished assessments of how their – sometimes incongruent – policies are affecting Israel's image in the media and support among American Jews.
###

What is Qatar's Game?

On the Middle East map, the peninsula state bordering Saudi Arabia, jutting into the Persian Gulf opposite Iran, is easy to overlook. Yet Qatar is one of the world's wealthiest countries, the dominant exporter of liquefied natural gas, and through its sponsorship of Al Jazeera, punches considerably above its weight.

On the face of it Qatar is not easy to pigeonhole. In 2022, it will host the World Cup football (soccer) games; it's already home to perhaps the first world class museum of modern art in the Arab world; and its national airline (besides inspiring some of the most creative commercials on television) has 180 planes on order including five superjumbo A380s.

Its attitude toward Jews in comparatively enlightened. In 1996, Qatar hosted the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and invited Israel to open a trade mission. In 2008, the sheikhdom allowed Israeli tennis star Shahar Pe'er to play in a WTA Tour tournament, and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni to address its Doha “Democracy Forum." This barely raised eyebrows as Shimon Peres had made his second visit to Doha in 2007. Qatar is also considered an American ally and hosts (rent free) the US military's Central Command which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

All this development and cosmopolitanism – in a country where native Qataris, practicing "liberal" Wahhabi Islam and comprise 200,000 out of a total 1.4 million population – is attributable to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and family. First lady Sheikha Mosah Bint Nasser al-Missned spearheads reform and is one of the most influential women in the world. Prime Minister (and businessman) Hamed bin Jaber al-Thani's recent corporate flirtation with Israeli entrepreneurs has been interpreted in some quarters as a political overture to the Jewish state.

There is, alas, also a darker side to the equation. During Israel's 2008-2009 military campaign to stop Hamas from firing rockets into its territory from Gaza, Qatar broke relations with Israel and moreover hosted extremist Arabs, plus Iran, to mobilize support for Hamas. (The Qataris subsequently offered to resume relations in return for being allowed to funnel reconstruction money directly to the Hamas authorities.) In addition to helping bankroll Hamas, the al-Thani's have played a key role in facilitating Hezbollah's suzerainty over Lebanon. And in December 2007, Qatar invited Mahmud Ahmadinejad to address the Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha, the first Iranian leader ever to do so.

Al Jazeera, based in Doha and created by Sheikh Hamad in 1996, is a tool of Qatar's foreign policy. In an Arab world where, until recently, dissent was forbidden, the channel's readiness to criticize Arab autocrats (excluding, naturally, the ruler of Qatar) has been exhilarating. Al Jazeera has also played a critical role in setting or codifying the pan-Arab agenda. But by notoriously, over and over again, disseminating the fulminations of al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden, the station concurrently promoted violent pan-Islam. Unlike the BBC's World Service shortwave broadcasts or even of Radio Free Europe of yesteryear, Qatar's soft power exercised through Al Jazeera has too often been in the service of tyranny.

While Al-Jazeera's English-language website and television mirror the BBC's professionalism (and frostiness toward the Zionist enterprise), the Arabic service often serves as a demagogic platform for spreading the radical views of the Moslem Brotherhood. Al Jazeera has provided a bully pulpit for extremist preacher Yussuf al-Qaradawi, promoted the Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hizbullah agenda, and glorified as shahids those killed "resisting" Israel. (To be fair, Al Jazeera allows the occasional Israeli spokesperson to appear in this sea of enmity.) Al-Jazeera's championing of Hamas over Fatah led it to broadcast The Palestine Papers, purporting to expose Mahmoud Abbas's peace negotiators as Zionist collaborators. When Qatar's rulers don't know what to make of a crisis, the network can vacillate. For instance, at their outset, Al Jazeera downplayed the disturbances in Egypt, only to become the nexus of anti-Mubarak agitation.

To a Western observer, Qatar's foreign policy can seem incoherent, even duplicitous. On the one hand the ruling family professes to promote reform and democratization, yet it is also a friend of medievalism and rejectionism. It is as if Qatar wants to be an unscrupulous Switzerland of the Middle East. In return for not being targeted, Qatar has come to an arrangement with terrorist groups and has for years provided safe haven to Muslim Brothers. Since 2003, Qatar has reportedly been paying al-Qaeda to spare it from terrorist attack; members of the royal family are said to have provided safe haven for 9/11 terrorists.

The al-Thani clan's continual playing off the forces of enlightenment and darkness against each other might be, somehow, excusable were its ultimate goal bringing the values of modernity to the Arab world. Regrettably, there is slim evidence they have any purpose beyond self-preservation and the consequences be damned.

###

Feb. 7, 2011

What Gives גלי צה"ל‎ Galei Tzahal? Why the Friedman Infatuation?

Am I the only one in Israel who wonders who at Israel's Army Radio is so infatuated with Tom Friedman of the NYTimes that they keep referencing his op-eds as if... they were something significant that we should all care about.

It seems that Old Tom has compared PM Netanyahu to Hosni Mubarak calling Netanyahu the "Mubarak of the peace process."

Standard Tom. Yawn.

Old Tom has been wrong about Israel more times than I'd care to count in this quickie posting.

He started being wrong from his college days when he was active with Breira. Sadly, from Beirut to Jerusalem (which, I'll admit is a good book with lots of bad ideas) has influenced thousands of young people to mis-perceive the Arab-Israel conflict.

So what gives Galei Tzahal?

Who is the Friedman-groupie in your news department?

Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty -- A Mistake?

Observing Egypt's current upheaval, reporter Ariel Kahane writing in the Hebrew daily Mekor Rishon opines: "Regardless of whether Mubarak falls or survives, whether the Islamists or the liberals take power, whether the riots die out or continue to rage, the lesson for Israel is clear: Arab regimes cannot be trusted." Kahane concludes that it is futile to pursue a modus vivendi with the Arabs based on Israeli territorial withdrawals.

Is he right? Should the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, signed in Washington by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat on March 26, 1979 -- sixteen months after Sadat's extraordinary visit to Jerusalem -- be construed as a mistake?

On the eve of its signing, only two members of Begin's Likud-led cabinet, Haim Landau (1916-1981), an underground comrade of the premier's, and Ariel Sharon opposed the treaty. In a subsequent Knesset vote, Speaker Yitzhak Shamir, another Likud stalwart, abstained. These hard-liners would have preferred "peace for peace" and worried – it turns out presciently – that trading land would set a precedent in regards to the strategic Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

In any event, their objections seemed besides the point as Israel's border with Egypt was opened, direct air-links between Tel Aviv and Cairo established and Begin left to tour the pyramids. Still, in October 1979 dissident members of his Likud, Geʾula Cohen and Moshe Shamir broke away to establish the Techiya or Renaissance party.

These secular hawks, bolstered by the theoretician Shmuel Katz (1914-2008), who in 1978 had quit the cabinet largely over Begin's peace policies, championed the Land of Israel ideology of Gush Emunim, the mostly Orthodox-led West Bank settlement movement. Techiya won three seats in the July 1981 elections and in 1982 vociferously opposed turning over the northern Sinai settlement of Yamit to Egyptian sovereignty. The party briefly realigned with Likud, went on to win five seats in the 1984 elections, before being supplanted in 1992 by a like-minded secular party, Tzomet.

As the fate of Hosni Mubarak's regime hung in the balance, came the news that Herb Zweibon, age 84, Katz's leading American disciple who had led opposition to the Egypt-Israel treaty in the US had died. Now, the old arguments raised by the Katz-Zweibon-Techiya camp against trading land for peace seem to have gained added resonance.

In truth, Israeli officials had few illusions about the nature of peace with Egypt, especially after Sadat's assassination and Mubarak's ascendency. He in effect gave Israel an ultimatum: Make "peace" on Palestinian terms or live with an Egyptian cold peace. Though wary of Egypt's profligate military build-up (fueled partly by U.S. aid), war games that could only have been intended against Israel, Mubarak’s debilitating intrigues against Israel at the United Nations, his duplicitous campaigning against Israel’s nuclear capacity, and his unwillingness or inability to stop the arms smuggling into Hamas-ruled Gaza, Israeli policymakers nevertheless preferred the cold peace to capitulation on the Palestinian front.

No wonder. For the past 30 years Egypt had been neutralized as a confrontation state. While Israel defended itself against two violent Palestinian uprisings, two Lebanon wars, against Hamas's aggression from Gaza and Iran's drive for the atomic bomb, Jerusalem did not have to divert resources to the southern front. To be sure there were also diplomatic and economic positives to the relationship, one being that fact that forty percent of the natural gas used by Israel is imported from Egypt.

Israelis are more anxious than most about Mubarak's fate. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has reportedly instructed the country's emissaries to make the case that while democratic change in Egypt is desirable violent revolutionary mayhem undermines the security of the region. Maintaining the peace – with all its flaws – between Israel and Egypt is Jerusalem's paramount goal. As President Shimon Peres forthrightly put it, having a fanatic Islamist regime in Egypt would not be better than the current lack of democracy.

In his previous incarnation, Peres had proclaimed a new Middle East modeled after Scandinavia. And Israeli doves, including late-in-life converts such as Ehud Olmert, not to mention an assortment of Palestinian leaders and European diplomats have preached that "peace brings security." Clearly, events in Egypt show this is not the case.

Providentially, Begin's treaty with Egypt was emphatically anchored in the strategic depth and demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula, not in Egypt's hoped for durable good intentions. It was designed for the possibility "a new king would arise in Egypt who knew not Begin."

No matter who will rule Egypt – Mubarak until new elections, Omar Suleiman, Mohamed ElBarade or, perish the thought, the benighted Muslim Brotherhood, the treaty with Egypt was designed precisely for worst case scenarios.

So the lesson is not that Israeli leaders should abandon the possibility of reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians or Syrians. Instead, it is that the cornerstones of any deal needs to take into account the possibility that their successors might reject peace with Israel.

For now, Mahmoud Abbas's intransigence along with the fractious nature of Palestinian politics and Syria's Bashar Assad's fidelity to the Iranian-led axis mean that Israel has no genuine peace partner. Yet the Egypt-Israel treaty, providing demilitarization, strategic depth, and early warning plus verification procedures remains the template for future accords.

That Arab commitments to peace could be rickety was hardly lost on Begin. It has, however, been blatantly, serially, and irresponsibly disregarded by critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan peace proposal which emphasized precisely the security parameters essential for peace. As a result, too little serious thinking has been devoted to the complex security arrangements Israel will need in the West Bank and on the Golan should genuine Arab peace partners emerge Sadat-like.
###

--Feb 1

IN MEMORY OF HERBERT ZWEIBON

A true freedom fighter for Israel.

We did not always agree, yet I never questioned his sincerity, commitment and loyalty to Eretz Israel.

May his memory be for a blessing.


See:

http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=558#comment-4701


http://www.afsi.org/index.shtml

My Two cents on PaliLeak

1. The theoretical concessions made – and none are real since the deal was/is that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" – by the Palestinians led by Mahmoud Abbas, fall far short of any deal acceptable to the Israeli mainstream.

Yet the liberal media paints any semblance of negotiating reasonableness as if Abbas gave away the store.

2. Though Israelis tended to yawn at Palestinian/Al-Jazeera/Guardian intrigues and dissimulations, what fascinates nonetheless is that positions Israelis assumed had been agreed to, namely strategic settlements blocs including Ma'ale Adummim have not been agreed to at all.

Wonder why it took PaliLeaks for us to know this…

3. Key for me is what happened afterwards.

Abu Mazen denied making any concessions. He simply lied to his people – again. He led them in chants about shaids and Jerusalem outside his Ramallah palace.

So long as "moderate" Pal leaders don't prepare their people for the idea that painful concessions will be needed on both sides – negotiations remain a farce and there is no Palestinian partner.

Have a look at this summary:

http://us.mg6.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.gx=1&.rand=4tbv5fuhh1itg

Drama in the Maghreb

On Jan. 14 the panicked strongman of Tunisia, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, fled to Saudi Arabia after the astonishingly spontaneous Facebook-driven crumbling of his corrupt regime. History will record that the incredible impetus was the December 17 self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a harassed and despondent 26-year-old fruit vendor, in the rough interior of the country.

With copycat suicides in Cairo and Algiers, and protests taking place in Jordan and Morocco, the Palestinian Authority barred West Bankers from rallying in support of the overthrow. Ayman Nour, the reformist Egyptian opposition politician, wondered aloud whether Egypt might follow the Tunisian model. And Arab League chief Amr Musa frankly acknowledged that events in Tunisia had exposed “the Arab soul" as broken by poverty, unemployment and frustration.

Though the situation remains volatile and unpredictable, Tunisians and foreigners alike have been contemplating whether the upheaval might possibly herald a Jasmine Revolution and the emergence of genuine democracy – not one man, one vote, one time – but a kind of political institution building that would ensure pluralism, civil liberties and tolerance.

Popular will among the Arab masses has found occasional, albeit, reactionary expression: Hamas's lopsided victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections; Hezbollah's capture of 88 percent of the Shi'ite vote in 2009 Lebanese balloting.
Could events in Tunisia lead to a genuinely democratic outcome that might have a domino effect on the rest of the Arab world?

Caution is in order.

For one, there is no coherent opposition much less one led by democrats in Tunisia. For another, it is still too soon to know what role, if any, Islamists will play. For now Muslim extremists are not in the vanguard of the struggle. Those who have come out into the sunshine after decades of government persecution claim feebly to stand for a distinctively moderate strain of Islamism not opposed to modernity.

We will all be wiser after Rachid El Gannushi, the 70 year-old Muslim Brotherhood chief returns to Tunis from his London exile and the extent of his group's malevolent influence can be gauged. Gannushi, with ties to Iran, is violently opposed to Israel's existence.

Each Arab country has its own unique circumstances and it's a mistake to treat them as one undifferentiated mass. Prof. Michael Laskier, a North Africa specialist at Bar-Ilan University, insists that nothing in the DNA of the Arab polity prevents democracy from eventually breaking out and that global democratic influences are filtering in. Preferring evolutionary change to revolutionary upheaval, Laskier argued that events in Tunisia send a warning signal to Iran and Syria "that they could be next in line." On the other hand, radical change in Egypt and Jordan could bring Islamist regimes to power.

So far, no Arab land has shown itself to be fertile ground for Western-style democracy. Perhaps that's because traditionalist Arab society has placed the interests of the individual lower than those of the family, clan and sect. Men and women are not free to choose who they may marry much less who will lead them, veteran journalist Danny Rubinstein has pointed out. Moreover, in so much of the Arab world, voices calling for democratic reform and groups championing civil society are weak. Autocratic leaders have snuffed out freedom-minded dissent perhaps even more aggressively than challenges from the Islamists.

Even so, could Tunisia, relatively well-off and demographically cohesive with its educated elites be the democratic exception to the Arab rule? Could it switch from the "not free" to "free" camp? True the country's interior is depressed and religiously devout, but the coast has experienced sustained economic growth and is cosmopolitan. Consummate foreign correspondent Robert D. Kaplan has emphasized that Tunisia has a history of prosperity and stability, a post-colonial political culture of secularism and a legacy of political moderation shaped by its founder Habib Bourguiba. Kaplan paradoxically ascribes Tunisia's current troubles to the flip side of its comparative achievements – the failure to meet rising expectations among its population (whose median age is 29). Still, Kaplan concludes that, "Despite all these advantages of history, prosperity and stability, Tunisia’s path forward is treacherous."

The Tunisian revolution – if it is that – could yet be hijacked by old guard politicians, returning Islamists or fizzle out as army generals seek to restore order. Iran and Libya, which have previously sought to shape events in Tunisia, could exploit the turmoil.

Watching from afar, Israelis cannot easily allow themselves to indulge in wishful thinking. They may nostalgically recall that Bourguiba was among those who early on favored Arab-Israel peace – though he also provided sanctuary to Yasser Arafat after his 1982 ouster from Lebanon – and that Bourguiba allowed his country's 100,000 Jews to leave for France and Israel (perhaps 1,200 remain). Under Ben Ali, Israelis have been able to travel to Tunisia on their Israeli passports. So no nation would be happier to see Arab democracy take root in moderate Tunisia and for it to serve as a beacon for the entire region.

-- Jan 25, 2011

No Sulha for Hamas and Fatah

The singular inconvenient truth that advocates of unilateral Palestinian statehood and an imposed solution to the Arab-Israel conflict labor intensively to play down is the spoiler role of Hamas and the crippling divisions within the Palestinian polity.

To focus attention elsewhere they industriously campaign to delegitimize Israel's
presence beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines and to "expose" the so-called Judaization of Jerusalem. Indeed, practically any Israeli measure from the mundane to the imprudent is skewered as heralding the death knell of the two-state solution – anything to deflect attention from Fatah's mulish refusal to negotiate with the Israeli government and Hamas's chronic rejectionism.

The Westerners and Israeli leftists who unfairly place the onus for the diplomatic deadlock entirely on the Jewish state, refusing to call on Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority to meet Israel half-way, have no sympathy for Hamas.

Yet by removing Fatah's incentive for indispensable compromises on boundaries, security, indeed the very nature of what peace should mean has meant that the Palestinian polity can avoid the tough choice: either the path of Hamas, or ending the conflict once and for all. With this left up in the air, the Fatah-Hamas rivalry continues to fester as both movements compete for the allegiance of the fickle Palestinian street, Arab and international legitimacy, and over which "resistance" movement is top dog.

Perhaps this is a good time to remind ourselves about what divides Fatah and Hamas. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and came into its own in 1987. It considers Palestine a Muslim trust and sees Islam as engaged in a zero-sum religious war with the Jews. Fatah was founded in the 1950s – when the Arabs controlled the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem – with the straightforward nonsectarian goal of destroying Israel via "armed struggle." Under the mercurial Yasser Arafat, Fatah came to dominate Palestinian politics. In 1993, abandoning the immediate full liberation of Palestine for a nebulous alternative strategy, Arafat signed the Oslo Accords.

Hamas viewed Arafat's prevarications on Israel, his rumored personal decadence and the Palestinian Authority's endemic corruption with contempt.

Hamas overwhelmingly defeated Fatah in the Palestinian Authority elections held in January 2006. A Saudi-engineered unity government crashed and burned when Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza in June 2007. Since then Fatah has continued to arrest Hamas men in the West Bank while Hamas persecuted Fatah followers in Gaza. Efforts at a sulha or reconciliation of the two camps have failed.

Fatah is hardly secular in the Western sense yet neither does it want Islam enveloping all of public and private life as demanded by the Islamists. The two camps also have opposing patrons with Fatah relying on the ostensible moderate Arab states and Hamas getting its main backing from Persian Iran. Moreover, both camps suffer from internal schisms. Cleavages within Fatah are many including along generational lines. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas expelled his former Gaza strongman Mohamed Dahlan from the West Bank fearing a putsch. For its part, Hamas inside Gaza is at odds with the Damascus-based leadership. Even within the Strip, "Prime Minister" Ismail Haniyeh holds little sway over Izzad-Din al-Qassam gunmen.

Episodically, come signs of rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas. Intermediaries continue to work toward a meeting between senior figures in the opposing camps. Haniyeh and Hamas co-founder Mahmoud Zahar recently telephoned Abbas -- and a local Hamas delegation visited his Ramallah offices -- to offer condolences on the death of his older brother Ata in Damascus.

Responding to internal pressure from the popular Marwan Barghouti (incarcerated in an Israeli prison for murder) for a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, and external demands from the Emir of Qatar (whose influential Al Jazeera's Arabic service leans toward Hamas over Fatah), Abbas recently ordered the release of several hunger striking Hamas prisoners from his "protective" custody. Among those set free was Wael al-Bitar involved in the killings of four Israelis. (He was swiftly taken into custody in Hebron by Israeli commandos.) Funnily enough, it is the IDF's presence in the West Bank that helps secure Abbas against the possibility of a Hamas-led overthrow.

Rank-and-file Palestinians know there can be no "Palestine" without reconciliation and hold both factions jointly responsible for the split. That the price of burying the hatchet would likely be an even more obdurate policy on Israel appears not to phase the Palestinian consciousness. In the meantime, Hamas and Fatah leaders pay lip-service to unity. But as Mkhaimar Abusada, a Gaza-based political scientist told the Christian Science Monitor, Hamas gunmen in the Strip remain unalterably opposed to reconciliation with Fatah even if the Damascus-based leadership is tempted to pursue the idea.

At stake is who will lead the Palestinian Arabs where and how. The betting is that the Hamas-Fatah divide will last a very long time. Meanwhile, apologists for the Palestinians will continue to cover-up one of the foremost obstacles to peace.

###
Jan 2011

Survey of the Hebrew Press in Israel

If as Walter Lippmann wrote the newspaper is the bible of democracy, what are we to make of Israel's Hebrew-language dailies? For a start, they have little in common with American broadsheets or tabloids and are more in the British mold in that the demarcation between news and views is difficult to discern. Also, Israeli papers are less driven by a coherent set of views about politics then by the personal pique of their owners and brutal competition for circulation.

The paper with the most readers (35.2 percent) is the centrist Zionist Israel HaYom which burst on the scene in 2007 backed by Las Vegas businessman Sheldon Adelson. Copies are distributed free by legions of red jumpsuit-clad newsboys; a digital version is available gratis to email subscribers. Politically, the paper has been criticized for the broad support it gives to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It neither opposed his original 10-month moratorium on West Bank settlement construction nor broke with him to support its extension. And its star columnist Dan Margalit atypically puts the onus for the stalled peace process on Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Yediot, dislodged from the top spot by Israel HaYom, now has a 34.9% share of circulation. Owner Arnon Mozes is very much involved in running the paper. To recapture the number one spot, Yediot has been discounting its cover price and distributing some editions free. While ideologically erratic, the paper is sharply, consistently and relentlessly critical of Netanyahu. The team of diplomatic correspondent Shimon Shiffer and Nahum Barnea, doyen of Israel's print punditocracy, do not disguise their loathing of Netanyahu purportedly for missing what they see as a window of opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians and Syria.

Number three in circulation is Ma'ariv whose owners, the Nimrodi family, were forced to cede operating control to businessman Zachi Rachiv as the paper struggles to climb from its 12.5% market share. Rachiv wants to deemphasize the print edition to build-up a digital readership. Ma'ariv also began distributing free or heavily discounted copies to chip away at Israel Ha Yom's lead. Its star columnist Ben Caspit despises Netanyahu no less than his colleagues at Yediot, portraying a mendacious premier prepared to reject sensible Palestinian overtures that could end the 100-year conflict out of crass political motives. Nevertheless, some media watchers discern

Ma'ariv shifting toward the political center. They cite the arrival of columnist Ben-Dror Yemini who has attracted a following by campaigning against the left's domination of Israeli academia even as he lambastes urban settlers for implanting themselves in heavily Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem.

Haaretz comes next with its 6.4% circulation share and a hugely disproportionate level of influence owning to its elite readership, the breadth of its coverage, and the inclusion of translated content from world-class foreign newspapers. Owned by the Schocken family and propped up by the German publisher M. DuMont Schauberg, critics see Haaretz as often crossing the line between unthinking criticism of Israeli policies to outright promulgation of the post-Zionist agenda. (The paper also publishes a 12-page daily English edition, mostly translated from the Hebrew, in collaboration with the global edition of The New York Times.)

Add to this mix Mekor Rishon whose original incarnation was the brainchild of Amnon Lord, a secular left-winger mugged by Oslo who targeted an expansive right-wing readership. In 2003, the paper was reconstituted under the ownership of Shlomo Ben-Tzvi, formerly a London businessman, who integrated it with the waning Orthodox Zionist HaZofeh and oriented the new product on a more hard-line religious and political path. The free weekday emailed digital edition and the Friday hardcopy paper have garnered a loyal constituency.

Any survey of the Hebrew press would be incomplete without reference to the ultra-Orthodox Hamodia (mouthpiece of the hassidic-oriented Agudat Israel party) and its competition the even more puritanical Yated Neeman, voice of "Lithuanian" ultra-Orthodoxy, and organ of the Degel Hatorah party. Neither paper has a Zionist orientation though Hamodia is more sympathetic. Sephardi ultra-Orthodox readers are served by the Shas party daily Yom L'Yom. A feature of all three papers is their policy of not covering stories at variance with "Torah values." Hence there has been no reportage in the haredi press of former president Moshe Katsav's trial and conviction of rape.

As a "bible of democracy" – and unique in the Middle East – Israeli newspapers emphatically offer a cacophony of uncensored views and news all competing to set the political agenda. As for probity, objectivity and placing the collective good over narrow interests – that is entirely another matter.

###

There goes 'The Economist' Again

The headline beseeches: "Please, Not Again: The Threat of War in the Middle East." The magazine's cover shows a worried looking President Barack Obama, an Israeli tank rumbling by in the background. Welcome to the Economist's first issue of 2011 devoted to Israel and to America's role in the Mideast. Its theme, in effect, is how to rein-in the Jewish state and preserve the peace.

Published in London, the Economist is hardly the only international newspaper – it resents being called a magazine – to heap lopsided responsibility on Israel for the perpetuation of the conflict. However, unlike moribund Time and Newsweek, the stylishly written and often droll Economist (worldwide circulation 1.6 million including over 800,000 in the U.S.) is must reading in government and academia. Owned partly by the parent company of the Financial Times – itself a bastion of British animus toward Zionism – and by among others, reportedly, some members of the British Rothschild's (who in the main are no longer Jewish), the Economist loses its facade of cool detachment when it comes to Israel.

In The Economist's view Israel suffers from a siege mentality, perpetually, lethally and disproportionately bungling even theoretically legitimate security threats, obdurately "colonizing" the "Palestinian side of the 1967 border," even going to the extreme of setting traffic lights to flick green only briefly to vex harassed Jerusalem's Arabs.

In its January 1 issue, the Economist says it fears war could break out this year over Iran's "apparent" desire to build atomic bombs, the arms race "between" Israel and Hezbollah or over "miscalculations" on the Gaza border. Its non sequitur solution to these disquieting possibilities would have Obama exert "tough love" on Israel by imposing a solution on the "feuding parties." The newspaper reasons that with a Fatah-led Palestine fashioned in the West Bank, Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas (in Gaza) will all find it "much harder" to attack Israel.

The fatal flaw with the Economist's argument is that the last time Fatah so much as feigned at peacemaking, at the start of the Oslo process, Hamas reacted violently by carrying out some twenty fatal terror attacks on Israelis between the September 1993 White House signing ceremony and mid-February 1994. Similarly, Hezbollah's aggression doubled in Oslo's wake. The implication is clear: Unless the international community first tackles the rejectionists, moderates will be afraid to make the compromises necessary for peace. Right now Mahmoud Abbas has latched onto any pretext not to negotiate with Benjamin Netanyahu's government. First he claimed settlement construction was suddenly keeping him from the bargaining table; though he did not deign to acknowledge Israel's ten-month moratorium until it was almost over. Next he insisted that Netanyahu stand behind a peace plan put forth by former premier Ehud Olmert, despite the fact that Abbas had walked away from this very offer. But it's no wonder relative moderates like Abbas are afraid to take risks for peace. Iran may soon provide the rejectionists with a nuclear umbrella; coddled by the international community, Hamas is solidifying its fanatical grip on Gaza, and with Syria's support Hezbollah has for all intents and purposes usurped Lebanese sovereignty. In this political ambiance Abbas would be pilloried by the rejectionists if he to negotiate in earnest with Netanyahu.

Economist editorials and features are customarily unsigned though the newspaper's Israel correspondent, former Haaretz editor David Landau, would likely have contributed to the latest barrage. Landau is on record as imagining that Israel "wants to be raped" by the U.S." and is begging for "more vigorous U.S. intervention." This week's feature has an unappreciative Israel pocketing billions in American aid even as it rebuffs pleas "backed by offers of yet more aid" to "pause in its building of illegal Jewish settlements." The reasons given for this supposed obstinacy are Israel's "thriving economy" and "America's pro-Israel lobby." The possibility that disputed territory deeply rooted in Jewish civilization, captured in a war of self-defense, and of immense strategic value to Israel's survival ought to be the subject of direct negotiations between the parties is, plainly, anathema at the Economist.

Instead, surveying the region from Afghanistan to Iran to Iraq, the "biggest headache" Economist editors put their finger on is not the metastasizing evil that inspired, in the latest incarnation, the bombing of a New Year's Eve Mass at a Coptic Christian church in Egypt, but "Jewish colonization in the West Bank." The Economist prefers to uncritically echo Muslim and Arab "objections" to America's presence in the Middle East and its support for Israel. One implication being: if only the Jewish state would just go away. In truth, Israel or no Israel, jihad is the pathological reaction of a dysfunctional civilization unable to cope with the demands of tolerance and pluralism emblematic of modernity.
###

Jan 2011

Return Ticket For Two? Amram Mitzna & Aryeh Deri

Amram Mitzna is the Benny Begin of the Zionist left: upright, abstentious and unlikely to ever lead his ideological camp to political victory. The kibbutz-born Mitzna is a dovish ex-general who once clashed with defense minister Ariel Sharon over his reaction to the Lebanese Christian massacre of Palestinians during the 1982 Lebanon War. In 1987, Mitzna found himself the IDF's commanding officer in the West Bank at outbreak of the first intifada. Convinced that "force was not the answer," Mitzna took a leave of absence to study abroad. By 1993, post-army, he was elected mayor of Haifa.

As head of the Labor Party during the second intifada, Mitzna was vanquished by Sharon in the 2003 Knesset elections. He quit national politics in 2005 and soon accepted appointment as mayor of Yeruham, a beleaguered Negev development town, whose elected chief executive had been removed by authorities for corruption. The city's subsequent renewal is credited to Mitzna's hard work and talent for public administration. Now, at 65, Mitzna says he has "a burning urge to bring a change" to the country and is weighing a fresh run for the Labor party leadership.

In the meantime, another politician is making a comeback though not in his original party. Aryeh Deri, going on 52, came to Israel from Morocco at age nine, went on to learn Talmud at a prestigious Ashkenazi academy, and unlike many ultra-Orthodox youths went to the army. In 1986, Sephardic ex-chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef tapped Deri to head his fledgling Shas party where Deri honed his skills as a powerbroker. His career abruptly ended when he was convicted in 1999 of channeling tax money to party institutions.

Chastened and changed, Deri is poised to reenter politics, nowadays studying English and French to burnish his cosmopolitan credentials. Estranged from his nonagenarian mentor and despised by his successor Eli Yishai, Deri plans to form a new, populist, cross-sectoral and ideologically moderate party.

The men are a study in contrasts. Mitzna abandoned the Knesset to take personal responsibility for Labor's rout. Deri left kicking and screaming only because he was sent to prison. Mitzna is from the Ashkenazi elite; Deri from the Sephardi underclass. Deri is a political animal; Mitzna lacks the killer instinct. Deri is charismatic; Mitzna is humorless. Deri has the potential of capturing support well beyond his own ultra-Orthodox base and keeps his innate dovishness understated. His knack for friendships across the political spectrum adds to his appeal. Mitzna, in contrast, has embraced the far-fetched Geneva Initiative as his platform on the Palestinian issue and is unlikely to win over many not predisposed to his views.

Though Israeli elections are far off, Mitzna's return could still be a boon to the leaderless and rudderless Zionist left, while Deri's second coming could, ironically, undercut the very ethno-politics he practiced so well. Shas is going through an identity crisis with one dissident Knesset member, Haim Amsalam – who hopes to join forces with Deri -- asking how the party came to champion "distorted" ultra-Orthodox insularity at the expense of its original social mandate.

Labor is experiencing its own identity crisis. Critics complain party leader Ehud Barak has sold out by partnering with the Netanyahu government. Yet the welcome mat is not being rolled out for Mitzna. Avishay Braverman and Isaac Herzog, Labor moderates who want to replace Barak as party leader say Mitzna's dovishness will drive Labor voters to the center-left Kadima party. Inscrutable as he is unpopular, Barak has invited Mitzna to run for the party leadership. Does this mean Barak has abandoned the idea of running again? Or will he, ultimately, try to elbow out Braverman and Herzog before tackling Mitzna's challenge?

Yossi Kucik, a political strategist and former aide to Barak when he was premier, is working to create a left-wing amalgamation that would include Labor, the atrophied Meretz party and various engaging personalities to improve the left's prospects in the next election. That may prove a mission impossible. Would Mitzna be willing to campaign as a good government candidate with demonstrated implementation skills and downplay his discredited views on the "peace process?" Can Labor, which has essentially embraced neo-liberal economics, run in tandem with social-democratic Meretz? With Mitzna at the helm, polls show Labor capturing no more than the 13 seats it currently holds. Still, if next time out Mitzna is prepared to stay the course he could keep Labor in the opposition and mold it in his own image: principled, respected, and perennially out of power.

As for the repackaged Deri, he has no interest in remaining on the opposition benches. Polls show his new party would win at least eight Knesset seats at Shas's expense. Were he to succeed in building a truly broad-based party, odds are he could do considerably better yet and parlay his mandates into a strong presence around the cabinet table.

-- December 2010