Posts Tagged ‘israel’
Before the next mistake, an idea for peace
In what is becoming an annual ritual, we poor nations of the Middle East are about to be subjected to another glitzy round of optimistic photo-ops collectively but inaccurately known outside the world as a “peace process.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy apparently came up with the latest idea:
Sarkozy seeks to capitalize on the momentum created by the participation of European leaders at a summit Sunday in Sharm al-Sheikh summit on the recent hostilities in Gaza, according to Le Figaro.
The paper also states that Sarkozy convinced German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had feared the cease-fire would not be kept, to attend the summit in Egypt.
The goal of the conference, the paper reported, is to reach a peace accord within a year, and it will be held a few weeks after a meeting of European foreign ministers in Egypt due to take place in February.
The form of the summit will reportedly be similar to that of the one the United States hosted in Annapolis in late 2007.
Here’s our problem with this “peace with a year” idea. According to our sources, Israeli intelligence believes Hamas would win election in every single Palestinian city were they held right now. Hamas rejects every arrangement with the Zionist entity that does not somehow lead to its destruction. The organization even took pains not to “accept” – but only “acknowledge” – the ceasefire announced yesterday.
If peace with Hamas itself is impossible, and peace with Fatah is meaningless because it doesn’t solve Gaza and may not hold traction in the Palestinian street, what could a French diplomat’s cajoling possibly change here?
We got here through the mistakes of many sides, including the Israelis, the Americans and the Europeans. But most importantly, we got here because the Palestinians have not yet decided as a nation to take their fate into their own hands. The leadership robbed its own people and the international community of an entire national economy. They refuse to begin even the most basic processes of sovereignty until all issues are resolved, things like currency, customs, diplomatic representation.
There is only one path to peace we can see. The US and a significant Arab party – Saudi Arabia? Egypt? – must begin a serious nation-building project in the West Bank, recreating an economy, an education system, the trappings of statehood (recall that both a US president and an Israeli PM have publicly declared the goal of negotiations to be a Palestinian state). Create a Palestine that will allow Israelis to believe that a pullout of settlements from the West Bank won’t bring a second Hamastan and rockets on Tel Aviv.
Is Sarkozy planning to do that? Does Obama, weighed down by the US financial implosion and blood on the line in Afghanistan and Iraq, have the bureaucratic bandwidth to engage in such a project? Can Egypt or Saudi Arabia participate in something like this without ruining it by trying to control it?
We don’t know. But we do know this: this conflict has not continued for lack of French cocktail parties.
The ‘radical peace camp’ spinning its wheels
The “radical peace camp,” for lack of a better term, continues to baffle us. It seems utterly committed to remaining in the ridiculed sidelines of a complicated conflict. Its latest anti-Israel act comes in the form of a statement calling for IDF troops to refuse to fight in Gaza.
Nothing surprising in the text:
We refuse to remain silent while Israeli leaders force Israeli soldiers to commit war crimes: crimes against humanity for which they will one day be called to account. Israeli soldiers of conscience can, and must, stop this dangerous, illegal, and immoral war.
Etc., etc., etc.
A member of one of the sponsoring organizations brought this petition to our notice, noting with pride that it has nearly 700 signatures from 37 countries. We agreed with her that 700 names was remarkable, but in the other direction: the vast majority of Jews are not against the Gaza operation.
But the question of popularity aside, what about the sheer inanity of the text? It’s hard to see as a serious part of the discussion someone who comes out for peace and quiet only now when Israel is shooting back.
Also, isn’t it just a bit intellectually lazy to label Israeli actions “war crimes?” International agreements clearly stipulate that the party that drags the civilians into the battlefield, or takes the battle to the civilian population, is the criminal. A statement that fails to deal with that is both misleading as to the meaning of “war crime” and irrelevant to any conversation about the realities on the ground.
How do they countenance a statement that calls only Israel to account? We fancy ourselves peace-loving liberals yearning for Palestinian statehood, but we still marvel at the glaring lacuna in the peace statement: where is the recognition that the opponent here is Hamas, not Mohandas Gandhi?
Kingmaker or mirage?
Binyamin Netanyahu
After Moshe Feiglin’s election to the 20th slot on the party list, the media narrative had it that Feiglin had successfully taken over the party.
“Likud eschews centrist candidates,” declared JTA, a news organization syndicated by over 100 Jewish newspapers worldwide.
The Jerusalem Post reported in similar vein:
Netanyahu’s associates expressed concern that the party would take a big hit in the polls after far-Right activist Moshe Feiglin won the realistic 20th spot on the list and Feiglin-endorsed candidates won 19 of the top 36 slots, defeating candidates supported by Netanyahu.
Feiglin-endorsed? You mean, for example, faction chairman and new #2 man Gideon Sa’ar, whose credentials include extremely popular legislation expanding women’s rights in the workplace? Yes, JPost means him. Or #3 Gilad Erdan, the man who used the Knesset as a bully pulpit to improve infrastructure and traffic enforcement nationwide, bringing the death toll on Israel’s roads down by double-digit percentages? Yes, Feiglin seems to have endorsed him as well. Of course, #4 Reuven Rivlin, the grizzled old lion of Likud politics who has already been speaker of the Knesset, was also on Feiglin’s list.
Gideon Sa'ar
It wasn’t Feiglin’s list that brought Erdan and Sa’ar to the top. It was their names who lent the list what small credence it had in the media’s imagination. In the end, the Likud chose the most productive and visible candidates for senior posts. After all, avowed centrist and Likud outsider Dan Meridor came in three spots ahead of Feiglin himself. Silvan Shalom, who supported the disengagement, did even better at #7. Ze’ev Elkin even took #21 against Feiglin’s candidate Asa Antov, despite coming in from Kadima 10 days before the primary.
The truth is that Feiglin lost rather badly. From legends that he controlled a disciplined army of 8,000 voting Likud members (about 49,000 voted in the primaries out of 99,000 members), making him the king-maker of Likud politics, we are left with the results of a relatively unpopular politician who won’t sit in the cabinet, won’t chair a committee, and likely won’t influence decision-making in the slightest. He is, if you like, what Yael Dayan was in the Labor Party shortly before leaving it for Meretz, and then leaving national politics altogether.
Rarely does the media notice its own bubbles, its gratuitous assumptions that lead it to consistently misreport even relatively simple realities.
Moshe Feiglin
Previous polls ordered by Netanyahu showed that the list’s inclusion of Moshe Feiglin, the leader of a right-wing faction within Likud, was liable to cost the party four or five seats. But the Haaretz-Dialog poll does not back that up. Instead, it appears that what has come to be known as the Feiglin effect has yet to make its way into the voters’ consciousness, though that could change over the coming days.
Later in the article:
Tuesday night’s news broadcasts made it seem like Feiglin had been chosen to fill the No. 2 spot rather than No. 20 and that he would be replacing Netanyahu as chairman any minute. That’s not the situation, of course, but in the world of Israeli politics, it’s the image that counts.
And who, pray tell, sets the image?
‘Tearing apart what remains of the Zionist dream’
Dan Ben-David
It bears quoting in full:
The tragic truth of modern Israel
By Dan Ben-DavidThe current coalition negotiations again raise the tragic truth of modern Israel: For quite a while, it has not been possible to govern in the Holy Land.
The problem is not only that the head of the country’s executive arm is held accountable, but not given the authority to build a cabinet with ministers who know something about the realm of their ministries and who also work for him/her. The problem is not only that Knesset members are not elected personally by voters, which ensures the existence of conflicts of interest between those who determine the party lists and those who actually vote for the lists on election day. The problem is not only the absence of fixed terms of office in the executive and legislative branches, which makes political instability structurally inherent in the current system and precludes long-term planning and vision.
These are just some of the more visual signs of a centrifugal governmental system in which sectoral demands steadily tear apart what remains of the Zionist dream.
In Israel’s current system of government, measures taken to survive politically in the present have a way of determining future reality. For example, it was not possible to remove Israeli citizens from Gaza without paying the political ransom of removing the ultra-Orthodox education stream from the system-wide educational reform that was approved at the time (which has since dissipated in any event, because of the lack of governance in the system).
Similarly, segments of the population with employment rates so low that they are unparalleled in the West are represented by politicians who insist on cementing this situation for eternity. They demand an increase in personal subsidies for each child – which have been shown to encourage extremely high birth rates – that are, in turn, translated into incomes that enable the choice of non-work as a way of life.
Three-quarters of ultra-Orthodox males and Israeli-Arab females of prime working ages (25-54) are not employed, while the rates of non-employment of their spouses are double Western averages. In 1960, only 15 percent of the country’s primary school pupils studied in the ultra-Orthodox and Israeli-Arab educational systems. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, in just four years, the 50 percent barrier will be crossed.
If today’s youth adopt the work habits of their parents, it should be clear that, in another generation or two, the resultant majority of the country’s population will create an untenable financial burden on the minority – who, by no small coincidence, will also be the sole bearers of the national defense burden. And what about the brain drain from Israel, which only accelerates this demographic process? Who is even dealing with this issue?The Knesset
In the struggle between left and right on keeping parts of the Land of Israel and Jerusalem that contain large Palestinian Arab populations, the current political tiebreakers are constraints that mortgage one demographic future – between Zionists and non-Zionists – for another demographic future, between Jews and Arabs.
A political tiebreaker of a totally different magnitude is needed: A political system in which each of the representatives, from the president down to the last Knesset member, is elected to fixed terms of office directly by the people. Representatives from different towns and regions will have to start looking out for the education that their constituents’ children receive, for jobs and personal security for the people who put them in office, for clean neighborhoods and environmental concerns in the areas that they come from. The accountability for successes and failures will be personal, with a corresponding political price tag.
When they will have to start dealing with the welfare of those who actually voted them into office, the politicians will have a lesser degree of freedom to advocate keeping the biblical Land of Israel instead preserving the health of today’s State of Israel; a lesser degree of freedom to be more concerned about Palestinian Arabs in Nablus and Ramallah than about Israeli Arabs in Taibeh and Rahat; and a lesser degree of freedom to insist on Torah studies as a substitute for, rather than as a complement to, education that facilitates the understanding of modern democracy and provides the tools for working in a global economy.
The total number of seats currently held by the three largest parties – Kadima, Labor and Likud – has already fallen to just half of the Knesset’s total (60 MKs in all). In light of the internal demographic changes that are taking place in Israel, the existing political fringes that represent narrow sectoral interests will become the majority in the Knesset in the near future, and the national perspective toward policy-making will have disappeared from the political scene. These fringes will become the primary boulevards – with each one leading toward the termination of the Zionist dream of a first-world democracy that is the national home of the Jewish people.
The time has come for the leaders of Kadima, Labor and Likud to understand that the country has reached the point of no return. Only the leaders of these three parties still have the combined parliamentary ability to put in place a new democratic system of government by the next elections. This will be the ultimate political tiebreaker that will return to the people the ability to salvage their collective future.
The author teaches economics in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University.
The emotional agony of an Israeli intellectual
Benjamin Balint is brilliant as always in a review of David Grossman’s Writing in the Dark. An excerpt from the review:
David Grossman
[Grossman] fears “that after decades of spending most of our energies, our thoughts and attention and inventiveness, our blood and our life and our financial means, on protecting our external borders, fortifying and safeguarding them more and more – after all this, we may be very close to becoming a suit of armor that no longer contains a knight, no longer contains a human.”At its best, then, Grossman’s Israel is but “a clumsy and awkward imitation of Western countries.” At its worst, which is more often, it is a “disaster zone,” a “tortured country,” “a nation whose intimate and permanent interlocutor is death.”
There is of course something to be said for a voice of conscience that urges us to strip away the layers of indifference and detachment that dull us to the suffering of others and to recover our moral sensitivities. But neither Grossman’s shrill self-condemnation, which sounds so close to the condemnations regularly heard from Israel’s self-declared enemies, nor the stale tradition which it continues, supplies that voice.
The reason for this is twofold. First, excessive political pessimism is as much a mark of escapism as Pollyannaish optimism. Second, self-examination ceases to edify the moment it crosses into self-disgust. Self-laceration is not a form of self-knowledge.
Stendhal once compared introducing politics in a novel to firing a pistol in the middle of a concert. There is something vulgar about it. But Writing in the Dark illustrates the opposite kind of vulgarity. In literature, as Grossman says, the desire to “know the Other from within him – even if that Other is our enemy” is a valuable imperative. In politics, however, a first duty is to make the elemental distinction between your own virtues and your all-too-real enemies’ vices. If David Grossman’s latest book is any indication, some Israeli intellectuals – to their detriment and to ours – have not yet learned how.
We recommend reading Balint’s review in full.
Why most journalism is usually bunk
Elyashiv is nervous
It wasn’t that he lied, you see, just that he overreached and failed to provide context. When deadline looms, too many journalists put sex-appeal over accuracy.
This latest journalistic offense was committed in a Sky News article which claimed it was explaining Tzipi Livni’s political “problem.” The title of the piece, written by Middle East correspondent Dominic Waghorn, proclaims: “Israeli Prime Ministerial Candidate Tzipi Livni Facing Obstacles Because Of Her Gender.”
Those Israeli sexists, one wants to scream. Where do they come off?
Waghorn explains that it’s all due to an 800-year-old opinion of Maimonides that women should not serve in positions of power. That ancient (and minority) opinion, in keeping with Maimonides’ views of women generally and with the surrounding Muslim culture’s attitudes as well, is said to be “still a problem for Ms Livni.”
Maimonides is, well, a bit Muslim on this issue
…this week the spiritual leader of one branch of ultra-orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Yosef Elyashiv, has reportedly said: “It is not simple to sit in a government where the prime minister is a woman.”
What we don’t get is this: Does Elyashiv’s queasiness about a woman running the country constitute, as the article states, “a new problem in her bid for power?”
Of course not. Shas is rushing headlong into the coalition and UTJ MKs (Avraham Ravitz, for example) are publicly proclaiming their desire to be part of the coalition.
So why isn’t the headline “Haredi parties seek entry into coalition despite rabbi’s unease?” Or even “Ancient minority opinion irrelevant to present-day political reality, even for the Ultra-Orthodox?” Perhaps because both of those accurate headlines would have had the disastrous disadvantage of being totally unsexy.
And what of the haredim who come out looking like silly caricatures? Or the readership who is told a story precisely the opposite of the current political reality? Aw, c’mon…this is just journalism.
Report: Demographics continue to shift in Jews’ favor
Palestinian children
His latest findings: The Jewish birthrate is up while the Arab birthrate is down.
Inside Israel:
The number of Jewish births during the first half of 2008 (55,948) amounts to 76% of total births within pre-1967 Israel, compared to 75% of total births in 2007 and 69% in 1995.
Compared to the Arab population:
Annual Jewish births have grown 40% during 1995 (80,400) – 2007 (112,000), while annual Arab births within pre-1967 Israel have stabilized around 39,000 during the same 13 years, reflecting a significant dive in Arab fertility. Such a dive results from successful Arab integration into Israel’s infrastructures of health, education, finance, commerce, agriculture, sports and politics. From a 3rd World fertility rate, Israel’s Arabs are shifting towards Israeli fertility.
In the West Bank, too:
Arab fertility rate has declined in Judea & Samaria, as demonstrated by the stabilization of annual Arab births during 1995-2007 (around 58,000 annually per PA Ministry of Health documentation). Arab population growth in Judea & Samaria has declined systematically – since 1992 – following the dramatic ascension since the 1967 integration into Israel’s infrastructures. The current decline is the outcome of substantial emigration (triggered by terrorism, PLO-Hamas civil war, PA abuse and corruption and rise of price of oil), urbanization, expanded education especially among women, higher median wedding age, all time high divorce rate and PA/UNRWA campaign against teen-pregnancy and for contraceptives.
This is interesting but, in our view, not all that relevant. It serves as further proof that the Palestinians are not a strategic threat to Israel, and that they won’t become such a threat in the foreseeable future.
Then again, our own support for Palestinian statehood was never based on strategic necessity, but on the moral imperative of national self-determination, which, being old-fashioned, we genuinely believe in.
Yes, they rejected peace and statehood in the aftermath of both ‘48 and ‘67. Yes, they don’t recognize our own right to our identity and country. Yes, they have created a tyrannical kleptocracy that wasted away an entire national economy in a quixotic war against us. Yes, the boots-on-the-ground occupation is tactically necessarily to fight terrorism. Yet, all that being true, Israelis are still driven to keep trying to relinquish our control over them as soon as possible. That’s not because we’re afraid of their wombs, but because we’re decent human beings.
Palin ‘expresses deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to Israel’
The campaign is working hard to offset the left-wing rumor mill. No, not the psychotic agitation about pregnancies. We’re talking about the rumor that Palin is anti-Israel. Palin met with AIPAC yesterday, and organization spokesman Josh Block told NBC:
“We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel. Like Sen. McCain, the vice presidential nominee understands and believes in the special friendship between the two democracies and would work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership in a McCain/Palin Administration.”
