Israel

The unseriousness of the PLO’s desire for peace with Israel was demonstrated in a comic manner this week. Here’s the news item from the AP:   The Palestinian president says he will sue Great Britain over the 1917 Balfour Declaration and its support for a Jewish national home in the Holy Land.   Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki made the announcement on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas at Monday’s opening of the Arab League summit in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott. Malki said the suit would be filed in an international court. He didn’t elaborate.   Perhaps Mr. Malki "didn’t elaborate" because he recognizes, at some level, the lunacy of this approach. Is it to be the International Criminal Court, where perhaps they could seek a warrant to arrest Lord Balfour? Problem: he died in 1930. Perhaps he has heirs whose property might be attached. In fact, he never married and had no children. Or perhaps the PLO might try to attach all the streets named for Balfour throughout Israel, or the community there called Balfouria after him. And this PLO approach might become a model: perhaps Germans still unhappy with the Versailles Treaty might sue England and France. Like the Balfour Declaration, that was only a century ago--and Versailles was an actual treaty, not a mere "declaration." If declarations are actionable in international courts, there will be a bonanza for lawyers. Every country in Latin America might sue the United States over the Monroe Doctrine, or perhaps every European country the Monroe Doctrine prohibited from intervening in this Hemisphere might sue us. Lawyers could ponder the difference between a "doctrine" and a "declaration." But there is something more serious to ponder: that the Palestinian leadership is wasting its time and energy on this nonsense instead of trying in practical ways to improve the lives of Palestinians. Suing Lord Balfour, or to be more exact suing the United Kingdom over the Balfour Declaration of 1917, is a substitute for decent governance and the evasion of even an effort to provide it. I imagine that Palestinians are fully aware of this and understand that this initiative is a form of bread and circuses. It’s likely that they will not find this whole episode as ridiculous and amusing as we in the West do.

The Israeli Knesset has just passed a law requiring that NGOs who receive more than half their budget from foreign governments and organizations state this publicly. A clamor has arisen, with critics denouncing the new legislation as anti-democratic. This strikes me as ridiculous, and let’s do some hypotheticals. The UK is facing the Brexit referendum, and the government of France secretly funds pro-Remain groups. Is that fair or democratic? In the past decade several states in our country held referenda over same-sex marriage. How would we feel if it turned out groups proposing a "yes" vote had been funded by the government of Sweden? We would feel, as the Brits would feel in my first example, that our internal debate was being thwarted and distorted by foreigners. That is precisely how the Israeli lawmakers who voted for the new law felt. Prime Minister Netanyahu said the new law will "prevent an absurd situation in which foreign countries meddle in the internal affairs of Israel." He’s right. In Israel, many leftist groups that endlessly attack not only the current /government and its policies but the legitimacy of Israel and the conduct of the IDF have been funded largely by European countries. The new Israeli law does not prevent this, and does not interfere with free speech, but merely says the financial facts must be stated in all public communications by the recipient Israeli group. No doubt the net effect will be to undermine the credibility of such groups, or so it seems to me--and presumably to the new law’s drafters. If you learn Monday that the Netherlands loudly denounced Israel in the UN, and Tuesday that some Israeli group denouncing the government is funded by the Netherlands, you may well put two and two together. In any event, you ought to have the relevant information. Is this really a problem, though? Is foreign intervention in Israeli politics a serious issue? You bet, and one of the main culprits turns out to be the United States of America. Politico has a story today headlined "Senate report: State Dept. grant also aided campaign to unseat Netanyahu." Here is more:   A State Department grant intended to rally support for peace between Israel and Palestine also helped set up political infrastructure that was later used for a campaign opposing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015, according to a bipartisan Senate investigative report released on Tuesday.   The report found no legal wrongdoing by the State Department, since the $349,000 in grants for OneVoice were used to further the Middle East process as intended. But shortly after Netanyahu called an election for 2015, the voter databases constructed with the grant money were activated for Victory 15, an unsuccessful effort to defeat Netanyahu. Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) each signed off on the investigation, which was conducted by Portman’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In releasing the report, Portman criticized the State Department for lax oversight and for undermining a U.S. ally. “The State Department ignored warning signs and funded a politically active group in a politically sensitive environment with inadequate safeguards,” Portman said. “It is completely unacceptable that U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to build a political campaign infrastructure that was deployed — immediately after the grant ended — against the leader of our closest ally in the Middle East.” The investigation is notable for its bipartisan sheen. McCaskill highlighted the conclusion that it showed “no wrongdoing” by President Barack Obama’s administration but said the report “certainly highlights deficiencies in the Department’s policies that should be addressed in order to best protect taxpayer dollars.” “Despite OneVoice’s previous political activism in the 2013 Israeli election, the Department failed to take any steps to guard against the risk that OneVoice could engage in political activities using State-funded grassroots campaign infrastructure after the grant period,” the report found.   Is it any wonder that Israeli lawmakers on the Right passed this law? Not only European governments but our own are in fact doing what Netanyahu denounced: meddling in Israel’s politics. The new law calls for transparency, and nothing more. And next time you read about bad feeling between Netanyahu and Obama, remember that bipartisan Senate report. Netanyahu opposed Obama’s Iran deal. For this he was accused of meddling in American politics. What did the Obama administration do? It funded a campaign to get Netanyahu thrown out of office.

The Middle East Quartet has just issued its first report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace efforts, and briefed the Security Council yesterday. The UN’s report on the report begins this way:   Continuing violence, terrorism and incitement, settlement expansion, and the Palestinian Authority’s lack of control of Gaza are hurting the Middle East peace process, the United Nations envoy today said summarizing the first ever report by the diplomatic Quartet – comprising the United Nations, Russia, the United States and the European Union – to the Security Council.   “The main objective of this report is not about assigning blame,” Nickolay Mladenov, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, told the 15-member council. “It focuses on the major threats to achieving a negotiated peace and offers recommendations on the way forward.”   The Quartet was created way back in 2002 by Colin Powell, and had managed to go for 14 years without issuing a report. (I was a participant from 2002 to 2008, joining the Russian Quartet representative, the UN representative, and at every meeting a large group of Europeans--representing the EU Council, the EU Commission, the EU foreign minister, and so on. Videos of the EU delegation to the Quartet might have enlarged considerably the Brexit vote in the UK.) This report actually has some very good aspects, but in the end does not manage to go beyond the conventional wisdom. The report contains a powerful denunciation of terrorism, and a strong discussion of "incitement," meaning the ways the Palestinian authorities glorify terror and the murder of Israelis. Here is part of that section:   Incitement to Violence. Palestinians who commit terrorist attacks are often glorified publicly as “heroic martyrs.” Many widely circulated images depict individuals committing terrorist acts with slogans encouraging violence. The spreading of incitement to violence on social media has gained momentum since October 2015, and is particularly affecting the youth....   Some members of Fatah have publicly supported attacks and their perpetrators, as well as encouraged violent confrontation. In the midst of this recent wave of violence, a senior Fatah official referred to perpetrators as “heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian.” Fatah social media has shown attackers superimposed next to Palestinian leaders following terrorist attacks. The Palestinian Authority leadership has repeatedly made statements expressing opposition to violence against civilians and senior officials have publicly maintained a commitment to non-violent resistance. Regrettably, however, Palestinian leaders have not consistently and clearly condemned specific terrorist attacks. And streets, squares and schools have been named after Palestinians who have committed acts of terrorism.   I do not recall seeing as candid a statement about Palestinian incitement in any UN document before. The report also occasionally includes a sensible statement that, if pursued, might lead somewhere. Here’s an example:   The Quartet stresses that while a permanent status agreement that ends the conflict can only be achieved through direct bilateral negotiations, important progress can be made now towards advancing the two-state solution on the ground.   In English (which is not exactly the language in use at the UN) this sentence can be translated thus: the negotiations are going nowhere and everyone knows it, so let’s concentrate on pragmatic steps that might actually be taken. Were the Quartet, and the EU and United States, to do this, Palestinians and Israelis would be better off. In fact the main problem with this report is that it is all about what’s "hurting the peace process," when in fact there is no peace process. There hasn’t been one since 2008, when PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas rejected the offer from Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, and 2009, when the Obama administration set a total construction freeze as a precondition for direct negotiations. The report continues an old pattern of equating morally the construction of a home and the murder of an Israeli civilian. It does this in several ways. The very first sentence quoted above shows this: the problems are violence and terror and settlement expansion, you see. I build a bedroom, you murder a child in her bed; we are in the eyes of the Quartet apparently equal obstacles to "the peace process." It is perhaps unfortunate for the Quartet but gives a deep insight into what is really preventing peace that the report was presented the day the following happened:   Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a 13-year-old American citizen, was stabbed to death while she was in her bed in Israel. According to the State Department, a 17-year-old Palestinian assailant allegedly broke into her home in the West Bank and killed her before he was shot by security guards.   There was another attack, same day, near Hebron, that killed a father and injured his wife and children in their car, which came the day after an attack in Netanya...and on and on it goes. It should be possible for the Quartet and for UN bodies to express opposition to settlement expansion without equating it with terrorism and murder. The "peace process" will go nowhere until such terror stops, and until the Palestinian Authority insists on what the Quartet correctly demands: an end to the incitement of and reward for murder.  

The argument that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the world took another blow this month when--for the first time in the history of the United Nations and of Israel--the Israeli ambassador was elected to head one of the UN’s permanent committees.  This the Legal Committee, also called the "Sixth Committee," and its covers the United Nations’ international law operations--which include matters related to terrorism and to the Geneva Conventions. There was a tough diplomatic fight over this, so it is worth handing out kudos. First, Israel’s ambassador Danny Danon, who was mocked by many on the Israeli Left and in the Israeli media (and yes, there is a large overlap) when Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him, showed that he is a very competent diplomat. He was a member of the Knesset and a minister when appointed, but had had no diplomatic experience. He has obviously learned the job, and fast. Second, kudos to the United States Mission to the UN, which fought very hard to get votes for Israel. Third, kudos to those members of the "Non-Aligned Movement" who refused to go along with Palestinian, Arab League, and Iranian pressure to stop the Israelis. Three countries in particular stopped the anti-Israel effort: Singapore, Rwanda, and India. That last is noteworthy, because India’s new friendship for Israel is a great departure from its decades of hostility and because India has considerable weight at UN headquarters in New York.  It has been stated in the Arab press, though impossible to prove because there was a secret ballot, that several Arab countries actually voted for Israel. This entire episode is a humiliation for the Palestinian delegation in New York. In the end Israel received 109 votes of 153 cast--a landslide. This victory for Israel shows how foolish is the line about Israel becoming increasingly isolated in the world. Relations with Turkey are about to be restored. Relations with several key Arab states are improving steadily. India’s new support is extremely significant. Israel maintains growing economic relations as well with China. It is true that many EU nations are increasingly critical of the Jewish state, which is significant because the EU is Israel’s largest trading partner (at least for now, while Britain remains in it). But at least in this case, the "Western European and Other Group" at the UN (which includes the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as well as the EU nations) did the right thing. Let’s suspend the mourning about Israel’s growing isolation for a moment of applause for this victory in Turtle Bay.  

Since leaving the White House in January, 2009, I’ve been telling audiences that Palestinian president and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas will never, never sign a peace agreement with Israel--no matter what its content. Those still in doubt might reflect on the events of this week. Abbas and Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, were both in Brussels, and European President Martin Schulz thought it would be nice to get them together. Rivlin’s post is ceremonial, but that’s all the more reason for a ceremonial gesture toward reconciliation. Abbas simply refused. Rabin could shake the hand of the terrorist Arafat, but Abbas could not shake the hand of the ex-parliamentarian, now president, Rivlin. Abbas and Rivlin both spoke to the European Parliament, where Abbas demonstrated yet again how close to signing a peace deal he is. He reported that Israel had cut off water to the West Bank for Ramadan in order to harm Palestinians, a charge the Palestinian Ministry of Information continues to repeat. The most remarkable line was this one: “The Palestinian people have experienced mass murder on an historic scale and unparalleled attacks under the eyes and ears of the international community, which gives Israel immunity. The Palestinians are going through dark days and live under the tyranny and racism of the occupation. Just a week ago, several rabbis in Israel asked their government to poison the water in order to kill the Palestinians.” Poisoning the wells: this medieval libel against Jews still lives, we see, in the Palestinian president’s rhetoric. And as to "mass murder," there is plenty of it in his neighborhood, not least in Syria where perhaps 500,000 Muslims have been murdered. Among them are Palestinians, who lived there in camps. But of all that he had of course nothing to say. Abbas has benefitted greatly by comparison to his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, and Arafat’s record of corruption and terror. But the Palestinian Authority under Abbas is compiling its own record of corruption, and while Abbas continues to denounce terror in every speech, his Palestinian Authority continues to honor and celebrate terrorists who kill Israelis. Abbas lacks charisma and he wears a suit and tie, unlike Arafat, but those qualities should not be mistaken for any intention ever to sign a peace deal. Abbas has now ruled far longer than Arafat, and the Israelis and Palestinians are no closer to peace. His refusal to meet with Rivlin and his despicable speech this week are reminders that he spurned Ehud Olmert’s peace offer in 2008 and refused the efforts of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to bring him to the peace table. So my views have not changed since 2009: Abbas will never sign a peace agreement. Life in the West Bank can be made better, Israel and the Palestinian Authority can move toward improved relations, terrorism can be fought, Palestinian autonomy can be negotiated, but there will be no peace negotiated by Mahmoud Abbas. The sooner Western governments come to grips with this fact, the sooner pragmatic approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can advance.

The Associated Press reports this week on the arrival of the first families moving into Rawabi, a new city being built in the West Bank. Rawabi is a marvel in many ways. I visited there in January, toured around a bit, and spoke with the founder, Bashar al-Masri. Rawabi is about 5 miles from Ramallah, and will eventually house 25,000 residents. (Its web site is here.) Construction has been slowed by grudging cooperation from Israel, and even today Rawabi has not been permitted to construct an adequate access road and to connect to sufficient water supplies. But the project is an extraordinary achievement, well designed for living and shopping, with common spaces such as a beautiful open air amphitheater. The AP story states that Rawabi isn’t just about real estate but is part of the statehood dream, and here I disagree. The "statehood dream" is in the hands of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, which are both far too incompetent and corrupt to have built Rawabi. It is successful in large part because it is a private sector project that has as little as possible to do with Palestinian politics. Rawabi is in my view more about Palestinians’ desires for a normal life, in a new city where they can live well despite the political problems that surround them.   Rawabi (Courtesy: Bayti Real Estate Investment Company/Massar International)   Rawabi’s own web site says it well:   Rawabi, is a new community for Palestinian families that will provide opportunities for affordable home ownership, employment, education, leisure and an attractive environment in which to live, work and grow.....The City Center offers a retail business district with hotels, cinemas and a convention center, all supported by the latest smart technologies and a high-speed fiber-optic network. Rawabi also features education and medical facilities, houses of worship, public green spaces and recreation facilities – creating new Palestinian economic and cultural destination.   As the largest private sector undertaking in Palestinian history, Rawabi will expand the local economy’s linkages to the global knowledge economy. It will introduce new technologies to the Palestinian construction sector and encourage international firms, particularly in the high-tech, health care and renewable energy sectors to take up a key role in bolstering current economic activities. Through attracting investors and technology suppliers; Rawabi plans to generate more than 5,000 permanent jobs, creating quality of life and making a long-term, sustainable contribution to national prosperity. Bayti Real Estate Investment Company, the developer of Rawabi, is jointly owned by Qatari Diar and Massar International. It was established to jumpstart the development of the Palestinian real estate sector with a mission to create affordable, accessible, family- friendly communities and create several thousand direct and indirect employment opportunities for Palestinians, providing multi-level stimulus to the national economy....   Notice: no politics here, and one wonders why the AP felt it necessary to insert it. Rawabi is a wonderful and impressive achievement, which Israelis should be applauding rather than intermittently slowing and obstructing. (Some of the obstructions come from residents of nearby Israeli settlements, whose objections are presumably ideological: they want more Israeli towns built near them, not more Palestinian towns.) The message to Palestinians, I would think, is that life in the West Bank can be greatly improved by Palestinians; Rawabi is certainly a rejection of the theology of victimization that makes Palestinians into helpless objects of Israeli action. Rawabi demonstrates that despite the failures of Palestinian politics, Palestinians can be actors, and agents of positive change.

Domestic pressures facing Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas mean France’s bid to reboot Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will likely be a nonstarter, says CFR’s Robert Danin. 

Are American Jews and Israel drifting apart? In an article and a podcast I examine the theories and two recent books on the subject. The article is the monthly essay at the web site Mosaic, and can be found here. There are very interesting responses as well from several distinguished commentators: Profs. Jack Wertheimer, Martin Kramer, and Daniel Gordis. Here is how the essay begins:   Everyone knows that American Jews and Israel are drifting apart—and everyone is confident of the reasons why. Israel, it is said, has become increasingly nationalistic and right-wing; “the occupation” violates liberal values; and the American Jewish “establishment,” with its old familiar defense organizations and their old familiar apologetics, has lost touch with young American Jews who are put off by outdated Zionist slogans and hoary appeals for communal solidarity. In brief, the fundamental problem resides in the nature of the Israeli polity and the policies of the Israeli government, which together account for the growing misfit between Israelis and their American Jewish cousins.   This, at least, is the new conventional wisdom. It is wrong—but the precise ways in which it is wrong, and by means of which it mistakes and overlooks deeper realities, are worth examining.   And here is the final paragraph:   Perhaps the Israeli and American Jewish communities will drift farther apart, and perhaps the level of criticism will rise. Work should be done, by all means, to prevent or minimize such trends. But the problems with which we are dealing won’t be solved by casting blame on Israelis or their politics. The problems begin at home, and so do the solutions.   The essay examines in particular the role of intermarriage in changing the nature of the American Jewish community and its relationship with Israel--something the three comments also take up. There is a further discussion of all these issues in a podcast in which the executive director of the Tikvah Fund, Eric Cohen, interviews me. It can be found at the web site of the Tikvah Fund here. As Tikvah explains it,   Abrams examines the conventional wisdom that American Jews are becoming less attached to, less interested in, and even more antagonistic toward the Jewish State. If so, he and Cohen ask, do we understand why, and are we willing to confront the real reasons? What are the new fault lines within American Jewry itself, and what does this mean for the America-Israel relationship more broadly? What does all this mean for Israel, given the tremendous threats it faces in a radicalizing Middle East, and in a political world in which new forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism seem to be on the rise?   If these are subjects of interest, I urge you to take a look or a listen.

Yesterday, Israel was assaulted twice: once by terrorists, and once by the Vice President of the United States. The physical attack was in Jerusalem, where a bomb injured 21 people in a bus, several of them seriously. On the very same day, the VP addressed the group called J Street and shared with it not solidarity with Israelis under attack but--with remarkable timing--a rhetorical attack on the government of Israel. Here is some of what he said, according to a report in The Times of Israel:   Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged “overwhelming frustration” with Israel’s government on Monday and said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration has led the country in the wrong direction, in an unusually sharp rebuke of America’s closest ally in the Middle East.   “I firmly believe that the actions that Israel’s government has taken over the past the past several years — the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures — they’re moving us and more importantly they’re moving Israel in the wrong direction,” Biden said. He said those policies were moving Israel toward a “one-state reality” — meaning a single state for Palestinians and Israelis in which eventually, Israeli Jews will no longer be the majority. “That reality is dangerous,” Biden added.   Put aside the exquisite timing of Biden’s remarks on a day when Israel suffered a terrorist attack, and they are still quite something. For one thing, President Obama is about to join a GCC summit in Saudi Arabia. Does Biden really think the Arabs pay no attention to how we treat our closest friends and allies? Does he not know that they will read all of this and not gloat-- but instead wonder when they will be getting the same treatment? Then there are the facts. How do you get to a "one-state reality" when the people and government of Israel refuse it? Who will force them into it? How do you get to "systematic" expansion of settlements when just about every analyst understands that Netanyahu has been constraining many aspects of settlement growth--to the great anger of the settlers? And finally, why is Biden not familiar with the history of his own administration’s peace efforts? As Dennis Ross made clear in his most recent book, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, Netanyahu was in fact ready to take significant political risks to meet American requests--and Abbas was not. As Martin Indyk put it in July 2014,   "Netanyahu moved to the zone of possible agreement. I saw him sweating bullets to find a way to reach an agreement," said Indyk. Abbas, for his part, did not show flexibility, Indyk added.   None of this was reflected in Biden’s remarks. In his book, Ross wrote that“Obama believed Israel was capable of doing more on peace. And it could help change the regional realities, and our place in the region, if it would only move on the Palestinians. But what if the Palestinians were not prepared to move? What if they were not capable of moving, regardless of Israeli actions? He never seemed to ask that question.” Neither did Biden.