As proof positive that there's a cease-fire on this week, the politicians immediately dove into sectarian squabbling. The first issue to fight over was the budget. As the Israeli economy takes a nose dive, the budget had to be amended to reflect the lower revenues for 2002. Every ministry, including defence, has to cut back expenditures by 9%, and of course nobody wants to. The country has started another year without a budget.
Earlier in the week, Arafat, who has been holed up in Ramallah for the last few weeks, wanted to go to celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem. The cabinet ordered that he not be allowed to go unless he hand over the two killers of the recently assassinated tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi. He refused, so it came to a showdown and Sharon didn't let him go. The United States was very understanding on the issue, and it had virtually no political fallout.
Later in the week, President Moshe Katzav announced that a former Arab Member of Knesset (MK) had suggested that he stand in front of the Palestinian Assembly and announce a year-long cease fire. The President, who is with the right-wing Likkud party, is usually only called upon for ceremonial functions, so it was quite a surprising idea. When Foreign Minister Peres got wind of the plan, he immediately moved to crush it, fearing that someone other than him might get credit for making peace. Sharon deemed it to be against his policy of not negotiating with Arafat, so he nixed it. The logic goes that if Arafat stops shooting, then there's a cease fire, so there's no need to announce one.
Meanwhile, the Knesset was running out of things to argue about, so they decided to write the "Shabbat Law." The law seeks to sort out what is permissible and what is not on Shabbat according to the State of Israel. The religious parties agreed that places of entertainment would be allowed to remain open, but that places of business and stores would stay closed for the duration of the Sabbath. If the bill were to pass, it would be yet another self-defeating move by the religious parties attempting to impose Shabbat on people, which will result in a further backlash against the religious and a further distancing of Israelis from their religion.
Now that the secular new year has come and gone, everybody seems to be lamenting over the problems and horrors of the previous year. We all knew that 2001 was going to be one of those years we try to forget but just can't. The headlines of today look pretty much the same as the Jerusalem Post Headlines from January 1, 2000: Twenty wounded in Netanya bomb attack; Stones and Firebombs Close Ramallah Tunnel Road; Calls for Calm after Kahane Slayings, etc. The government is cranking out year's end statistics for 2001 including everything from terror to pollution.
This year, 181 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, 86 of them in the territories, 101 of them in pre-1967 Israel. Seven foreign citizens were also killed by Palestinians. 455 Palestinians were killed in the territories and 10 in Israel pre-1967 Israel by the Israeli Defense Forces.
556 Israelis were killed and 40,000 were wounded in road accidents. Environment Minister Tzahi Hanegbi announced, "1,000 people die every year because of air pollution in Israel's large cities."
And never mind the economic tailspin. On January first, a dollar cost 4.04 shekels, today it costs 4.47. In the last two weeks, I've been watching the shekel to dollar rate rise from 4.21 to 4.48. This is supposedly a natural reaction to the decrease in interest rates aimed at spurring the economy, but in the end it all works out the same: the little money I actually have is worth even less now.
Israel has entered its first recession since 1953, with negative GDP growth of 0.5%. Israel's major industries; technology, defense, and tourism, all took a major beating. The dot com to dot bomb disaster in the states is hurting the tech sector, with 20% of tech startups closing, and electronics sales down by 20%. Tourism is also hurting, down 50%, although Jewish tourism is actually up 3% because of all of the solidarity missions coming from abroad. According to most accounts, the intifada has had almost zero effect on the economy, except for tourism, which would be down anyway because of the recession and the 9-11 attack in America. Meanwhile, unemployment of Arabs in Gaza is at about 80%. Israel had replaced the Palestinians with foreign workers from Thailand and Romania for security concerns. Now, the government has decided to try to start getting rid of the foreign workers to drive up the price of labor and help keep what money there is within the local economy.
But, there is always good news. The enormous GDP growth rate of 6% in 2000 is expected to help the country through the recession, and the lower shekel is going to help manufacturing and exporting, although that doesn't help me much.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan are getting ready for a war, and, as usual, somebody always makes a profit from somebody else's disaster. In this case, it's Israel, which happens to be one of India's major suppliers of weaponry. The economic collapse of Argentina is also helping Israel, which is gearing up for a wave of immigration from Argentina's 200,000 strong Jewish community. Immigration is the life blood of this country, bringing in foreign expertise and helping to build the economy. 44,000 people made aliyah (immigrated) last year, mostly from Russia. However, half of those people are not Jewish according to Jewish law. Israel's definition of a Jew is somebody with one Jewish grandparent or someone married to a Jew, is different from Judaism's definition whereby a Jew is anyone whose mother is Jewish or went through an Orthodox conversion. The sectarian conflicts of twenty years from today are brewing even now. Israel's population now stands at 6.5 million, with 5.3 million Jews and 1.2 million Arabs.
With the ever increasing population, the Army is experiencing a manpower glut. There are two types of soldiers in the Israeli Army: combat soldiers and jobniks. Combat soldiers are mostly volunteer and do all of the fighting. Jobniks are either clerks and broom-pushers or technical people. Non-technical Jobniks are considered dead weight in the Army, so they are not particularly wanted. This prompted a move by the army to allow combat soldiers to extend their service by one year and in exchange receive full pay (most soldiers are given enough money during their three year mandatory service for a bus ride home and a coca cola.) This is hoped to take the burden off the reservists and save money for the army in the long run. I suspect that Israel, with its ever increasing population, is gradually moving closer to a more professional, volunteer army.
There has also been a significant reduction in the acts of violence, with the average time between suicide and armed attacks on Israeli civilians decreasing from once every one hour and twenty minutes to once every two hours ten minutes. American General Zinni landed in Israel a few hours ago and he's supposed to start pressuring people to move towards an official cease-fire. I wish him luck, but I don't think he'll have any. It has been nice, through, to go a few weeks without any major bombings.
Thursday, January 03, 2002
Unilateral Withdrawal
I received the following letter from someone on the email list, and I'm sure it reflects the thoughts of a great many people:
I pretty much agree with everything you have said, but I personally believe that Israel must in the end evacuate all the settlements in Gaza and WB and simply get the hell out of those areas, UNILATERALLY. Israel does not need to wait for an agreement with the Palestinians, because as you've observed, they are not interested in one. Ehud Barak recently concluded that Arafat is interested in a two-state solution, one state for Palestinians and one for Palestinians and Jews (Israel) but with the Pal. Right of return, so that the demographics would be quickly skewed in favor of the arab population---demographic suicide. I believe Israel needs to evacuate the WB and Gaza simply because they will never give Israel peace. I personally believe that settling those lands was the worst mistake Israel ever made. I don't believe that by doing so there will be peace. What it will do though, is give Israel the moral high ground and make it clear to the Pal. And the world that having made that singularly magnanimous gesture, the Pals. now have everything they need to create a viable state---no more excuses (not entirely unjustified) that a chunk of land pockmarked with Jewish settlements, IDF forces and access roads makes it impossible for them to have a cohesive state. Evacuation renders that whole argument completely moot. I would retain a 2 or 3-mile buffer all around that border and make it clear to the Pals. That any incursions into Israel proper will be met with the same response as any act of war on a sovereign nation. If and when there was a real peace agreement they could talk about return that buffer zone. Now when Israel goes into the WB or Gaza to carry out reprisals it does it from the position of an occupier, a very unsympathetic place to be, and unfortunately, one with absolutely NO VIABLE FUTURE FOR ISRAEL. As my mother, a committed social Zionist, said, better a small and secure Israel that a larger one perpetually at war. I see no other way out. By taking those actions unilaterally, Israel declares that it doesn't need the Palestinians to achieve an acceptable level of safety for its citizens. This is essentially what Israel did in S. Lebanon--come to the conclusion that being their, with its promise of a protective buffer for N. Israel, just wasn¹t worth the cost.
Here is my response:
This is essentially what everybody has been talking about for the last 15 months - how can Israel extricate itself from this situation? The answer, everybody from Barak to Bibi Netanyahu has said, is "Unilateral Separation," whereby Israel removes itself from "Yehsa", the acronym of "Yehuda, Shomron, and Aza," or, in secular terms, "The West Bank Gaza Strip" without signing any treaties or as part of any deal.
Such a plan sounds nice as a five second sound byte, as Barak likes to say, "It'll be us over here and them over there." Unfortunately, the plan has several drawbacks that the talking heads are studiously avoiding. The main problem with this strategy is that there are quite a lot of us over there, and even more of them over here. To be specific, there are about 1.2 million Israeli Arabs living inside pre-1967 Israel, and there are about half a million Jews living in Yesha. The second problem is that the government will eventually have to draw a line somewhere, and there is going to be a huge fight, possibly even a civil war, between Jews when it comes time to make that decision. The third problem is that there is still a question as to whether building a wall is physically possible, and whether it will actually do anything to increase Israel’s security. Still a further question is how the Palestinians, the Arabs as a whole, and the world will react to such a move.
Unfortunately, you can't exactly draw a line to separate the Arabs and the Jews. The stickiest situation by far is Jerusalem, whose neighborhoods are arranged in a checkerboard manner, alternating between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods intertwined and surrounding each other, usually separated only by a street or sidewalk. Before 1967, there was a line running through the center of town with a no-man's land, armed soldiers, and landmines, with East Jerusalem controlled by Jordan and West Jerusalem controlled by Israel. Jews were not allowed to visit the Western wall, the Mount of Olives, or any other holy sites on pain of death. After the reunification of the city, the city was annexed, its Arab residents offered citizenship, and a huge Jewish settlement drive attempted to surround the Arab section with Jewish neighborhoods to prevent any future redivision of the city, leaving pockets of Arab neighborhoods in a sea of Jewish ones. The last phase of this plan is being implemented today with the construction of the Har Homa neighborhood, approved by then Prime Minister Rabin and started by Netanyahu, which would be the final nail in the coffin of the idea of the redivision of the city by blocking the last open and undeveloped land passage between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Arabs, for their part, responded with a settlement drive of their own, building dozens of Arab settlements very close to the outer ring of Jewish neighborhoods, making the map even more confused and messy.
Jerusalem is a small model of the situation Israel faces today. Anywhere you draw a line, there is going to be a mixture of Arabs and Jews on both sides. This is where the idea of ethnic cleansing comes in. If, as was suggested by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, 95% of the West Bank and Gaza are ethnically cleansed of all Jewish residents and transformed into a racially pure Arab state, the question remains, where are these half million Jewish refugees going to go, and what can be done about the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs living inside pre-1967 Israel? Are they to be ethnically cleansed as well, or will we put that off until the next war?
The act of driving people from their homes and destroying houses, schools, libraries, synagogues, and lives is not as simple as taking a vote in the Knesset. The people who live in these towns and villages have invested huge pieces of their lives and themselves in building them, and have suffered heavy personal losses during the recent violence to retain them, and I'm sure many will fight to defend them. Imagine if you were living in, say, San Francisco, California, and the U.S. Army surrounded the city and told you that you had one day to pack your things and leave before they came through and razed the city to the ground? I think that many people would have more than just harsh words for the Army. It also raises the question: if we are going to run away from certain pieces of territory because we’re being shot at, then where do we stop? Remember, the 1967 border is not an internationally recognized border but only a cease fire line, which is an important distinction because you can count on the fact that the Arabs, once they have Yesha, will begin making claims inside Pre-1967 Israel. What if everybody leaves the Yesha and then they start attacking, say, Be’er Sheva or Ashkelon, which, according to the partition plan of 1947 was to be part of the Arab state, not the Jewish one, do we then run away from Be’er Sheva?
Would building a fence between Arab and Jewish areas stop terrorism? Perhaps, but I doubt it. The main problem is the length of the border. The security border with Lebanon in the north is about 30 miles long. Israel has been hurriedly constructing a security fence along this border since its withdrawal a year and a half ago, but there has been no shortage of kidnappings and infiltrations anyway. The 1967 cease-fire line is hundreds of kilometers long. Many particularly violent Arab settlements and cities, such as Tulkarm and Silwan, are located exactly on this border, which makes the creation of a buffer zone impossible. The border is also arbitrary, not based on natural barriers or straight, short lines, but it was made wherever the fighting happened to stop in 1948. It is convoluted and bends back on itself in several places. The construction of a high-tech electronic security fence along the entire length of this border with motion detectors and cameras would be prohibitively expensive. Certain areas in which terrorists and infiltrators tend to cross in greater numbers can be made with high-tech fencing while the remainder can be made more low-tech, with landmines and barbed wire. However, to a determined suicide terrorist, these obstacles may not prove enough, and it will take years to build anyway.
A unilateral retreat from Yesha will also not provide Israel with any more diplomatic legitimacy than it had before. The Arab world, with or without treaties with Israel, will never truly recognize this country until the Arabs, as Bob Marley would say, "Emancipate themselves from mental slavery," and rid themselves of tyranny. Terrorism from Yesha existed long before Israel’s capture of the area in 1967 and will persist long after any withdrawal. The choice, therefore, is not between a big Israel eternally at war and a small Israel at peace, but a big Israel eternally at war or a small Israel eternally at war.
Europe, as well, is not about to become friends with Israel. I have observed that regardless of Israel's actions, whether it exercises restraint or fights, withdraws from land or builds settlements, assassinates terrorists or is the victim of terrorists, Europe issues a steady stream of condemnation and hatred towards the Jewish state. Israel's actions seem to be just a pretext, and I think that Europe's open anger and hostility towards Israel is deeply rooted in Europe, not Israel. If Israel were to withdraw from all the territories completely, Europe might pat Israel on the back for a few minutes, but then the Palestinians would start making territorial claims inside pre-1967 Israel. The Europeans may even initially oppose this idea, but, then the Palestinians will send a wave of suicide terrorist attacks into Europe and weaken their resolve, just like they did in the 1970s.
In retrospect, however, I think Israel has to look inward to find the true cause of many of its problems. This country likes to practice a policy of "constructive ambiguity," as Clinton called it. By this policy, Israel does not define and announce explicitly what it is doing, but at the same time makes its intent clear through its actions. Sometimes this policy is necessary, as, for example, in Israel's nuclear program. Israel has quite a stockpile of nuclear weapons. If need be, Israel has the power to destroy the entire Middle East in a matter of minutes. However, because Israel does not want to be subject to international nuclear regulators or to diplomatic pressure to disarm, it has a "mums the word" policy. Maybe we have them, maybe we don't. Everybody knows that the big building in Dimona, a few kilometers from where I'm sitting, is a working nuclear reactor, and everybody knows that the spent fuel rods from this reactor are used to make weapons, but nobody says anything. The facility is jokingly called the "Beit Haroshet Garini," garin being either seed or nucleus in Hebrew, and therefore the full title can be translated as either "Seed Factory" or "Nuclear Factory." Often times, however, "constructive ambiguity" is used to iron over internal differences and avoid making a decision. Such was the case with killing terrorists until recently. I remember when a targeted killing was attempted on the son of the military leader of Hizbullah, the Israeli generals got on television and smirkingly said, "Last night, one of our F-16 fighters accidentally dropped a bomb which accidentally landed on the house of this terrorist leader, coincidentally just as he was in his living room, and accidentally killed him." Or the time when Netanyahu tried to kill Hamas leader Khaled Marshall in Jordan and the operation was botched. The Mossad spies were supposed to put something in his ear that would make him sick and die without anybody being able to figure out it was them, but instead they botched the operation and got caught, and King Hussein of Jordan threatened to execute the spies of Marshall died. Marshall kept getting sicker and sicker and Israel kept saying they didn't do it until they came forward with the cure in exchange for their spies. I was very relieved when, recently, the government finally came out and said straight out exactly what it was doing, and that anybody who tries to kill and Israeli citizen will become a target himself.
Such constructive ambiguity was also used with the settlement drive. There was great internal debate as to what, exactly, was to be done about this land, whether it should be settled or given back, and what can be done about the Arabs living in it. After Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War, people began expecting miracles everywhere. Israel decided to start building settlements and simply not worry about the rapidly growing 1.7 million Arabs on the land (today 3.2 million.) After all, if Israel’s birth and continued existence was dependent on miracles, why not expect just one more? Rather than letting idealism set the goals and realism get them there, people threw realism out the window and acted purely on idealism.
It must also be remembered that Yesha isn’t just land, it’s the heart of the heart of the Jewish homeland, with Hebron, the first capital of the Jewish people and burial place of the patriarchs, Shechem, where Joseph is buried, Jehrico, the city of date palms, the place where the sun stood still for Joshua and the walls came a tumblin’ down, and many other places mentioned in the bible; Shiloh, Beit Lechem (Bethlehem), Elon Moreh, the list goes on. This is where the bible actually happened, not Tel Aviv or Haifa, and the Jewish people will always have a very strong attachment to these areas. The combination of attachment to the land and the belief in the ability of Israel to work miracles whenever it chose led to a disorganized, mass movement into these areas. Rather than being controlled by the government, the settlers controlled the government through their actions by setting up makeshift settlements wherever they chose and then waiting for the government to recognize them retroactively. This action undermined the authority of the Israeli government. When the government came under fire internationally for having started a settlement drive, it again embarked on a path of constructive ambiguity. By not annexing these territories, they were technically leaving all options open, but by building in them, they were de-facto annexing them. Israel effectively held sovereignty over the land, with Israeli courts holding jurisdiction over the land, Israeli sewers and electric systems being hooked up to it, and Israeli homes being built on it. As the circumstances of the Six Day War, with the near destruction of Israel, the fact that Israel is only eight miles wide without this land, and the strategic necessity of holding some of this land, faded from the memory of the world, it became harder and harder to officially annex it. The sudden appearance of the Palestinians after 1967, a people who had never before existed and therefore never been taken into account, and who now had a deep and historical claim to the land in the eyes of the world, made it even more difficult to annex.
Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but I believe that the government could have done a much better job managing the Yesha settlement drive. If, instead of allowing the settlement drive to take control, the government had channeled the energy on step-by-step, pragmatic, and achievable goals, we would be in a very different situation today. The Jordan River valley runs from the Kinerret (Sea of Galilee) in the north to the city of Jericho near the northern bank of the Dead Sea, in the south. This valley is considered a strategic necessity for Israel. Its eastern edge is bordered by the Jordan River and its western edge is lined with enormous sheer rock-faced cliffs, capable of stopping a tank assault on central Israel. This area is also very fertile land, and almost completely devoid of Arabs. The government should have simply bitten the bullet and annexed this land, thus removing any question as to its status, and then launched a major settlement drive to spur agriculture and industry. Rather, the government placed a few hundred families there and then ignored it, and today it is assumed that it will end up in the hands of Israel’s enemies. Likewise, rather than setting up tiny settlements in the heart of every major biblical city, the government should have focused on maybe one, such as Hebron, and started a huge building drive to try to affect the demographic balance of the city and place a permanent Jewish hold there. Today, there are only a few hundred families living in Hebron who are much easier to remove than would be a whole city. The lack of pragmatic planning and the decision to gamble the future of the country on a miracle has caused much of the quandary that Israel finds itself in today.
Israel must extricate itself from this mess by itself. Europe and the Arab regimes will condemn Israel regardless of what it does because they do not deem Israel to be a legitimate entity, and therefore their yelling and screaming must be ignored. In my opinion, Israel must hold on to and annex as much land as it can while annexing as few Arabs as it can, and that is what this war is being fought over. I would encourage the government to officially annex those areas that it deems necessary for its security and leave the rest after the fighting stops, or at least slows. A unilateral withdrawal from any settlements at this time would be extremely destructive, as it would be handing our enemies a victory as well as sparking a civil conflict. The more that Israel gives under duress to its enemies, the more encouragement and validity Israel will be giving to terror as a means of negotiating. After all, if Arafat can get more by fighting than through negotiating, and he doesn’t have to sacrifice any of his honor by lowering himself to talking to Israel, then of course he will continue fighting. Some settlements which are too far out and too difficult to defend will eventually be evacuated, but only after fighting has subsided. I don’t think that this could have happened at the beginning of the conflict because it would spark a civil war, and Israel does not need to fight a civil war while simultaneously fighting a billion Arabs with both hands tied behind its back. I personally know many people who were prepared to go down and physically fight the army to prevent the Temple Mount from being handed over to Arafat. However, there is nothing like a long, bloody conflict to dampen people’s enthusiasm and bring the realization: Israel can not physically hold all of Yesha.
This country was built by ideological zealots, and as we learn from the story of Chanukah, zealotry has often been necessary to save the Jewish people. The boundless constructive energy of the idealists of Israel must be channeled and used pragmatically for the good of the people of Israel. Idealism will tell us where we're going, and pragmatic realism will get us there.
I pretty much agree with everything you have said, but I personally believe that Israel must in the end evacuate all the settlements in Gaza and WB and simply get the hell out of those areas, UNILATERALLY. Israel does not need to wait for an agreement with the Palestinians, because as you've observed, they are not interested in one. Ehud Barak recently concluded that Arafat is interested in a two-state solution, one state for Palestinians and one for Palestinians and Jews (Israel) but with the Pal. Right of return, so that the demographics would be quickly skewed in favor of the arab population---demographic suicide. I believe Israel needs to evacuate the WB and Gaza simply because they will never give Israel peace. I personally believe that settling those lands was the worst mistake Israel ever made. I don't believe that by doing so there will be peace. What it will do though, is give Israel the moral high ground and make it clear to the Pal. And the world that having made that singularly magnanimous gesture, the Pals. now have everything they need to create a viable state---no more excuses (not entirely unjustified) that a chunk of land pockmarked with Jewish settlements, IDF forces and access roads makes it impossible for them to have a cohesive state. Evacuation renders that whole argument completely moot. I would retain a 2 or 3-mile buffer all around that border and make it clear to the Pals. That any incursions into Israel proper will be met with the same response as any act of war on a sovereign nation. If and when there was a real peace agreement they could talk about return that buffer zone. Now when Israel goes into the WB or Gaza to carry out reprisals it does it from the position of an occupier, a very unsympathetic place to be, and unfortunately, one with absolutely NO VIABLE FUTURE FOR ISRAEL. As my mother, a committed social Zionist, said, better a small and secure Israel that a larger one perpetually at war. I see no other way out. By taking those actions unilaterally, Israel declares that it doesn't need the Palestinians to achieve an acceptable level of safety for its citizens. This is essentially what Israel did in S. Lebanon--come to the conclusion that being their, with its promise of a protective buffer for N. Israel, just wasn¹t worth the cost.
Here is my response:
This is essentially what everybody has been talking about for the last 15 months - how can Israel extricate itself from this situation? The answer, everybody from Barak to Bibi Netanyahu has said, is "Unilateral Separation," whereby Israel removes itself from "Yehsa", the acronym of "Yehuda, Shomron, and Aza," or, in secular terms, "The West Bank Gaza Strip" without signing any treaties or as part of any deal.
Such a plan sounds nice as a five second sound byte, as Barak likes to say, "It'll be us over here and them over there." Unfortunately, the plan has several drawbacks that the talking heads are studiously avoiding. The main problem with this strategy is that there are quite a lot of us over there, and even more of them over here. To be specific, there are about 1.2 million Israeli Arabs living inside pre-1967 Israel, and there are about half a million Jews living in Yesha. The second problem is that the government will eventually have to draw a line somewhere, and there is going to be a huge fight, possibly even a civil war, between Jews when it comes time to make that decision. The third problem is that there is still a question as to whether building a wall is physically possible, and whether it will actually do anything to increase Israel’s security. Still a further question is how the Palestinians, the Arabs as a whole, and the world will react to such a move.
Unfortunately, you can't exactly draw a line to separate the Arabs and the Jews. The stickiest situation by far is Jerusalem, whose neighborhoods are arranged in a checkerboard manner, alternating between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods intertwined and surrounding each other, usually separated only by a street or sidewalk. Before 1967, there was a line running through the center of town with a no-man's land, armed soldiers, and landmines, with East Jerusalem controlled by Jordan and West Jerusalem controlled by Israel. Jews were not allowed to visit the Western wall, the Mount of Olives, or any other holy sites on pain of death. After the reunification of the city, the city was annexed, its Arab residents offered citizenship, and a huge Jewish settlement drive attempted to surround the Arab section with Jewish neighborhoods to prevent any future redivision of the city, leaving pockets of Arab neighborhoods in a sea of Jewish ones. The last phase of this plan is being implemented today with the construction of the Har Homa neighborhood, approved by then Prime Minister Rabin and started by Netanyahu, which would be the final nail in the coffin of the idea of the redivision of the city by blocking the last open and undeveloped land passage between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Arabs, for their part, responded with a settlement drive of their own, building dozens of Arab settlements very close to the outer ring of Jewish neighborhoods, making the map even more confused and messy.
Jerusalem is a small model of the situation Israel faces today. Anywhere you draw a line, there is going to be a mixture of Arabs and Jews on both sides. This is where the idea of ethnic cleansing comes in. If, as was suggested by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, 95% of the West Bank and Gaza are ethnically cleansed of all Jewish residents and transformed into a racially pure Arab state, the question remains, where are these half million Jewish refugees going to go, and what can be done about the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs living inside pre-1967 Israel? Are they to be ethnically cleansed as well, or will we put that off until the next war?
The act of driving people from their homes and destroying houses, schools, libraries, synagogues, and lives is not as simple as taking a vote in the Knesset. The people who live in these towns and villages have invested huge pieces of their lives and themselves in building them, and have suffered heavy personal losses during the recent violence to retain them, and I'm sure many will fight to defend them. Imagine if you were living in, say, San Francisco, California, and the U.S. Army surrounded the city and told you that you had one day to pack your things and leave before they came through and razed the city to the ground? I think that many people would have more than just harsh words for the Army. It also raises the question: if we are going to run away from certain pieces of territory because we’re being shot at, then where do we stop? Remember, the 1967 border is not an internationally recognized border but only a cease fire line, which is an important distinction because you can count on the fact that the Arabs, once they have Yesha, will begin making claims inside Pre-1967 Israel. What if everybody leaves the Yesha and then they start attacking, say, Be’er Sheva or Ashkelon, which, according to the partition plan of 1947 was to be part of the Arab state, not the Jewish one, do we then run away from Be’er Sheva?
Would building a fence between Arab and Jewish areas stop terrorism? Perhaps, but I doubt it. The main problem is the length of the border. The security border with Lebanon in the north is about 30 miles long. Israel has been hurriedly constructing a security fence along this border since its withdrawal a year and a half ago, but there has been no shortage of kidnappings and infiltrations anyway. The 1967 cease-fire line is hundreds of kilometers long. Many particularly violent Arab settlements and cities, such as Tulkarm and Silwan, are located exactly on this border, which makes the creation of a buffer zone impossible. The border is also arbitrary, not based on natural barriers or straight, short lines, but it was made wherever the fighting happened to stop in 1948. It is convoluted and bends back on itself in several places. The construction of a high-tech electronic security fence along the entire length of this border with motion detectors and cameras would be prohibitively expensive. Certain areas in which terrorists and infiltrators tend to cross in greater numbers can be made with high-tech fencing while the remainder can be made more low-tech, with landmines and barbed wire. However, to a determined suicide terrorist, these obstacles may not prove enough, and it will take years to build anyway.
A unilateral retreat from Yesha will also not provide Israel with any more diplomatic legitimacy than it had before. The Arab world, with or without treaties with Israel, will never truly recognize this country until the Arabs, as Bob Marley would say, "Emancipate themselves from mental slavery," and rid themselves of tyranny. Terrorism from Yesha existed long before Israel’s capture of the area in 1967 and will persist long after any withdrawal. The choice, therefore, is not between a big Israel eternally at war and a small Israel at peace, but a big Israel eternally at war or a small Israel eternally at war.
Europe, as well, is not about to become friends with Israel. I have observed that regardless of Israel's actions, whether it exercises restraint or fights, withdraws from land or builds settlements, assassinates terrorists or is the victim of terrorists, Europe issues a steady stream of condemnation and hatred towards the Jewish state. Israel's actions seem to be just a pretext, and I think that Europe's open anger and hostility towards Israel is deeply rooted in Europe, not Israel. If Israel were to withdraw from all the territories completely, Europe might pat Israel on the back for a few minutes, but then the Palestinians would start making territorial claims inside pre-1967 Israel. The Europeans may even initially oppose this idea, but, then the Palestinians will send a wave of suicide terrorist attacks into Europe and weaken their resolve, just like they did in the 1970s.
In retrospect, however, I think Israel has to look inward to find the true cause of many of its problems. This country likes to practice a policy of "constructive ambiguity," as Clinton called it. By this policy, Israel does not define and announce explicitly what it is doing, but at the same time makes its intent clear through its actions. Sometimes this policy is necessary, as, for example, in Israel's nuclear program. Israel has quite a stockpile of nuclear weapons. If need be, Israel has the power to destroy the entire Middle East in a matter of minutes. However, because Israel does not want to be subject to international nuclear regulators or to diplomatic pressure to disarm, it has a "mums the word" policy. Maybe we have them, maybe we don't. Everybody knows that the big building in Dimona, a few kilometers from where I'm sitting, is a working nuclear reactor, and everybody knows that the spent fuel rods from this reactor are used to make weapons, but nobody says anything. The facility is jokingly called the "Beit Haroshet Garini," garin being either seed or nucleus in Hebrew, and therefore the full title can be translated as either "Seed Factory" or "Nuclear Factory." Often times, however, "constructive ambiguity" is used to iron over internal differences and avoid making a decision. Such was the case with killing terrorists until recently. I remember when a targeted killing was attempted on the son of the military leader of Hizbullah, the Israeli generals got on television and smirkingly said, "Last night, one of our F-16 fighters accidentally dropped a bomb which accidentally landed on the house of this terrorist leader, coincidentally just as he was in his living room, and accidentally killed him." Or the time when Netanyahu tried to kill Hamas leader Khaled Marshall in Jordan and the operation was botched. The Mossad spies were supposed to put something in his ear that would make him sick and die without anybody being able to figure out it was them, but instead they botched the operation and got caught, and King Hussein of Jordan threatened to execute the spies of Marshall died. Marshall kept getting sicker and sicker and Israel kept saying they didn't do it until they came forward with the cure in exchange for their spies. I was very relieved when, recently, the government finally came out and said straight out exactly what it was doing, and that anybody who tries to kill and Israeli citizen will become a target himself.
Such constructive ambiguity was also used with the settlement drive. There was great internal debate as to what, exactly, was to be done about this land, whether it should be settled or given back, and what can be done about the Arabs living in it. After Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War, people began expecting miracles everywhere. Israel decided to start building settlements and simply not worry about the rapidly growing 1.7 million Arabs on the land (today 3.2 million.) After all, if Israel’s birth and continued existence was dependent on miracles, why not expect just one more? Rather than letting idealism set the goals and realism get them there, people threw realism out the window and acted purely on idealism.
It must also be remembered that Yesha isn’t just land, it’s the heart of the heart of the Jewish homeland, with Hebron, the first capital of the Jewish people and burial place of the patriarchs, Shechem, where Joseph is buried, Jehrico, the city of date palms, the place where the sun stood still for Joshua and the walls came a tumblin’ down, and many other places mentioned in the bible; Shiloh, Beit Lechem (Bethlehem), Elon Moreh, the list goes on. This is where the bible actually happened, not Tel Aviv or Haifa, and the Jewish people will always have a very strong attachment to these areas. The combination of attachment to the land and the belief in the ability of Israel to work miracles whenever it chose led to a disorganized, mass movement into these areas. Rather than being controlled by the government, the settlers controlled the government through their actions by setting up makeshift settlements wherever they chose and then waiting for the government to recognize them retroactively. This action undermined the authority of the Israeli government. When the government came under fire internationally for having started a settlement drive, it again embarked on a path of constructive ambiguity. By not annexing these territories, they were technically leaving all options open, but by building in them, they were de-facto annexing them. Israel effectively held sovereignty over the land, with Israeli courts holding jurisdiction over the land, Israeli sewers and electric systems being hooked up to it, and Israeli homes being built on it. As the circumstances of the Six Day War, with the near destruction of Israel, the fact that Israel is only eight miles wide without this land, and the strategic necessity of holding some of this land, faded from the memory of the world, it became harder and harder to officially annex it. The sudden appearance of the Palestinians after 1967, a people who had never before existed and therefore never been taken into account, and who now had a deep and historical claim to the land in the eyes of the world, made it even more difficult to annex.
Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but I believe that the government could have done a much better job managing the Yesha settlement drive. If, instead of allowing the settlement drive to take control, the government had channeled the energy on step-by-step, pragmatic, and achievable goals, we would be in a very different situation today. The Jordan River valley runs from the Kinerret (Sea of Galilee) in the north to the city of Jericho near the northern bank of the Dead Sea, in the south. This valley is considered a strategic necessity for Israel. Its eastern edge is bordered by the Jordan River and its western edge is lined with enormous sheer rock-faced cliffs, capable of stopping a tank assault on central Israel. This area is also very fertile land, and almost completely devoid of Arabs. The government should have simply bitten the bullet and annexed this land, thus removing any question as to its status, and then launched a major settlement drive to spur agriculture and industry. Rather, the government placed a few hundred families there and then ignored it, and today it is assumed that it will end up in the hands of Israel’s enemies. Likewise, rather than setting up tiny settlements in the heart of every major biblical city, the government should have focused on maybe one, such as Hebron, and started a huge building drive to try to affect the demographic balance of the city and place a permanent Jewish hold there. Today, there are only a few hundred families living in Hebron who are much easier to remove than would be a whole city. The lack of pragmatic planning and the decision to gamble the future of the country on a miracle has caused much of the quandary that Israel finds itself in today.
Israel must extricate itself from this mess by itself. Europe and the Arab regimes will condemn Israel regardless of what it does because they do not deem Israel to be a legitimate entity, and therefore their yelling and screaming must be ignored. In my opinion, Israel must hold on to and annex as much land as it can while annexing as few Arabs as it can, and that is what this war is being fought over. I would encourage the government to officially annex those areas that it deems necessary for its security and leave the rest after the fighting stops, or at least slows. A unilateral withdrawal from any settlements at this time would be extremely destructive, as it would be handing our enemies a victory as well as sparking a civil conflict. The more that Israel gives under duress to its enemies, the more encouragement and validity Israel will be giving to terror as a means of negotiating. After all, if Arafat can get more by fighting than through negotiating, and he doesn’t have to sacrifice any of his honor by lowering himself to talking to Israel, then of course he will continue fighting. Some settlements which are too far out and too difficult to defend will eventually be evacuated, but only after fighting has subsided. I don’t think that this could have happened at the beginning of the conflict because it would spark a civil war, and Israel does not need to fight a civil war while simultaneously fighting a billion Arabs with both hands tied behind its back. I personally know many people who were prepared to go down and physically fight the army to prevent the Temple Mount from being handed over to Arafat. However, there is nothing like a long, bloody conflict to dampen people’s enthusiasm and bring the realization: Israel can not physically hold all of Yesha.
This country was built by ideological zealots, and as we learn from the story of Chanukah, zealotry has often been necessary to save the Jewish people. The boundless constructive energy of the idealists of Israel must be channeled and used pragmatically for the good of the people of Israel. Idealism will tell us where we're going, and pragmatic realism will get us there.
Sunday, December 30, 2001
Jewish Attitudes Towards Arabs
The names of the characters in this email have been changed.
Jewish attitudes towards Arabs are usually based on pity, fear, or anger. Each of these reactions seems to be related to the level of real life contact which one has with Arabs.
Those who react with pity tend to be those who are also the furthest removed from the threat. The city that votes most solidly left and has a reputation for being the breeding ground for most of the “Peace” activist groups is Tel Aviv. Every time I enter Tel Aviv, I feel that I am leaving Israel, like I should be getting my passport stamped as I get off the train. The place simply doesn't feel like the Israel I know. The Israel I know, mostly Be'er Sheva and Jerusalem, is a pressure cooker. Every serious problem of this country is staring you in the face every second of the day. When I walk out of my apartment building in Be’er Sheva, the desert dust and heat blowing through the streets reminds me of the water crisis, the streets crowded with Bedouin in traditional dress, Haredi Jews in East-European garb, secular Jews and Arabs in Jeans and T-shirts, blacks, whites, Sephardim, and Ashkenazim, is a constant reminder of the sectarian fissures running through this society. The slums and run-down neighborhoods are a reminder of the crushing poverty many here face. In Tel Aviv, none of these problems are apparent on the surface. The vast majority of people are secular, there are very few Arabs, and those Arabs who do live and work in Tel Aviv don’t dress like extras from the set of Lawrence of Arabia. The streets are clean, and the buildings new and well maintained. Very few of the restaurants are kosher, and on Saturday, you wouldn’t know that there was such thing as Shabbat. Except for the occasional bombing or attack, things like the Intifada, the Jewish Majority, the water shortage, and the Arab military threat are abstract concepts and not everyday realities. There are many places like Tel Aviv in Israel, places which don’t feel the stress of the real problems of Israeli society.
The only contact that most Americans and Tel Avivniks have with Arabs is through the television. The average American’s or Tel Avivnik’s first emotion upon seeing the Arab condition is pity. This is a natural reaction to seeing the condition of the Arabs living in the slums in Yesha, to which CNN and company refer as “Refugee Camps.” The other night on Israeli television there was a program that showed clips of Arab kids who had to climb through two layers of barbed wire in order to retrieve their soccer ball and other clips of the daily misery that the Arabs living in these cities and slums have to go through.
This environment spawns organizations such as “Rabbis for Human Rights,” which, on its website, declares itself to be, “The voice of Rabbinic conscience in Israel” (emphasis added.) The organization’s most public activities include protests against settlement activities and condemning Israel when Arabs are killed in the conflict. To my mind, person or organization that declares itself to be “the” voice of morality, conscience, righteousness, holiness, etc., as opposed to “a” voice is extremely dangerous. History’s darkest moments were written by those who were convinced of their own exclusive moral authority. I also think the title “Rabbis for Arab Rights” would be much more appropriate since this organization seems not to give a hoot about the human rights of Jews, such as the right not to be blown to pieces on one’s way home from work. After the murder of a Jewish shepherd around Hebron, I remember the organization came out with a statement to the effect that he was not a nice person and got what he deserved.
Most Americans fall into the “pity” category, as is evidenced by the fact that 75% of the scholarships given to Ben Gurion University by American Jews are specifically earmarked not to be given to Jews, only Arabs. Source: I know someone who works in the scholarship distribution department.
Those who fall into the “pity” category label themselves as “The Peace Camp.” Rather than defining themselves by a means to achieve a goal, such as territorial compromise or unilateral separation, they define and name themselves by the goal itself. This suggests that anybody who opposes their actions also opposes their goal, Peace. By implication, therefore, since the “Peace” camp demands the withdrawal from land, anybody opposed to such withdrawal wants a war. Anybody who opposes their means, such as a settler, becomes and “obstacle to peace.”
Today, the “pity” society is having deep emotional problems. They still feel the pity, but they don’t know what to do with it. The mental construct which they had for the world, in which they believed that the Arabs are attacking the Jews because the Jews occupy Yesha, fell apart when Barak offered to surrender all of Yesha and the Arabs responded by attacking. In every previous conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, Peace Now and Rabbis for Human Rights have clearly sided with the Palestinians. Throughout the Arab and European “enlightened” world today, there have been cries of “Where is the ‘Peace Camp’ in Israel?” What’s left of it is in disarray. After ten years of constantly lecturing the Israeli public and eventually convincing them to make painful sacrifices for peace, Yassir Arafat finally demanded all of Israel, including Tel Aviv. The “Peace Camp” has disintegrated because it is unwilling to make the same sacrifices of house and home which it has been preaching to the rest of the country.
Aviram, an American friend of mine, came to Israel as a part of the “pity” society. “You know,” he told me one day, “When I came here, I said to myself, ‘We have to do something to work this out.’ I thought that we could sit down and figure out what these people want and come to some kind of arrangement. Now, when I look at an Arab, I think to myself, ‘What’s wrong with these people? Why do they insist on killing me? What did I ever do to them?’ They’re just a bunch of unreasonable and crazy people, and that’s all there is to it.”
Yossi may live in Tel Aviv, but he doesn’t fall into the “pity” category. As we drive through the narrow streets looking for a gas station, we come to a stop and an Arab crosses the street in front of the car. “You know,” says Yossi, “not only do I not like the Arabs, I also really hate them.” Yossi is one of the kindest people I have met since I came to Israel. He has always had the time to help me with anything I need, and often helps me translate exams and homework in his spare time. A deeply religious person raised in a secular family, he has always been ready to take me into his home on a moment’s notice, always with a huge smile. When I visit him, he sleeps on the couch and I sleep in his bed.
As we walk through the streets of North Tel Aviv, Yossi reaches into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m switching money from one pocket to the other,” He answers humbly.
“Yes Yossi, but why?”
“I have two pockets. As I go through the day, I transfer a small amount of tzedukkah (charity) from one pocket to the other. The Torah teaches us that we should always be giving tzedukkah, so this is how I can constantly be giving. At the end of the day, I give the money away. And I never turn away a beggar.”
There is a brief pause in the conversation as Yossi mulls over his last comment. “Well, I never give to Arabs. The Talmud teaches us that, ‘He who is kind to the cruel will become cruel to the kind.’ Arabs are cruel people and I don’t want to help them.”
Conversations with Yossi usually focus around religion or school. He spends any pauses in the conversation lambasting the Arabs. He also likes to give long drashas, religious sermons, about faith.
“You know,” he begins, “I really believe that G-d watches us all of the time. I deeply feel that everything that happens on this Earth is directly connected to how we relate to G-d in heaven. G-d watches every action we do, even when we aren’t thinking about it, and records it and deals with us based on this.”
As an Arab woman, her head wrapped in a head scarf passes us, Yossi turns and spits in the path where she was just walking. “F----ing Arabs,” he mutters.
In spite of my inability to truly feel the anger Yossi feels, I can understand where it comes from. Jewish anger at Arabs does not exist in a vacuum. It is not a result of not being able to empathize with “the other,” the fact that they are from a different “tribe,” the fact that they are a minority, or xenophobia. It is a fact that in almost every interaction that Jews as a people have had with the Arabs, going back to Mohammed, the Arabs have attacked and killed the Jews. Yossi was correct when he said, “It’s very simple, the Arabs don’t have a left, right, or center, they all just want to kill us.” There may be some competition between the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, but the only real point of debate between them is on how to most quickly destroy Israel. There is no organization called “Mullahs for Human Rights,” no Arab version of “Peace Now,” no Arab “Peace Camp.” Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, and other members of the Israeli left can be seen on television waving Palestinian flags and talking about a future Palestinian state. The only time you see Arabs with an Israeli flag on television is when they are burning it. In all of the vast expanses of the Arab lands, in all twenty-two Arab dictatorships, there is not a single organization dedicated to reconciliation, not a single Arab waving an Israeli flag on television, no desire for peace. “These people are not even people,” my cousin tells me, matter of factly. “Why is it that, if a Jew walks into an Arab area, he dies, but when an Arab walks into a Jewish area, nothing happens to him?” There is truth to his words, if not his conclusion. If I walk into an Arab city, it will have the same net effect as putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger.
When Yossi was thirteen years old, he was sitting in a bomb shelter with a gas mask on, listening to Sadaam Hussein’s Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv and wondering if he was going to be gassed. He turned on the television to see news coverage of the Palestinian Arabs dancing on the rooftops in celebration. In the north of Israel, for the past fifty years, families have been enjoying their Sabbath meals in bomb shelters. Before 1967, the Syrians regularly showered the area with artillery. Between 1967 and operation “Peace for Galilee,” Yassir Arafat’s PLO launched a series of murderous raids on northern Israel, taking over classrooms full of schoolchildren and mowing them down. Now the Syrians, via their proxy force in Lebanon, Hizbullah, the party of god, continuously launch rocket and mortar attacks on the northern civilian population centers. When I was in elementary school, we learned duck and cover like in case of an earthquake. Yossi’s generation learned how to strap on a gas mask as fast as possible and duck and cover in case of a missile attack.
It’s not just the big things; it’s the little ones as well. As we walk into the stairwell of Yossi’s apartment building, he points to the floor. “Look,” he says, pointing at some spit, “the Arab who cleans the stairs always spits on the third stair when he’s done.” One day Yossi came over to my apartment asking to use my computer to make some fliers so he could paste them around campus to publicize what had happened to him. It seems that the Arab professor in his lecture in the University announced, during an engineering lecture, that he hated Israel and was looking forward to see it destroyed. A few days later an Arab in his class turned to him and told him, with a straight face, that he felt it is totally acceptable to murder Jewish settlers. As I walk through the Old City of Jerusalem with my friend Yonatan, a group of Arabs sitting on the street corner stares us down with the most hostile faces they can muster. If looks could kill, I would have been just another statistic.
Yossi’s anger begs the question; can this anger which is directed towards a particular group of people be considered racist? Well, not exactly, because neither the Jews nor Palestinians constitute a distinct race.
I have seen Arabs in full Bedouin dress who are as black as any African and white enough to pass for an Englishman. The Jews, as well, have picked up every race and complexion imaginable in their wanderings across the Earth, from black Ethiopian to white Swede, to Chinese to Cuban. If you put a freeze-frame picture of an Arab next to one of a Jew, there is usually no way to tell the difference. Set the picture in motion, however, and the difference becomes as clear as night and day. Israeli Jews tend to behave in body language and behavior like amplified Americans. They conduct everyday interactions, such as negotiating with the grocer or ordering a falafel, with the same mannerisms and gestures as Americans except perhaps more temperamentally and passionately. When two Jewish friends meet on the street they shake hands.
The Arabs and us seem worlds apart. When two Arabs men meet on the street, they hug and are much more intimate, patting and stroking each other, something assumed to have sexual implications in America. Egyptian television news often shows two government ministers who had a meeting that day walking around holding hands. Also, they are very excitable, unpredictable, and loud. Seeing a group of Arab men in their early twenties walking around on campus, often one or more of them will jump up on a bench or they will spontaneously begin wrestling with one another. If I am standing in line in the campus cafeteria, often the Arab in front of me will take a coin out of his pocket and start throwing it high into the air and then move around bumping other people out of his way to catch it.
While I consider the condition of most of the Arabs in Israel to be pitiable, and I definitely feel a piece of Yossi’s anger, my own personal first reaction to the Arabs is fear. When I am in the shuk (market), and an Arab comes over and grabs me by the arm and pulls me over to his booth, and starts smiling and trying to sell me his wares all the while staring at me with eyes that want to kill me, my first thought is, “Is this guy about to plant a knife in my back?” The wild bodily gesticulations and temperamental yelling of the Arabs is very unnerving. If a person can become so excited that he loses control of his body, then G-d forbid he become angry at me because there is no telling what he might do to me. I try not to let it affect my personal interactions. I have gone to the dialogue groups, tried to listen, and I always try to judge people on a personal level, not based on what they are. I can’t help being an American. That being said, seeing the massive rallies on television in which the Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad flags fly next to the Nazi flag is very telling. I feel that I am living next door to four million people who are focused every waking moment of every day on finding new and exciting ways of taking away my life. I feel like I am living next to four million Nazis.
Jewish attitudes towards Arabs are usually based on pity, fear, or anger. Each of these reactions seems to be related to the level of real life contact which one has with Arabs.
Those who react with pity tend to be those who are also the furthest removed from the threat. The city that votes most solidly left and has a reputation for being the breeding ground for most of the “Peace” activist groups is Tel Aviv. Every time I enter Tel Aviv, I feel that I am leaving Israel, like I should be getting my passport stamped as I get off the train. The place simply doesn't feel like the Israel I know. The Israel I know, mostly Be'er Sheva and Jerusalem, is a pressure cooker. Every serious problem of this country is staring you in the face every second of the day. When I walk out of my apartment building in Be’er Sheva, the desert dust and heat blowing through the streets reminds me of the water crisis, the streets crowded with Bedouin in traditional dress, Haredi Jews in East-European garb, secular Jews and Arabs in Jeans and T-shirts, blacks, whites, Sephardim, and Ashkenazim, is a constant reminder of the sectarian fissures running through this society. The slums and run-down neighborhoods are a reminder of the crushing poverty many here face. In Tel Aviv, none of these problems are apparent on the surface. The vast majority of people are secular, there are very few Arabs, and those Arabs who do live and work in Tel Aviv don’t dress like extras from the set of Lawrence of Arabia. The streets are clean, and the buildings new and well maintained. Very few of the restaurants are kosher, and on Saturday, you wouldn’t know that there was such thing as Shabbat. Except for the occasional bombing or attack, things like the Intifada, the Jewish Majority, the water shortage, and the Arab military threat are abstract concepts and not everyday realities. There are many places like Tel Aviv in Israel, places which don’t feel the stress of the real problems of Israeli society.
The only contact that most Americans and Tel Avivniks have with Arabs is through the television. The average American’s or Tel Avivnik’s first emotion upon seeing the Arab condition is pity. This is a natural reaction to seeing the condition of the Arabs living in the slums in Yesha, to which CNN and company refer as “Refugee Camps.” The other night on Israeli television there was a program that showed clips of Arab kids who had to climb through two layers of barbed wire in order to retrieve their soccer ball and other clips of the daily misery that the Arabs living in these cities and slums have to go through.
This environment spawns organizations such as “Rabbis for Human Rights,” which, on its website, declares itself to be, “The voice of Rabbinic conscience in Israel” (emphasis added.) The organization’s most public activities include protests against settlement activities and condemning Israel when Arabs are killed in the conflict. To my mind, person or organization that declares itself to be “the” voice of morality, conscience, righteousness, holiness, etc., as opposed to “a” voice is extremely dangerous. History’s darkest moments were written by those who were convinced of their own exclusive moral authority. I also think the title “Rabbis for Arab Rights” would be much more appropriate since this organization seems not to give a hoot about the human rights of Jews, such as the right not to be blown to pieces on one’s way home from work. After the murder of a Jewish shepherd around Hebron, I remember the organization came out with a statement to the effect that he was not a nice person and got what he deserved.
Most Americans fall into the “pity” category, as is evidenced by the fact that 75% of the scholarships given to Ben Gurion University by American Jews are specifically earmarked not to be given to Jews, only Arabs. Source: I know someone who works in the scholarship distribution department.
Those who fall into the “pity” category label themselves as “The Peace Camp.” Rather than defining themselves by a means to achieve a goal, such as territorial compromise or unilateral separation, they define and name themselves by the goal itself. This suggests that anybody who opposes their actions also opposes their goal, Peace. By implication, therefore, since the “Peace” camp demands the withdrawal from land, anybody opposed to such withdrawal wants a war. Anybody who opposes their means, such as a settler, becomes and “obstacle to peace.”
Today, the “pity” society is having deep emotional problems. They still feel the pity, but they don’t know what to do with it. The mental construct which they had for the world, in which they believed that the Arabs are attacking the Jews because the Jews occupy Yesha, fell apart when Barak offered to surrender all of Yesha and the Arabs responded by attacking. In every previous conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, Peace Now and Rabbis for Human Rights have clearly sided with the Palestinians. Throughout the Arab and European “enlightened” world today, there have been cries of “Where is the ‘Peace Camp’ in Israel?” What’s left of it is in disarray. After ten years of constantly lecturing the Israeli public and eventually convincing them to make painful sacrifices for peace, Yassir Arafat finally demanded all of Israel, including Tel Aviv. The “Peace Camp” has disintegrated because it is unwilling to make the same sacrifices of house and home which it has been preaching to the rest of the country.
Aviram, an American friend of mine, came to Israel as a part of the “pity” society. “You know,” he told me one day, “When I came here, I said to myself, ‘We have to do something to work this out.’ I thought that we could sit down and figure out what these people want and come to some kind of arrangement. Now, when I look at an Arab, I think to myself, ‘What’s wrong with these people? Why do they insist on killing me? What did I ever do to them?’ They’re just a bunch of unreasonable and crazy people, and that’s all there is to it.”
Yossi may live in Tel Aviv, but he doesn’t fall into the “pity” category. As we drive through the narrow streets looking for a gas station, we come to a stop and an Arab crosses the street in front of the car. “You know,” says Yossi, “not only do I not like the Arabs, I also really hate them.” Yossi is one of the kindest people I have met since I came to Israel. He has always had the time to help me with anything I need, and often helps me translate exams and homework in his spare time. A deeply religious person raised in a secular family, he has always been ready to take me into his home on a moment’s notice, always with a huge smile. When I visit him, he sleeps on the couch and I sleep in his bed.
As we walk through the streets of North Tel Aviv, Yossi reaches into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m switching money from one pocket to the other,” He answers humbly.
“Yes Yossi, but why?”
“I have two pockets. As I go through the day, I transfer a small amount of tzedukkah (charity) from one pocket to the other. The Torah teaches us that we should always be giving tzedukkah, so this is how I can constantly be giving. At the end of the day, I give the money away. And I never turn away a beggar.”
There is a brief pause in the conversation as Yossi mulls over his last comment. “Well, I never give to Arabs. The Talmud teaches us that, ‘He who is kind to the cruel will become cruel to the kind.’ Arabs are cruel people and I don’t want to help them.”
Conversations with Yossi usually focus around religion or school. He spends any pauses in the conversation lambasting the Arabs. He also likes to give long drashas, religious sermons, about faith.
“You know,” he begins, “I really believe that G-d watches us all of the time. I deeply feel that everything that happens on this Earth is directly connected to how we relate to G-d in heaven. G-d watches every action we do, even when we aren’t thinking about it, and records it and deals with us based on this.”
As an Arab woman, her head wrapped in a head scarf passes us, Yossi turns and spits in the path where she was just walking. “F----ing Arabs,” he mutters.
In spite of my inability to truly feel the anger Yossi feels, I can understand where it comes from. Jewish anger at Arabs does not exist in a vacuum. It is not a result of not being able to empathize with “the other,” the fact that they are from a different “tribe,” the fact that they are a minority, or xenophobia. It is a fact that in almost every interaction that Jews as a people have had with the Arabs, going back to Mohammed, the Arabs have attacked and killed the Jews. Yossi was correct when he said, “It’s very simple, the Arabs don’t have a left, right, or center, they all just want to kill us.” There may be some competition between the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, but the only real point of debate between them is on how to most quickly destroy Israel. There is no organization called “Mullahs for Human Rights,” no Arab version of “Peace Now,” no Arab “Peace Camp.” Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, and other members of the Israeli left can be seen on television waving Palestinian flags and talking about a future Palestinian state. The only time you see Arabs with an Israeli flag on television is when they are burning it. In all of the vast expanses of the Arab lands, in all twenty-two Arab dictatorships, there is not a single organization dedicated to reconciliation, not a single Arab waving an Israeli flag on television, no desire for peace. “These people are not even people,” my cousin tells me, matter of factly. “Why is it that, if a Jew walks into an Arab area, he dies, but when an Arab walks into a Jewish area, nothing happens to him?” There is truth to his words, if not his conclusion. If I walk into an Arab city, it will have the same net effect as putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger.
When Yossi was thirteen years old, he was sitting in a bomb shelter with a gas mask on, listening to Sadaam Hussein’s Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv and wondering if he was going to be gassed. He turned on the television to see news coverage of the Palestinian Arabs dancing on the rooftops in celebration. In the north of Israel, for the past fifty years, families have been enjoying their Sabbath meals in bomb shelters. Before 1967, the Syrians regularly showered the area with artillery. Between 1967 and operation “Peace for Galilee,” Yassir Arafat’s PLO launched a series of murderous raids on northern Israel, taking over classrooms full of schoolchildren and mowing them down. Now the Syrians, via their proxy force in Lebanon, Hizbullah, the party of god, continuously launch rocket and mortar attacks on the northern civilian population centers. When I was in elementary school, we learned duck and cover like in case of an earthquake. Yossi’s generation learned how to strap on a gas mask as fast as possible and duck and cover in case of a missile attack.
It’s not just the big things; it’s the little ones as well. As we walk into the stairwell of Yossi’s apartment building, he points to the floor. “Look,” he says, pointing at some spit, “the Arab who cleans the stairs always spits on the third stair when he’s done.” One day Yossi came over to my apartment asking to use my computer to make some fliers so he could paste them around campus to publicize what had happened to him. It seems that the Arab professor in his lecture in the University announced, during an engineering lecture, that he hated Israel and was looking forward to see it destroyed. A few days later an Arab in his class turned to him and told him, with a straight face, that he felt it is totally acceptable to murder Jewish settlers. As I walk through the Old City of Jerusalem with my friend Yonatan, a group of Arabs sitting on the street corner stares us down with the most hostile faces they can muster. If looks could kill, I would have been just another statistic.
Yossi’s anger begs the question; can this anger which is directed towards a particular group of people be considered racist? Well, not exactly, because neither the Jews nor Palestinians constitute a distinct race.
I have seen Arabs in full Bedouin dress who are as black as any African and white enough to pass for an Englishman. The Jews, as well, have picked up every race and complexion imaginable in their wanderings across the Earth, from black Ethiopian to white Swede, to Chinese to Cuban. If you put a freeze-frame picture of an Arab next to one of a Jew, there is usually no way to tell the difference. Set the picture in motion, however, and the difference becomes as clear as night and day. Israeli Jews tend to behave in body language and behavior like amplified Americans. They conduct everyday interactions, such as negotiating with the grocer or ordering a falafel, with the same mannerisms and gestures as Americans except perhaps more temperamentally and passionately. When two Jewish friends meet on the street they shake hands.
The Arabs and us seem worlds apart. When two Arabs men meet on the street, they hug and are much more intimate, patting and stroking each other, something assumed to have sexual implications in America. Egyptian television news often shows two government ministers who had a meeting that day walking around holding hands. Also, they are very excitable, unpredictable, and loud. Seeing a group of Arab men in their early twenties walking around on campus, often one or more of them will jump up on a bench or they will spontaneously begin wrestling with one another. If I am standing in line in the campus cafeteria, often the Arab in front of me will take a coin out of his pocket and start throwing it high into the air and then move around bumping other people out of his way to catch it.
While I consider the condition of most of the Arabs in Israel to be pitiable, and I definitely feel a piece of Yossi’s anger, my own personal first reaction to the Arabs is fear. When I am in the shuk (market), and an Arab comes over and grabs me by the arm and pulls me over to his booth, and starts smiling and trying to sell me his wares all the while staring at me with eyes that want to kill me, my first thought is, “Is this guy about to plant a knife in my back?” The wild bodily gesticulations and temperamental yelling of the Arabs is very unnerving. If a person can become so excited that he loses control of his body, then G-d forbid he become angry at me because there is no telling what he might do to me. I try not to let it affect my personal interactions. I have gone to the dialogue groups, tried to listen, and I always try to judge people on a personal level, not based on what they are. I can’t help being an American. That being said, seeing the massive rallies on television in which the Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad flags fly next to the Nazi flag is very telling. I feel that I am living next door to four million people who are focused every waking moment of every day on finding new and exciting ways of taking away my life. I feel like I am living next to four million Nazis.
Tuesday, December 25, 2001
Personal Matzav Update
Tuesday, December 25, 2001, 8:00:38 PM
My personal situation at this time can be best described as "Serious to moderate." It started with my tuition wavier. I just couldn't get a wavier for my tuition through the stupid, backward bearocracy here for months, and therefore couldn't register for my classes for this semester. Then, my stipend fund from the university ran out so I quickly ran out of money and ended up about 2,000 shekels in overdraft. They tried to find other money for me, but I couldn't get it deposited into my account until I had registered for classes, which required the tuition wavier. Finally, the tuition wavier eventually went through, thank G-d, but I still couldn't register for classes because I had to pay 500 shekels for bills to the university, but I couldn't pay this bill until I got my stipend, and I couldn't get the stipend without registering for classes, so I was stuck. In the meantime, I didn't have enough money to buy food, and ended up digging into my pasta reserves which I had saved for the long winter months. Eventually, I got enough money from a combination of loans and grants to pay the fees to the university and register for classes, but I still didn't have the stipend because my grades last year were extremely bad, and you have to do well to get a stipend. I explained my situation, that I was a new immigrant and don't speak Hebrew very well, but they told me they simply don't have any money to give me anyway, so I was still starving. In the mean time, I received notice from the U.S. Department of Education that they do not recognize my institute of higher learning and my loan payments are now in default and will be forwarded to a credit agency. I eventually took care of that by declaring myself unemployed and experiencing extreme financial difficulty, and got another year of deferment.
In the mean time, I ran out of money with which to buy bottled water, so I started drinking from the tap and, as expected, got the stomach flu. I ran out of toilet paper but couldn't afford to buy more, so I had to run two blocks to work every time I had to use the camode, until I figured out that I could take some T.P. with me. My boss just dug up a few thousand shekels yesterday from some fund he had and transferred them to my account so I can pay rent and was able to buy some groceries, and I should have enough to last me through the end of the semester, but I'm not out of the woods yet, as I still owe about 2,100 shekels to seven different people, and have a 600 shekel phone bill because I had to keep calling the U.S. to arrange my loans.
Thank G-d my problems are only financial.
My personal situation at this time can be best described as "Serious to moderate." It started with my tuition wavier. I just couldn't get a wavier for my tuition through the stupid, backward bearocracy here for months, and therefore couldn't register for my classes for this semester. Then, my stipend fund from the university ran out so I quickly ran out of money and ended up about 2,000 shekels in overdraft. They tried to find other money for me, but I couldn't get it deposited into my account until I had registered for classes, which required the tuition wavier. Finally, the tuition wavier eventually went through, thank G-d, but I still couldn't register for classes because I had to pay 500 shekels for bills to the university, but I couldn't pay this bill until I got my stipend, and I couldn't get the stipend without registering for classes, so I was stuck. In the meantime, I didn't have enough money to buy food, and ended up digging into my pasta reserves which I had saved for the long winter months. Eventually, I got enough money from a combination of loans and grants to pay the fees to the university and register for classes, but I still didn't have the stipend because my grades last year were extremely bad, and you have to do well to get a stipend. I explained my situation, that I was a new immigrant and don't speak Hebrew very well, but they told me they simply don't have any money to give me anyway, so I was still starving. In the mean time, I received notice from the U.S. Department of Education that they do not recognize my institute of higher learning and my loan payments are now in default and will be forwarded to a credit agency. I eventually took care of that by declaring myself unemployed and experiencing extreme financial difficulty, and got another year of deferment.
In the mean time, I ran out of money with which to buy bottled water, so I started drinking from the tap and, as expected, got the stomach flu. I ran out of toilet paper but couldn't afford to buy more, so I had to run two blocks to work every time I had to use the camode, until I figured out that I could take some T.P. with me. My boss just dug up a few thousand shekels yesterday from some fund he had and transferred them to my account so I can pay rent and was able to buy some groceries, and I should have enough to last me through the end of the semester, but I'm not out of the woods yet, as I still owe about 2,100 shekels to seven different people, and have a 600 shekel phone bill because I had to keep calling the U.S. to arrange my loans.
Thank G-d my problems are only financial.
Monday, December 17, 2001
Existential Threats
Part of the stress of living in Israel is the knowledge that the country you live in is faced, 24 hours per day, with a seemingly endless list of threats to its existence. All of these threats are intertwined into one giant, tangled mass called the “Matzav.” The current “security situation,” “low grade war”, or whatever it is being called now, is only the most visible and obvious existential threat. Over the past 15 months, I have watched the title of what I like to think of as the “local” news section in the Yahoo! News service change from “Middle East Peace Process” to “Palestinian-Israeli Crisis.” After the bombing a week ago, it changed again, this time to “Middle East Conflict.” On the surface, Arab terror would not appear to be such an existential threat. After all, the highest cutting-edge technology weapons are invented in Israel, the region’s only nuclear power, while the Palestinians have kalashnikovs, katyushka rockets, and mortars, but not enough to seriously challenge Israel militarily. Israel also has a much larger and well-trained army. The “existential” nature of the threat is that Arafat has thousands of people under his command who actually want to die, and millions of mothers who are proud of dead children. While Israel’s high level of security and policy of killing terrorists has had a major effect in reducing the number of Israeli casualties, as we saw last week, if one gets through, twenty die. Israelis, who do not want to die, and whose mothers weep over dead children rather than celebrate, will decide to leave if things get bad enough, and that is the existential threat. No Jews, no Jewish state.
Everything comes down to Facts On The Ground. Regardless of the UN or international recognition, the basis of the existence of Israel as a democratic state is that it has a Jewish majority. The Arabs know this, and therefore one of their strategies for destroying Israel is based on higher population growth plus “right of return” of all Palestinian refugees, a Palestinian Refugee being defined by the U.N. as any Arab who lived in pre-1948 Israel for a period of two years. According to the CIA world factbook, the Arabs in Gaza have a 4.01% yearly population growth rate, whereas Israel’s is 1.58%. By contrast, the U.S. has a population growth rate of 0.9%. In order to counter the higher Arab birth rate, Israel must also encourage a high birth rate plus immigration. The fastest growing segments of Israeli population, aside from the Arabs, are the Haredim (often referred to as “ultra orthodox”,) and the Russian immigrants. Today, over 10% of the population of Israel is comprised of immigrants who arrived from the former Soviet Union within the last 10 years. Immigration from Russia has slowed as the former Soviet Union is almost drained of Jews, but the extremely high birthrate among the Haredi population, with young marriages and an average of 7.5 children per family, makes them the fastest growing group in Israel. An off-the-cuff, unconfirmed statistic I heard was that Jerusalem is 25% Haredi, but 69% of the kindergarteners in Jerusalem are from Haredi families. In fact, Israel is the only country in the world with a natural increase in Jewish population, and is expected to replace the United States as the largest Jewish community in the world within the next 10 years.
One of the major points of confrontation between the Haredi sector and the rest of the population is that they are not drafted into the Army. This is a source of enormous social tension, not only between the Haredim and the Secular Israelis, but also between the Haredi and other religious Jews. The Religious Zionists solved the problem by creating a “Hesder” or “Arrangement” system, whereby army service and study in a yeshiva, or religious education program, are interspersed and the religious serve in special non co-ed units in the army. The Haredim, however, to not participate in this system, and there is great resentment at the Haredim among the rest of the population in that they are seen as willing to take from the country and send their fellow Jews out to die to defend them while refusing to take the same risks themselves. The non-Haredi Jews take it as a statement, “Our lives are more precious than yours, so it is OK for you to die, but not us.” As the Haredim continue to increase in percentage of the population and influence in the government, this conflict is bound to come to a head. The resentment of the Haredim also results in a feeling of oppression and shame on their part. The way my Rabbi puts it, “They don’t even see us as human beings.”
Encouraging this growth rate is also very expensive. New immigrants are not usually able to function very well in society, like me, and require subsidies for rent, Hebrew lessons, and job retraining. In order to encourage a high level of growth in the Haredi sector, the government gives monthly allotments for each child on an increasing scale, i.e., the more children you have, the more money you get per child. Because Israel’s laws are non-discriminatory, the payments also apply to Arabs. During the independence war, some Bedouin tribes sided with Israel and some with Egypt. After the war, those who sided with Israel were settled in the Negev, and those who had sided with Egypt were asked to leave. At that time, they were only a few thousand, but because they each have four wives, and each wife has fifteen or sixteen children, families with sixty children are not uncommon. There is no shortage of women as they can bring in wives from Gaza. Around Be’er Sheva, there are several Bedouin villages. On a tour the ruins of Tel Be’er Sheva, now next to a Bedouin village of tens of thousands, the archaeologist remembered back to the mid 1970s, “When I was in college on a dig here, Tel Sheva consisted of three tents.”
Illegal Arab immigration is another often ignored problem. At last report, a few months ago, 50,000 Arabs had illegally entered Israel and settled in the Galilee area. America, of course, experiences the same problem, illegal immigration from Mexico, and for the same reason, people looking for a better life and higher wages. In America, after a generation, the Mexicans add their own spice to the country, and mariachi radio stations and taquerias pop up all over the west. In Israel, the next generation of illegal immigrants learns how to plant roadside bombs, ambush busses, and carry out suicide attacks. Of course, the number who turn to violence against the state and civilians is very small, but even if it is one in a hundred, this still presents a very serious threat to the state and must be dealt with quickly. As one friend euphemized, “It’s difficult to see how the country is going to survive if we don’t start moving people around.”
All of this rapid population growth places enormous strains on the environment. The state was built so quickly, and it was so busy dealing with other existential threats, that the government did not prioritize environmental protection for matters of national security. Today, the major rivers run black and stink, and are banked by barbed-wire fences with skull and crossbones signs. An entire squad of navy commandos who trained at the outlet to the Kishon river came down with different cancers, some with four or five at once. In the Maccabiah bridge disaster, in which a marathon of athletes was passing over a bridge which subsequently collapsed, the victims did not die from the injuries they sustained in the fall but the poisons they were exposed to in the river.
The most serious environmental strain is the water. Israel has always had a chronic water shortage, being a desert country. Recently this problem has become acute. Three years of drought have already depleted the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), Israel’s only major reservoir, by six meters. The Kinneret has a surface layer of fresh water and a bottom layer of saline water. If the fresh water is all sucked away, then all that will remain is salt water. The fear is that when water is reintroduced to the lake, it will not reform into layers but mix, permanently poisoning the lake. The water department put a so-called “red line” on the level to which the Kinneret could be pumped, below which any pumping would potentially cause an ecological catastrophe, but that red line was passed a year and a half ago. In order to solve the problem, the government decided to continue lowering the red line. There are also two major aquifers in Israel, the coastal and the mountain aquifer, both of which are severely depleted. The danger to the coastal aquifer is that, if the water table drops to below sea level, seawater will flow into the aquifer and poison it. When Arafat uses his old expression, “Whoever doesn’t like it can drink Gaza seawater!” he is serious. Unrestricted pumping in Gaza has already salinated half of the aquifer in that region. The coastal aquifer is also being poisoned every day by industries along the coast. The mountain aquifer runs under the Palestinian areas. Recently, the Palestinians have begun dumping biological poisons and toxic wastes into the rivers flowing into Israel. This will doubtless reach the aquifers and cause severe problems.
The basis of the shortage is that Israel’s population is increasing so rapidly that consumption now overreaches the rainfall in an average year, let alone a drought. The drought has only accelerated the problem. The government has been scrambling to come up with an alternative, and is building two desalination plants, as well as planning to build one more every five years for the next 25 years. Unfortunately, the first plant is scheduled to come online in 2003, and in the meantime, there is no effective plan. Israel’s ally to the north, Turkey, which has huge amounts of unused water, has offered to sell it to Israel, but there is no way to get it here. There is talk of refitting oil tankers to carry water, which will cost about twice as much as desalinating the water, or of building a pipeline. Any pipeline, however, would have to run through Syria, which is still at war with Israel. The other option was to build a pipeline under the Mediterranean, but this idea seems to have been dropped. The main fear is that Turkey, a Muslim country, will have a coup d’etat and become another Islamic Theocracy and shut off the water to Israel.
In order to alleviate the water shortage, the government has reduced water to farmers by 50%. Agriculture, while only making up about 2% of the Israeli economy, is very important strategically. Israel is under a constant state of siege from its neighbors, and has to be prepared to feed itself. Agriculture is also important because it puts a Jewish presence on the land. There is an old law on the books form the Turkish days that states that if somebody has an olive tree next to his house, then the land is his, no matter who the legal owner was previously. This causes a major problem for the settlements in the south, for when they leave a field fallow, they often come back the next year to find it full of Bedouin with olive trees.
Israel’s diverse and constantly warring factions result in a paralyzed government. Israel does not have a constitution. They tried to write one immediately after independence, but negotiations broke down. Today, many religious parties are afraid to draft a constitution because it might come to be viewed as a replacement for Torah. Meanwhile, in his last days, Barak announced a “secular revolution” to write a constitution and completely expunge Jewish religion and tradition from all government, which led to fears of oppression on the part of the religious and made the religious parties even more suspicious of the idea of a constitution. Due to the divides in Israeli society, Arab-Jew, Secular-Religious, Ashkenazi-Sephardi, Rich-Poor, Haredi-Religious Zionist, Left-Right, as well as the stubborn and uncompromising nature of Israelis, political parties are multiplying like bacteria on a petri-dish. Every time there is a disagreement, a party splits. Every issue results in a party. There are several parties for Russian immigrants, a party for religious people without beards, a party for religious people with beards, a party for religious people with beards and black hats, a party for religious Sephardim with beards and black hats, a party for taxi cab drivers (really!), a party for the legalization of Marijuana, a one-woman party lead by a famous CEO of a cosmetics company, the list goes on. Everybody who has a new idea or philosophy starts his own party. Every party the demands a ministry in the government in order to join the coalition. In order to accommodate all the new parties, Sharon had to increase the number of government ministries to 28, almost ¼ of the entire Knesset. A normal parliamentary government in a more sane country has eight or nine. Because the coalitions are so narrow, each tiny party can then threaten to quit the coalition and collapse the government. Any party with three out of 120 seats in the Knesset can threaten to resign and exert a disproportionate pressure relative to the number of people who actually voted for it.
Meanwhile, since there is no constitution, the Israeli Supreme Court has decided to allocate whatever powers to itself it deems fit. As in America, the Supreme Court declared that it has the power of judicial review, the power to overturn laws which are not constitutional. However, since there is no constitution, the court bases its rulings on the declaration of independence, a vaguely worded document which does not detail the system of government. In response, the Knesset began passing laws which would expressly say that “the Supreme Court can not declare this law unconstitutional,” which the Supreme Court then determined to be unconstitutional themselves. But that’s not all, the Supreme Court took it an extra step and declared that it has the right to overturn a law and then re-write the law itself, and that law then becomes the standing law of the land. Chief Justice Aharon Barak has actually made several appearances in the Knesset trying to convince them to pass certain laws he wanted. The Knesset is now busy trying to form a constitutional court to take the powers of Judicial review away from the Supreme Court. Living in Israel has given me a great appreciation for the value of separation of powers and a two party system.
It is said that Israel is terrible at dealing with day to day life but great with dealing with emergencies. In facing these challenges, it must be remembered what was here one hundred years ago. There were plenty of swamps, deserts, and rocky hillsides, but not a lot of people. In 100 years, this country has transformed from an idea in magazine articles into a modern, high-tech, rapidly growing country. Its people have a western standard of living, its gross domestic product is greater than that of all of the Arab countries combined (minus oil), and its vastly outnumbered armies have defeated its enemies time and time again. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, upon his retirement, gave the country 50-50 odds of surviving into the 21st century. If you could transport one of the early theorists or visionaries of a Jewish state and list off all of the existential threats the country is facing today, he would weep with joy.
Friday, December 14, 2001
The Bin Laden Tape
I got home last night and watched some excerpts from the "Bin Laden Tape," in which, interspersed between cryptic Koranic references and countless "praised be Allah's," and after unraveling the layers of poetic and religious nonsense, makes it is pretty clear that Bin Laden did the deed. As if there were any doubt. Some Bush II worker bees then ran around on the news shows saying that this would finally prove to the Arab world that Bin Laden did it. Their naiveté is good for a laugh.
Much of our worldview, and many of things we take for granted, are dependant upon our upbringing. We take for granted the ability to reason, but it is actually based on how we are brought up. The ability to decide that a supposition or idea is untrue based on the facts at hand, no matter how much we would like to believe in our cherished supposition or idea, is the basis of reason and all scientific achievement. This basic process of deductive reasoning is something which does not come naturally to people and must be taught from an early age. Europe stagnated in the dark ages for over a thousand years, and people believed in dragons, trolls, and leprechauns, because the basic system of reasoning, of being able to test whether such things were true or not, had been lost.
Most of the third world lives in starvation, poverty, and backwardness. When one is searching for a crust of bread, there isn't time to teach one's children the fundamentals of logical thought. The expectation that the United States can present this videotape as evidence and then the starving and downtrodden masses of the Arab world to suddenly say, "Oh, I see now, I suppose that I was incorrect in thinking that Bin Laden didn't do it," is foolish. It will be passed off as another conspiracy. Maybe it will be pinned on the United States, but the popular explanation will be that the tape was created by that mystical, supernatural force of evil which keeps holding the billion or so Arabs down, the Jews. Just like Arafat claims that the September 11th attack was planned by Israel, the Egyptian Airlines crash was planned by Israel, Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish spy, and every injustice and and failing of the local despots is our fault, so this tape will be passed off as "Just another Zionist conspiracy" and forgotten.
Much of our worldview, and many of things we take for granted, are dependant upon our upbringing. We take for granted the ability to reason, but it is actually based on how we are brought up. The ability to decide that a supposition or idea is untrue based on the facts at hand, no matter how much we would like to believe in our cherished supposition or idea, is the basis of reason and all scientific achievement. This basic process of deductive reasoning is something which does not come naturally to people and must be taught from an early age. Europe stagnated in the dark ages for over a thousand years, and people believed in dragons, trolls, and leprechauns, because the basic system of reasoning, of being able to test whether such things were true or not, had been lost.
Most of the third world lives in starvation, poverty, and backwardness. When one is searching for a crust of bread, there isn't time to teach one's children the fundamentals of logical thought. The expectation that the United States can present this videotape as evidence and then the starving and downtrodden masses of the Arab world to suddenly say, "Oh, I see now, I suppose that I was incorrect in thinking that Bin Laden didn't do it," is foolish. It will be passed off as another conspiracy. Maybe it will be pinned on the United States, but the popular explanation will be that the tape was created by that mystical, supernatural force of evil which keeps holding the billion or so Arabs down, the Jews. Just like Arafat claims that the September 11th attack was planned by Israel, the Egyptian Airlines crash was planned by Israel, Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish spy, and every injustice and and failing of the local despots is our fault, so this tape will be passed off as "Just another Zionist conspiracy" and forgotten.
Thursday, December 13, 2001
Matzav Update
There was another suicide attack in Haifa this week. The bomber tried to get onto a bus, but a couple of policemen spotted him, so he blew himself up with a small charge. The small charge was designed to injure people, and then he was supposed to detonate a second, much larger bomb, when the paramedics came to help his victims. The first bomb went off and lightly injured some people, and the bomber himself survived, although on fire. Police noticed that the had a second bomb, so they shot him, and the bomber died with a bullet wound and burning alive, but he had time to look around and see that he hadn’t killed anyone but himself.
Sadly, last night, there was another terrorist attack on a bus in the territories. A roadside bomb plus gunfire killed ten. The terrorists did not run but lay in wait, and, when the ambulances came, they attacked again trying to kill as many paramedics as they could. This is getting too familiar. In response, the cabinet referred to Arafat as “irrelevant,” broke off all ties, and bombed some empty buildings in Gaza for the cameras, to little or no effect. This afternoon, Israel destroyed the “Voice of Palestine” radio station, which used to belong to Arafat. They are now broadcasting on another frequency from somewhere else, and I expect that later tonight the army will soon track that station down and destroy it.
Sadly, last night, there was another terrorist attack on a bus in the territories. A roadside bomb plus gunfire killed ten. The terrorists did not run but lay in wait, and, when the ambulances came, they attacked again trying to kill as many paramedics as they could. This is getting too familiar. In response, the cabinet referred to Arafat as “irrelevant,” broke off all ties, and bombed some empty buildings in Gaza for the cameras, to little or no effect. This afternoon, Israel destroyed the “Voice of Palestine” radio station, which used to belong to Arafat. They are now broadcasting on another frequency from somewhere else, and I expect that later tonight the army will soon track that station down and destroy it.
This week, there was also a controversial interview on the Israeli news with Arafat, who is still caged in Ramallah after Israel destroyed his getaway helicopters. The government requested that the interview not be aired; comparing its actions to the United States’ request that American news services not broadcast interviews with Osama bin Laden. The news crew went ahead and did it, and it was quite fascinating to watch. The Israeli interviewer spoke fluent Arabic and asked straightforward questions, to which Arafat was quite unaccustomed. Arafat had someone sitting behind him whispering into his ear what to say throughout the interview. He flew into a rage at one point, as well as confusing several peoples’ names and other facts. The tendency of Arab dictators to behave irrationally and lose self-control is both an advantage and a disadvantage to Israel. You can never predict what the Arabs are going to do, but whatever it is, it is usually wrong.
I continue to be astonished at the level of support Israel has been getting internationally. Straight-talking American Middle East Envoy General Zinni got through a meeting with Arafat and stated, “I have never encountered such lack of trustworthiness in my life,” and that it would be, “a waste of time to try to reach a serious agreement with Arafat." He said he hopes to work with other Palestinian leaders instead. Even the Europeans are pitching in, with the EU pressuring Arafat to crack down on militants and dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Everybody knows that this is totally impossible because, last I heard, about half of Arafat’s security forces, policemen, soldiers, terrorists, whatever, are also in the employ of Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
Personally, I feel that all the focus on Arafat is misleading. Palestinian society has decided to wage war, and Arafat is just following them. Whether Arafat is alive or not, the conflict will continue.
So where is all of this headed? To be honest, I don’t know. I can say one thing for sure, the government has not yet begun to treat this conflict with appropriate seriousness, and I think, unfortunately, it will get much worse before it gets better. The left wing has a disproportionate level of control at this time. Due to certain loopholes which former Prime Minister Barak took advantage of when he resigned, there was no general election earlier this year, only a prime ministerial election, so the parliament is still heavily left-wing, with Labor (left) controlling 26 seats and Likkud (right) 19 seats, the rest of the 120 seats belonging to various small parties. This despite the fact that if the elections were held today, Likkud is polling 50 seats and Labor less than 20, and Sharon has a 70% approval rating. What this means is that the Labor party, which still hasn’t grasped the total failure of the Oslo process, is still able to control many important government policies, and is restraining the government from taking forceful action. The next elections are scheduled for 2003, and it could be just that long before there is any concrete military action on the ground.
The official government spokespeople say that the current intifada will last until at least 2003. The calculation is quite simple: The number of bullets which the Palestinians are known or suspected to have, minus the number they fire into the air in wild celebration, this quantity divided by the number of bullets fired per day. I have been listening to the “experts” on internet radio and newspapers, and they all suggest different actions, but it is pretty clear that, by their opinions, an extremely forceful and lethal response needs to be taken. It is also clear that all actions taken up to this point, such as blowing up empty buildings and killing terrorist leaders, have been proven ineffective. In a Jerusalem Post Radio interview, Martin Van Crewald, Professor of Military History and Strategy at Hebrew University, stated that the situation will get worse and worse as the Arabs become better and better at terrorism and that it will only be ended when the government decides to take decisive action and root out the terrorists, which will probably involve losses on the Israeli side as well as killing thousands of enemy civilians, since terrorists and civilians are indistinguishable. I have also heard other suggestions from military personalities that the only way to end the constant firing of mortars, missiles, and bullets from Beit Jallah into Jerusalem is to line up tanks and bulldozers and announce over the radio that the next bullet that comes out of Beit Jallah will result in the destruction of fifty apartment buildings, and then the army will have to carry through on the threat five or six times. However long it takes until the residents of Beit Jallah determine that their odds of survival are better if they kick out the terrorists using their neighborhood as a base than if they face the Israeli army. Israel will also have to take this threat seriously enough to cut off all electricity, gas, and water to the Palestinian areas, which it provides free of charge.
It sounds horrible as I write it, but I think that this is a minimum of what needs to be done. Yes, I am concerned about the human rights of our enemies, and if the Palestinians would stop trying to kill me than I would totally support giving them a state. However, protecting the rights of my enemies takes a back seat to my own personal survival. Americans are experiencing the same thing today in Afghanistan. I watch CNN, I see the bodies of all of the innocent people who were killed by the wholesale bombing of Afghanistan, but Americans look at the pictures of the corpses of Afghanistani children being dug up for the cameras and say to themselves “Well, they were probably just killed by the Taliban.” Subconsciously, they know full well that this happened because of the actions of their government and say quietly to themselves, “Better your kids than mine.” Americans realize that their lives are under threat, and they are giving their government carte blanche to do whatever if feels necessary, Geneva Convention or not, to protect them. There is no real peace movement in America, nor is there in Israel, because the people feel their lives directly threatened.
The world seems to have become very insecure and crazy right now. The 90s, a time of prosperity, peace, negotiation, and cultural openness and exchange, officially ended in 2001 with three things: The ascent of George Bush II, the recession, and September 11th. All of this leads to an increase in unilateralism, exemplified by Bush II’s decision to withdraw form the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty today, and the fact that there is no real coalition and no mandate from the UN for what America is doing in Afghanistan. Nobody is talking any more and everybody is just doing what they determine needs to be done.
However the intifada ends, there isn’t going to be a signing on the White House Lawn or a Nobel Peace Prize. The Palestinians have collectively decided that they will not make peace until Israel is completely destroyed and all of its residents are dead or exiled, so there really isn’t anything left to talk about. Any sort of agreement with the Arabs will be reached de-facto and not through negotiations. Any Arab who negotiates with Israel today risks facing the firing squad when he goes home. Any deal with any Palestinian “leader” (killer) reached today would never pass in the parliament. Nobody is compromising on ideology.
Of course, the future is never clear, and I do not possess the gift of prophecy, but if I had to make a prediction as to how this “situation” will progress, this is what I think: The “core issues” of the Peace Process will be settled unilaterally.
Settlements:
Any settlements in which the residents feel themselves to be in personal danger will be abandoned. Many settlements in the Jordan Valley are already being abandoned, not by government order, but by residents who feel their lives are in danger. Meanwhile, settlements in other areas are growing. Those that grow will be defended and retained.
Borders:
The government has always been hesitant about building walls and fences because it is tantamount to setting a de-facto border. However, the only effective way to deal with terrorist suicide infiltration is to build walls and fences where they cross the most. No prime minister can sacrifice his citizens’ lives in order to be in a better negotiating position, so fences will be built where they must.
Right of Return:
There will be no “Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees into pre-1967 Israel. Israelis aren’t stupid and don’t want to see their state destroyed.
There will be no “Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees into pre-1967 Israel. Israelis aren’t stupid and don’t want to see their state destroyed.
Jerusalem:
Jerusalem was legally annexed to Israel, and it is an open city, i.e., there are no checkpoints or fences between the Jewish and Arab sections. This ease of access is why so many suicide bombs have gone off in Jerusalem. If suicide bombings get bad enough, the public outcry will be so great that some sort of fence will have to be built. The Arab section will then become the anarchic realm of whatever gangster thug can take control.
The Temple Mount:
The Temple Mount will not be surrendered because, first and foremost, there is nobody to whom it can be surrendered. The Palestinian Authority has essentially disintegrated. Nobody lives on the Temple Mount. Also, the Western Wall is part of the Temple Mount, and Arab worshippers have occasionally stoned and murdered Jewish worshipers there, so it is difficult to imagine a surrender of sovereignty there, if for no other reason than for the sake of the preservation of life.
Economy:
There will be no workers crossing from the Palestinian areas into Israel to work because Israelis don’t want to have to worry about being killed by their employees. Israel does not depend on the Palestinians at all for its economy and will be unaffected in this respect.
The Palestinian Authority:
Sooner or later, Arafat is going to die. He is 72 years old, has Parkinson’s disease, and is keeping company with cutthroats and gangsters. Even if he survives, he has no control and is, in the words of Sharon, “irrelevant.” The major Palestinian areas are currently separated with very little connection or communication between them in order to prevent a unified front from arising. In each city, a local gangster-thug will take control. Security arrangements and effective cease-fires can be brokered with individual gangster thugs. Those gangster thugs who continue terrorist attacks on Israel will be eliminated.
War is a very painful and frightening thing, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. I pray it ends soon, but I’m not very hopeful
Friday, December 07, 2001
Something Snapped
After the suicide bombing last weekend, something seems to have snapped. The Israeli cabinet declared Arafat "A regime that harbors terrorism and all that implies," and then launched a series of air strikes, blowing up Arafat's helicopters and airports, forcing him to stay in Ramallah, near Jerusalem. The assumption is that he is much less dangerous in Ramallah then flying around the world.
Afterwards, everybody in Israel was watching the television or reading the newspaper waiting for he condemnations of Israel to begin. Strangely, they never came. Usually, when a terror attack occurs, the State Department launches a preemptive condemnation of Israel for whatever it's about to do, the White House stays quiet, and the Congress supports Israel. This time, though, they all seem to be speaking with one voice of tacit support. Even Colin Powell was able to hold his tongue and say that Israel's government is democratically elected and must defend itself.
Has common sense finally broken out? Why? I'm sure that the Palestinian leadership is scratching their collective heads as well, trying to figure out why they aren't gaining any diplomatic advantage from the attack this time, like a dog waiting expectantly for a treat who gets whipped instead. After all, this attack isn't really any different from the hundreds of others which have been executed by the Palestinian Authority, nor are these fatalities any different from the thousands who have died by Arafat's hand over the last thirty years.
There are a few possible reasons. This is the first large-scale terrorist attack to happen since the beginning of the US's military campaign in Afghanistan. America would have a serious credibility problem if, in the middle of waging a war on a country which launched a deadly terrorist attack on it, it condemned Israel for doing the same.
Prior to this, the Bush administration placed a very high value on the coalition. What they have found since the ground campaign, however, is that if anything, the Arab states in the coalition are pinning the operations down. The Saudis are not allowing the U.S. to use its runways in the campaign, and the "coalition partners" aren't exactly lining up to take part in these actions. It is also noteworthy that all of the 9-11 hijackers came from the same Arab countries who are supposedly the most pro-western, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, raising questions about their true loyalties.
More importantly, however, I think that Bush has decided to use the momentum of the military campaign to go after Iraq in an effort to "clean up" this corner of the world. He knows that doing so will face opposition from all of the Arab members of the coalition, except Kuwait, and his administration has been very frank that the coalition may change, getting people ready for the Arab governments to bail out. If you're going to upset the Arabs, it will hurt just as much to do it now as later. If the Arab governments decide to raise oil prices as punishment at a time like this, it will be perceived in Washington as an attempt to undermine the war on terrorism The billions of dollars foreign aid to these coalition partners, as well as technology transfers, will be in jeopardy.
In the end, however, it comes down to personal politics. Bush and his administration see the world very simply. Either you are with the U.S. or you are against it. They seem to be tired of dealing with the slippery, stab-your-best-friend-in-the-back nature of Mideast politics. Not that politics everywhere isn't like that, but here, back-stabbing is not a figure of speech but a literal occurrence. They are also sick of dealing with Arafat and have reached the conclusion that he is either incapable or unwilling to make peace, ahs no credibility, and is therefore of no further use to the administration. There have been times when one of Bush's aides called Arafat and asked if such-and-such terrorist was in prison in Gaza, and Arafat confirmed that he was, to which the aid replied, "Then how did Israel kill him ten minutes ago in Ramallah?" The usual argument that Arafat is the best of all possible evils isn't washing any more, because things seem so bad now that they couldn't be any worse under Hamas.
All of this, as well as things we may not yet have heard, may have lead the U.S. to abandon it's policy of even-handedness and side with Israel. The question is: Is this a long-term strategic decision, or a short-term tactical decision?
Monday, December 03, 2001
Islam
The following is a response to a question I received from someone on the email list.
>What do you know about Islam? I know you read the Koran. What was the general
>"feeling" you got from it?
I don't think that you can get a very good feel for a religion by just reading it's book, so I don't claim to be knowledgeable just because I read the Koran. There is plenty in Judaism that I think non-Jews would find very offensive. It is very clear that it was a commandment from G-d to Joshua to come into the land of Israel and kill everything, including the cattle. There is still a commandment to wipe out and destroy the nation of Amalek. Once one understands that Amalek's ideology was pretty close to that of the Nazis, i.e. no G-d, kill the all Jews, etc.; this commandment becomes more understandable, but this explaination is not given in the Torah, so somebody who just opens up and starts reading may very easily get the wrong impression. Likewise, I don't think that there is anything in the Christian bible about launching masive Crusades to wipe out thousands of innocent people, I don't think I've ever heard that Christianity gives you exemption from all you! r sins if you kill an infidel, which is what the Pope did. I don't think there is anything in the Bible which says that you have to torture people to get them to convert, which is what the Spanish Inquisition did. I am therefore loath to judge a religion based only on its book.
The grand irony of today's situation is that what Bin Laden claims to be fighting, the Crusaders, is precisely what he has become. The Crusaders were offered eternal paradise in heaven in exchange for dying in a holy war while killing infidels. So was Muhammad Attah and the twenty other hijackers. The Crusaders did not differentiate between civilian and military, and neither does Bin Laden. There is a sickening similarity between the Crusaders' decision to lock the Jews of Jerusalem in the city's main synagogue and burn it to the ground and the footage of the world trade center collapsing in a ball of fire on its occupants.
The gut feeling I get is that the majority of Muslims the world over, and especially the Arabs, are very supportive of the September 11 attacks. Of course, I don't want to make a blanket judgement about an entire group of people because every group has a variety of opinions, but I still have not personally heard an unequivocal statement of condemnation of terrorism from a Muslim religious leader, either here or in America. If one does hear a condemnation, it is always a conditional statement. I.e., "We condemn the attacks but... a) It's the United States' fault because they got involved in the Gulf War b) It's the United States' fault because they are trying to democratzie the Middle East c) It is the United States' fault becuase they support the Jews." These conditional condemnations turn the terrorist attacks into a political ultimatums. It's as if they are saying, "If you would just get out of the Middle East, give up this whole 'freedom for the world' ! ideology, and abandon the Jews, then we will get on board and condemn this attack wholeheartedly."
These ultimatims backfire on those who issue them. The American deal is that if you want to be an American, and you are willing to contribute yourself wholly to the country, then you're in, regardless of where you were born or what your religion is. When American Muslim leaders issue these ultimatims, they present themselves as outsiders. After all, you don't make ultimatims to your own people. I think that when Americans see American Muslim leaders on television saying that America has to do a, b, and c before the Muslim community will get on the bandwagon and condemn terrorism fully, then Americans feel a subconscious sense of betrayal. Here is someone who is taking advanage of American hospitality and acceptance without fully subscribing to the American deal.
One of the problems in the interactions between east and west is the differences of approach. In the west, everything is straightforward. The prices in the stores are always labeled, signed contracts are to be kept, and the rules are the rules. It is an attitude which manifests itself in every aspect of society. We westerners like big, tall box-shaped skyscrapers, preferrably dull metallic chrome or gray. We like knowing that there are a million McDonalds outlets all over the country where we can buy lunch and we know how much it will cost and what it will taste like before we look at the menu. Even our written language is composed of twenty six standard, easily identifiable and distinct letters.
Arab and eastern cultures are almost exactly the opposite. The prices in the stores are never labelled, you always have to ask and haggle. A word is to be kept as long as it is mutually beneficial, but no longer. Everybody has an angle and everybody else knows it. Arab architecture is typified by pointy domes, graceful curves, and flourescent colors, without hard and fast rules. The language is written in a cursive script in which one letter runs into the next, and you're never sure where a word begins and ends. The sands are always shifting and nothing is ever certain.
When two western countries have a disagreement, they go to war, fight it out, and the winner gets to decide the future. America assumed that the same would be true of its war in Iraq. It was assumed that Iraq, being militarily defeated, would ascede to the US's will. Instead, Sadaam started pushing and testing. Let's see what happens if I try to sneak out some oil. Nothing? Ok, let's see what happens if I try to close a few places to weapons inspectors. Nothing? Ok, let's see what happens if I kick out these weapons inspectors altoghether. In response, the US started bombing his country, which is when he backed down. After the US airstrikes, he started testing and pushing again. It is really quite remarkable, he totally lost a war by every standard imaginable, and yet today most sanctions have been lifted and he is free to continue developing weapons of mass destruction. America never had to re-bomb Germany after World War II, but now everybody's talking about go! ing back to Iraq 10 years later.
The same is true of those Muslim religious leaders, be they in America or elsewhere, who say, "We condemn terror but..." They realize that America wants to accept and respect them, and are pushing and testing to take maximum advantage of this generosity. Until they come out and say forthrightly, "We condemn terrorism, period," the perception of disloyalty will continue.
>What do you know about Islam? I know you read the Koran. What was the general
>"feeling" you got from it?
I don't think that you can get a very good feel for a religion by just reading it's book, so I don't claim to be knowledgeable just because I read the Koran. There is plenty in Judaism that I think non-Jews would find very offensive. It is very clear that it was a commandment from G-d to Joshua to come into the land of Israel and kill everything, including the cattle. There is still a commandment to wipe out and destroy the nation of Amalek. Once one understands that Amalek's ideology was pretty close to that of the Nazis, i.e. no G-d, kill the all Jews, etc.; this commandment becomes more understandable, but this explaination is not given in the Torah, so somebody who just opens up and starts reading may very easily get the wrong impression. Likewise, I don't think that there is anything in the Christian bible about launching masive Crusades to wipe out thousands of innocent people, I don't think I've ever heard that Christianity gives you exemption from all you! r sins if you kill an infidel, which is what the Pope did. I don't think there is anything in the Bible which says that you have to torture people to get them to convert, which is what the Spanish Inquisition did. I am therefore loath to judge a religion based only on its book.
The grand irony of today's situation is that what Bin Laden claims to be fighting, the Crusaders, is precisely what he has become. The Crusaders were offered eternal paradise in heaven in exchange for dying in a holy war while killing infidels. So was Muhammad Attah and the twenty other hijackers. The Crusaders did not differentiate between civilian and military, and neither does Bin Laden. There is a sickening similarity between the Crusaders' decision to lock the Jews of Jerusalem in the city's main synagogue and burn it to the ground and the footage of the world trade center collapsing in a ball of fire on its occupants.
The gut feeling I get is that the majority of Muslims the world over, and especially the Arabs, are very supportive of the September 11 attacks. Of course, I don't want to make a blanket judgement about an entire group of people because every group has a variety of opinions, but I still have not personally heard an unequivocal statement of condemnation of terrorism from a Muslim religious leader, either here or in America. If one does hear a condemnation, it is always a conditional statement. I.e., "We condemn the attacks but... a) It's the United States' fault because they got involved in the Gulf War b) It's the United States' fault because they are trying to democratzie the Middle East c) It is the United States' fault becuase they support the Jews." These conditional condemnations turn the terrorist attacks into a political ultimatums. It's as if they are saying, "If you would just get out of the Middle East, give up this whole 'freedom for the world' ! ideology, and abandon the Jews, then we will get on board and condemn this attack wholeheartedly."
These ultimatims backfire on those who issue them. The American deal is that if you want to be an American, and you are willing to contribute yourself wholly to the country, then you're in, regardless of where you were born or what your religion is. When American Muslim leaders issue these ultimatims, they present themselves as outsiders. After all, you don't make ultimatims to your own people. I think that when Americans see American Muslim leaders on television saying that America has to do a, b, and c before the Muslim community will get on the bandwagon and condemn terrorism fully, then Americans feel a subconscious sense of betrayal. Here is someone who is taking advanage of American hospitality and acceptance without fully subscribing to the American deal.
One of the problems in the interactions between east and west is the differences of approach. In the west, everything is straightforward. The prices in the stores are always labeled, signed contracts are to be kept, and the rules are the rules. It is an attitude which manifests itself in every aspect of society. We westerners like big, tall box-shaped skyscrapers, preferrably dull metallic chrome or gray. We like knowing that there are a million McDonalds outlets all over the country where we can buy lunch and we know how much it will cost and what it will taste like before we look at the menu. Even our written language is composed of twenty six standard, easily identifiable and distinct letters.
Arab and eastern cultures are almost exactly the opposite. The prices in the stores are never labelled, you always have to ask and haggle. A word is to be kept as long as it is mutually beneficial, but no longer. Everybody has an angle and everybody else knows it. Arab architecture is typified by pointy domes, graceful curves, and flourescent colors, without hard and fast rules. The language is written in a cursive script in which one letter runs into the next, and you're never sure where a word begins and ends. The sands are always shifting and nothing is ever certain.
When two western countries have a disagreement, they go to war, fight it out, and the winner gets to decide the future. America assumed that the same would be true of its war in Iraq. It was assumed that Iraq, being militarily defeated, would ascede to the US's will. Instead, Sadaam started pushing and testing. Let's see what happens if I try to sneak out some oil. Nothing? Ok, let's see what happens if I try to close a few places to weapons inspectors. Nothing? Ok, let's see what happens if I kick out these weapons inspectors altoghether. In response, the US started bombing his country, which is when he backed down. After the US airstrikes, he started testing and pushing again. It is really quite remarkable, he totally lost a war by every standard imaginable, and yet today most sanctions have been lifted and he is free to continue developing weapons of mass destruction. America never had to re-bomb Germany after World War II, but now everybody's talking about go! ing back to Iraq 10 years later.
The same is true of those Muslim religious leaders, be they in America or elsewhere, who say, "We condemn terror but..." They realize that America wants to accept and respect them, and are pushing and testing to take maximum advantage of this generosity. Until they come out and say forthrightly, "We condemn terrorism, period," the perception of disloyalty will continue.
Sunday, November 11, 2001
Television and Totalitarianism
I got a new TV. Well, actually, my roommate Guy brought it from Rishon Le'Tzion, near Tel Aviv. Now, we get hundreds of channels, whereas before, we could get maybe 12. Of course, Israel still has only two official networks, a movie channel, and a c-span like broadcast of various government functions and congresses live.
The Israeli made programs are usually very coarse, sometimes racy, and uncensored. One friend described it, "On an American program, they would make a reference to someone having an extramarital affair, in Israel, they have to show it." Israeli television is usually very deep, but often depressing. There is one especially good weekly soap opera about a group of Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon. There is another program about a secular family where the husband decides to become very religious, but the couple decides to stay together, making for great tension and interesting story lines, but a lot of yelling and screaming. One show features a group of inmates in a prison and their interactions. The second half of prime time is devoted to American imports, which are much more shallow. I have often witnessed some of the most serious, humorless Israelis I know glued to Beverly Hills 90210 to see if this week Brandon's latest controversial editorial in the Beverly Hills High ! Newspaper is going to get him fired from the staff. People here see American television and long to live in a world where the first thing you think in the morning is, "What will I wear," rather than, "I hope I don't get called for reserve duty this month."
The rest of the stations are foreign, from places like Turkey, Germany, England, and our local enemies. It's an interesting window into a closed world.
Egyptian television is mostly "barekka" movies. It's called "barekka" because it is like the barekka, a baked croissant-like pastry filled with potatoes, spinach, or some other tasty goop. No matter how well you make it, it's never going to be gourmet, it's still just a barekka. Likewise, the barekka movies are low budget soap-opera-ish everyday movies, nothing special. They also broadcast nature documentaries and children's cartoons, all dubbed into Arabic. The news is all state controlled. I don't understand what they're saying, but it's usually just footage of the local glorious ruler, Hosni Mubarak, opening mosques or meeting with important people. Egyptian television is probably the most westernized of all Arab countries.
Jordanian programming used to be even more modernized than Egyptian, until King Hussein died. My cousins in Jerusalem, who live on the Jordanian side of the Judean hills, could pick up the broadcast. They used to show western programming such as Darma and Greg, as well as western movies, but they censored any references to "adult" situations, although they never seemed to have any problem with gory violence. Israelis used to listen to Jordanian radio as well, which played modern rock. The irony is that many religious Jews refused to watch Israeli television but had no problems watching broadcasts from Jordan. Ever since the local glorious ruler King Abdullah took power after his father succumbed to cancer, the television switched to showing the news, the Jordanian rubber-stamp parliament in action, and reruns of a musical show of about forty men sitting on the floor cross-legged playing traditional Arab instruments. If television is any indication, Abdullah has dragged his ! country about fifty years into the past.
Saudi television is by far the most interesting. Every commercial break, there is a special music video dedicated to the local glorious ruler, King Faud. It starts off with footage of the intifada with things blowing up, smoke and fire, the usual CNN newscast. Meanwhile, a dashing, moustached, singing soldier with a black and white kaffiah (the Palestinians' adopted identity clothing) is singing something in Arabic, with pictures of King Faud floating around. This is followed by pictures of King Faud meeting with Yassir Arafat, and then huge armies of marching soldiers flying the Saudi flag, which consists of a green field with a big sword on it and some Arabic writing. The message is pretty clear: Here's the Palestinians killing Jews, here's our glorious ruler meeting with the leader of those who are killing Jews, here's our massive armies which our glorious leader will use to help crush the Jews. Then it shows King Faud kissing babies (I guess all politicians have some things in common,) and praying in Mecca. There are two programs which are repeatedly rebroadcast. One is a musical with about two hundred Saudis dressed up in traditional robes dancing with swords and daggers, and one is of some cleric standing at a podium screaming his head off.
It's one thing to academically discuss dictatorship versus democracy, quite another to turn on the television and try to imagine one's self living in the nightmare of the Arab world. I recently heard an interview with Natan Sharansky, who spent a decade in the gulag in Siberia because he demanded that the Jews of the Soviet Union be allowed to move to Israel. The irony is that the Russians hated the Jews and wanted to get rid of them the whole time, but they hated the Jews so much that they hated Israel too, and letting the Jews go would strengthen Israel, so they decided to keep them prisoner. Once the Russian Jews were released, Sharansky became a major leader of the Russian Jews in Israel and founded the main Russian immigrants'' party. In his interview, he stated that one of the main mistakes of the United States was to rely on the stability of a dictatorship. America naturally favors democracies and supports them where they exist, but it also has the habit of strengthening dictatorships in the belief that a stable dictator will bring a stable country. However, any dictator needs to have an external enemy in order to justify the level of control he has over the individual, and the horrors he perpetrates on his society.
In the case of Arafat, the objective of of the United States and Israel in the peace process was to create a totalitarian Palestinian dictatorship which would be favorable to Israel. Bush I, Clinton, and Rabin's justification was that Arafat would be able to fight terror with a free hand, with no supreme court or Geneva convention to get in his way. Their mistake was in assuming that he would have any interest in actually doing so. Let's imagine, for a moment, that Palestine and Israel sit side by side in peace, one of them a democracy and one of them a totalitarian state lead by Yassir. People living in Yassir land are going to begin asking themselves, "Hey, wait a minute, where are all of the billions of dollars that the world has given us going? Why am I still poor? If the people next door are able to choose who leads them, and they are legitimate, why can't I?" Yassir will be lucky to escape with his life.
The only option for a dictator, therefore, is to make democracy the external enemy which is trying to destroy "us." Listening to any representative of an Arab government, you will hear the refrain, "Democracy is a foreign, western implant. It may work in the West, but here in the middle east, it isn't organic and doesn't fit in." From the western viewpoint, the dictatorships look better than local civil war and chaos, like in Afghanistan and what happened in Lebanon, so they are something we should support. We like to tell ourselves that, since these people are so radicalized and out of control, the best thing we can do for them is to set up a strong dictator who will provide stability. It's what we said to ourselves about the fanatics in Japan and Germany in the thirties, a mistake which cost fifty million lives.
Dictators don't provide stability, they provide wars. To hold power, they must repress and kill their own people. In dealing with the terrorist threat, we hear a lot about "Draining the swamp rather than just swatting the mosquitoes," i.e. ending the conditions which spark terrorism rather than just killing individual terrorists. Most Arab regimes refer to America's support of Israel and America's meddling attempts to promote regional democracy as the swamp. I would say that the swamp is the presence of totalitarianism, which will never, ever make peace with democracy.
The Israeli made programs are usually very coarse, sometimes racy, and uncensored. One friend described it, "On an American program, they would make a reference to someone having an extramarital affair, in Israel, they have to show it." Israeli television is usually very deep, but often depressing. There is one especially good weekly soap opera about a group of Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon. There is another program about a secular family where the husband decides to become very religious, but the couple decides to stay together, making for great tension and interesting story lines, but a lot of yelling and screaming. One show features a group of inmates in a prison and their interactions. The second half of prime time is devoted to American imports, which are much more shallow. I have often witnessed some of the most serious, humorless Israelis I know glued to Beverly Hills 90210 to see if this week Brandon's latest controversial editorial in the Beverly Hills High ! Newspaper is going to get him fired from the staff. People here see American television and long to live in a world where the first thing you think in the morning is, "What will I wear," rather than, "I hope I don't get called for reserve duty this month."
The rest of the stations are foreign, from places like Turkey, Germany, England, and our local enemies. It's an interesting window into a closed world.
Egyptian television is mostly "barekka" movies. It's called "barekka" because it is like the barekka, a baked croissant-like pastry filled with potatoes, spinach, or some other tasty goop. No matter how well you make it, it's never going to be gourmet, it's still just a barekka. Likewise, the barekka movies are low budget soap-opera-ish everyday movies, nothing special. They also broadcast nature documentaries and children's cartoons, all dubbed into Arabic. The news is all state controlled. I don't understand what they're saying, but it's usually just footage of the local glorious ruler, Hosni Mubarak, opening mosques or meeting with important people. Egyptian television is probably the most westernized of all Arab countries.
Jordanian programming used to be even more modernized than Egyptian, until King Hussein died. My cousins in Jerusalem, who live on the Jordanian side of the Judean hills, could pick up the broadcast. They used to show western programming such as Darma and Greg, as well as western movies, but they censored any references to "adult" situations, although they never seemed to have any problem with gory violence. Israelis used to listen to Jordanian radio as well, which played modern rock. The irony is that many religious Jews refused to watch Israeli television but had no problems watching broadcasts from Jordan. Ever since the local glorious ruler King Abdullah took power after his father succumbed to cancer, the television switched to showing the news, the Jordanian rubber-stamp parliament in action, and reruns of a musical show of about forty men sitting on the floor cross-legged playing traditional Arab instruments. If television is any indication, Abdullah has dragged his ! country about fifty years into the past.
Saudi television is by far the most interesting. Every commercial break, there is a special music video dedicated to the local glorious ruler, King Faud. It starts off with footage of the intifada with things blowing up, smoke and fire, the usual CNN newscast. Meanwhile, a dashing, moustached, singing soldier with a black and white kaffiah (the Palestinians' adopted identity clothing) is singing something in Arabic, with pictures of King Faud floating around. This is followed by pictures of King Faud meeting with Yassir Arafat, and then huge armies of marching soldiers flying the Saudi flag, which consists of a green field with a big sword on it and some Arabic writing. The message is pretty clear: Here's the Palestinians killing Jews, here's our glorious ruler meeting with the leader of those who are killing Jews, here's our massive armies which our glorious leader will use to help crush the Jews. Then it shows King Faud kissing babies (I guess all politicians have some things in common,) and praying in Mecca. There are two programs which are repeatedly rebroadcast. One is a musical with about two hundred Saudis dressed up in traditional robes dancing with swords and daggers, and one is of some cleric standing at a podium screaming his head off.
It's one thing to academically discuss dictatorship versus democracy, quite another to turn on the television and try to imagine one's self living in the nightmare of the Arab world. I recently heard an interview with Natan Sharansky, who spent a decade in the gulag in Siberia because he demanded that the Jews of the Soviet Union be allowed to move to Israel. The irony is that the Russians hated the Jews and wanted to get rid of them the whole time, but they hated the Jews so much that they hated Israel too, and letting the Jews go would strengthen Israel, so they decided to keep them prisoner. Once the Russian Jews were released, Sharansky became a major leader of the Russian Jews in Israel and founded the main Russian immigrants'' party. In his interview, he stated that one of the main mistakes of the United States was to rely on the stability of a dictatorship. America naturally favors democracies and supports them where they exist, but it also has the habit of strengthening dictatorships in the belief that a stable dictator will bring a stable country. However, any dictator needs to have an external enemy in order to justify the level of control he has over the individual, and the horrors he perpetrates on his society.
In the case of Arafat, the objective of of the United States and Israel in the peace process was to create a totalitarian Palestinian dictatorship which would be favorable to Israel. Bush I, Clinton, and Rabin's justification was that Arafat would be able to fight terror with a free hand, with no supreme court or Geneva convention to get in his way. Their mistake was in assuming that he would have any interest in actually doing so. Let's imagine, for a moment, that Palestine and Israel sit side by side in peace, one of them a democracy and one of them a totalitarian state lead by Yassir. People living in Yassir land are going to begin asking themselves, "Hey, wait a minute, where are all of the billions of dollars that the world has given us going? Why am I still poor? If the people next door are able to choose who leads them, and they are legitimate, why can't I?" Yassir will be lucky to escape with his life.
The only option for a dictator, therefore, is to make democracy the external enemy which is trying to destroy "us." Listening to any representative of an Arab government, you will hear the refrain, "Democracy is a foreign, western implant. It may work in the West, but here in the middle east, it isn't organic and doesn't fit in." From the western viewpoint, the dictatorships look better than local civil war and chaos, like in Afghanistan and what happened in Lebanon, so they are something we should support. We like to tell ourselves that, since these people are so radicalized and out of control, the best thing we can do for them is to set up a strong dictator who will provide stability. It's what we said to ourselves about the fanatics in Japan and Germany in the thirties, a mistake which cost fifty million lives.
Dictators don't provide stability, they provide wars. To hold power, they must repress and kill their own people. In dealing with the terrorist threat, we hear a lot about "Draining the swamp rather than just swatting the mosquitoes," i.e. ending the conditions which spark terrorism rather than just killing individual terrorists. Most Arab regimes refer to America's support of Israel and America's meddling attempts to promote regional democracy as the swamp. I would say that the swamp is the presence of totalitarianism, which will never, ever make peace with democracy.
Sunday, October 21, 2001
Rest in Peace, Rehavam Ze'evi
Last week, Rehavam Ze'evi was assassinated in his hotel room, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who's leader Abu Ali Mustafa was killed by Israel about a month and a half ago, claimed responsibility. He was the tourist minister, a somewhat unimportant position considering that tourism has been dead since the war started, but his position of minister gave him a vote in inner governmental decisions, including tactics and strategy in fighting the war. He was a founding member of the right wing "Moledet" or "Homeland" party and advocated transfer of the local Arab population from Israel with Arab agreement as part of a larger middle east settlement.
The coverage of his assassination provides a striking example of the blatant double standard being applied to Israel. In his Obituary in The Guardian, a British newspaper, Ze'evi was referred to as, "...so rightwing that he barely remained within the outer perimeter of political acceptability." In order to back up this false assertion, The Guardian searched far and wide for quotes to demonstrate his supposed insane right-wing extremism. The best they could come up with was, "There were moments, however, when Zeevi's rationalist mask slipped, as when he condemned Arabs working illegally in Israel this year as 'lice' and 'cancer'." Not exactly politically correct, but I'm sure you can find some quotes by American politicians referring to illegal workers in America in the same tones. The most important thing to notice is that he did not advocate any form of terror against Arabs or any sort of unjustified violence. Further trying to paint his extremist image, The G!uardian continued, "On various occasions he called ...Yasser Arafat a 'viper' and 'war criminal'; while former Labor prime minister Ehud Barak was plainly 'insane'." Well, using civilian neighborhoods to shield one's self from military reprisal while launching military attacks is a war crime, as is, I believe, torture, blowing up school busses, and firing mortars at civilian residences, all of which Arafat and those under his command have taken part in in the last year. And former Prime Minister Ehud Barak did try to give away 22% of Israel to the very people who were conducting these attacks.
To further illustrate the double-standard, look at The Guardian's obituary of Faisal Husseini, a Palestinian Nationalist leader, which was posted June 1st, 2001, after the current war in Israel had begun. "The death from a heart attack of the Palestinian statesman, Faisal Husseini, aged 60, is another hammer blow to hopes for peace and progress in the region... His lofty title only hinted at the respect he commanded. He played a pivotal role in pursuing accommodation with Israel, while championing the centrality of Jerusalem in the Arab psyche."
Now let's look at what he had to say to Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, Aug 27, 1998, "On May 4, 1999, we will announce the independence of the Palestinian state, at which time the Palestinian Authority will forcefully open up our borders with Jordan and Egypt ... there will be violent confrontation and death, but this time on both sides... The Israelis [are] more numerous and better equipped... but the superiority of us Palestinians lies in the fact that we are willing to lay down our lives, whereas for them every death is a tragedy that society cannot bear." Here we have a major Palestinian "peace activist" discussing plans for the war which everybody knew was coming. In referring to the terrorist killing of two security guards, one of them American, at an insurance office on October 11, 2000, he told the Jerusalem Post, "... I have no problem with the deed." In an interview with the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, he announced that the current war is not just another intifada but a war of independence which will not end until the last Israeli leaves the land claimed by Israel in the 1967 war. The Guardian obituary curiously left those quotes out of its glowing obituary.
The Guardian provides a crystal clear example of the double standard. Rehavam Ze'evi did not advocate terrorism or violent solutions, yet he, "barely remained within the outer perimeter of political acceptability." Faisal Husseini gleefully anticipates the current war, has "no problem" with terrorist murder, and yet his death is "...another Hammer Blow to the peace process." We live in a world in which we can look evil in the eye and call it good. Rehavam Ze'evi advocates transfer of Arabs from Israel as part of a wider peace agreement and he is a right-wing extremist. Faisal Husseini advocates the transfer of 200,000 Jews from their homes in the disputed territories by means of war and killing and he is a peacemaker. Well, with peacemakers like Husseini, we're in for a long war.
The coverage of his assassination provides a striking example of the blatant double standard being applied to Israel. In his Obituary in The Guardian, a British newspaper, Ze'evi was referred to as, "...so rightwing that he barely remained within the outer perimeter of political acceptability." In order to back up this false assertion, The Guardian searched far and wide for quotes to demonstrate his supposed insane right-wing extremism. The best they could come up with was, "There were moments, however, when Zeevi's rationalist mask slipped, as when he condemned Arabs working illegally in Israel this year as 'lice' and 'cancer'." Not exactly politically correct, but I'm sure you can find some quotes by American politicians referring to illegal workers in America in the same tones. The most important thing to notice is that he did not advocate any form of terror against Arabs or any sort of unjustified violence. Further trying to paint his extremist image, The G!uardian continued, "On various occasions he called ...Yasser Arafat a 'viper' and 'war criminal'; while former Labor prime minister Ehud Barak was plainly 'insane'." Well, using civilian neighborhoods to shield one's self from military reprisal while launching military attacks is a war crime, as is, I believe, torture, blowing up school busses, and firing mortars at civilian residences, all of which Arafat and those under his command have taken part in in the last year. And former Prime Minister Ehud Barak did try to give away 22% of Israel to the very people who were conducting these attacks.
To further illustrate the double-standard, look at The Guardian's obituary of Faisal Husseini, a Palestinian Nationalist leader, which was posted June 1st, 2001, after the current war in Israel had begun. "The death from a heart attack of the Palestinian statesman, Faisal Husseini, aged 60, is another hammer blow to hopes for peace and progress in the region... His lofty title only hinted at the respect he commanded. He played a pivotal role in pursuing accommodation with Israel, while championing the centrality of Jerusalem in the Arab psyche."
Now let's look at what he had to say to Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, Aug 27, 1998, "On May 4, 1999, we will announce the independence of the Palestinian state, at which time the Palestinian Authority will forcefully open up our borders with Jordan and Egypt ... there will be violent confrontation and death, but this time on both sides... The Israelis [are] more numerous and better equipped... but the superiority of us Palestinians lies in the fact that we are willing to lay down our lives, whereas for them every death is a tragedy that society cannot bear." Here we have a major Palestinian "peace activist" discussing plans for the war which everybody knew was coming. In referring to the terrorist killing of two security guards, one of them American, at an insurance office on October 11, 2000, he told the Jerusalem Post, "... I have no problem with the deed." In an interview with the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, he announced that the current war is not just another intifada but a war of independence which will not end until the last Israeli leaves the land claimed by Israel in the 1967 war. The Guardian obituary curiously left those quotes out of its glowing obituary.
The Guardian provides a crystal clear example of the double standard. Rehavam Ze'evi did not advocate terrorism or violent solutions, yet he, "barely remained within the outer perimeter of political acceptability." Faisal Husseini gleefully anticipates the current war, has "no problem" with terrorist murder, and yet his death is "...another Hammer Blow to the peace process." We live in a world in which we can look evil in the eye and call it good. Rehavam Ze'evi advocates transfer of Arabs from Israel as part of a wider peace agreement and he is a right-wing extremist. Faisal Husseini advocates the transfer of 200,000 Jews from their homes in the disputed territories by means of war and killing and he is a peacemaker. Well, with peacemakers like Husseini, we're in for a long war.
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