Abandon The Peace Process To Save The Two State Solution
August 12, 2014 § 4 Comments
My friend Jordan Hirsch and I (follow him on Twitter @jordanchirsch if you aren’t already for brilliant commentary on a whole host of topics) argue in Foreign Affairs that the recent fighting in Gaza proves the wisdom of the 2005 disengagement, and that Israel needs to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank as well. The article can be found here and here’s the opening salvo.
As the latest battle between Israel and Hamas in Gaza wears on, there are two schools of thought — one on the right and one on the left — about what Israel should do next.
The first take, on the right, is that renewed fighting in Gaza proves that Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was a mistake. According to this view, the withdrawal empowered Hamas, inviting rockets from above and tunneling terrorists from below, while earning Israel no international credit for having ended its occupation of the coastal strip. That pattern, the thinking goes, would repeat itself should Israel disengage from the West Bank. For that reason, any pullout now would be dangerously misguided.
The second argument, on the left, is that Israel’s mistake was not that it disengaged from Gaza, but that it did not sufficiently support the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, thereafter. By failing to reward Abbas’ nonviolent resistance, this theory suggests, Israel robbed Palestinians of the hope that anything but Hamas’ rockets could achieve their aims. The best means of countering Hamas in Gaza, then, is to present an alternative in the West Bank and immediately return to negotiations with Abbas to demonstrate the efficacy of a nonviolent approach.
Both positions are understandable. Israel has fought a string of wars with Hamas since leaving Gaza in 2005, each more threatening to its civilians than the last. For that reason, maintaining some control in the West Bank seems to be the most sensible option. On the other hand, those hoping for more Israeli support for the PA would like Israel to bolster the notion that Palestinians can succeed without resorting to armed resistance. Yet closer examination reveals that neither of these positions is tenable. And, in fact, there is a third option. Israel correctly, if not faultlessly, disengaged from Gaza. And now, to protect itself in the long run, it must do so again from the West Bank. Israel must abandon the peace process in order to save the two-state solution.
Read the rest here at Foreign Affairs.
Exposing the Lie of Hamas Moderation
June 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Hamas seems to be begging Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead, The Sequel. 45 rockets were fired by Hamas into Israel on Tuesday following the cross-border attack from Egyptian territory on Monday, confining much of southern Israel to bomb shelters. There is never an excuse for rockets directed toward civilians, and Hamas is barely even pretending to have a justification this time around. Hamas claims that the rocket barrage is a response to Israeli airstrikes, but the real reason Hamas is now returning to its strategy of indiscriminately targeting Israeli civilians is that it is beginning to feel squeezed by other groups that are questioning Hamas’s commitment to armed resistance. As pointed out in the New York Times, Islamic Jihad’s more militant approach has garnered it growing popularity and Hamas does not want to be eclipsed by its smaller competitors. More saliently though, the attack on Monday coming from the Sinai and for which a group claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaida has claimed responsibility put even more pressure on Hamas, since it cannot afford to be seen sitting on the sidelines while an outside non-Palestinian group carries the banner of resistance against Israel. Hamas is madly trying to reestablish its credentials of taking the fight to Israel, and it does so by firing rockets from Gaza because it has no other long term strategy and no interest in a productive solution. It is being tarred as too compliant and willing to live with the status quo, and so Israeli civilians have to bear the brunt of it reflexing its muscles. Let’s also not pretend that any of this is a “legitimate response to Israeli aggression” since it’s pretty clear who made the first move here, not to mention that purposely targeting civilian communities with rockets is never a legitimate response to anything.
Hamas is gambling that with Israeli tanks moving toward the Egyptian border and Iran presumably occupying the Israeli defense ministry’s attention, the IDF will have neither the time or the inclination to bother with a large scale response to rocket fire that has thankfully not killed any Israelis yet. This is a bad miscalculation on Hamas’s part. Israel’s first priority is protecting its citizens from attack, and should this rocket fire continue, I fully expect to see an IDF incursion into Gaza. Israel is not going to be frightened off by a Morsi victory in Egypt, and is also unlikely to sit back and absorb rocket fire as a favor to the Egyptian military, which does not want to be pressured by public opinion into fighting Hamas’s battles. This is not destined to end well for Hamas should it provoke a real Israeli response, and yet Hamas is bafflingly more concerned with not being outshined by smaller resistance groups.
In this vein, the most important takeaway from this episode is that it is time to lay to rest forever the idea that Hamas is moderating or will moderate. When Israel pulled out of Gaza and Hamas took control of the strip from the Palestinian Authority, I thought there was a small but legitimate chance that Hamas would begin to transition away from terrorizing Israeli civilians and start focusing on governance. Any hopes I had on this front have been thoroughly dashed. Despite the recent relative quiet, it is clear that Hamas is not changing. It remains a revanchist group dedicated not to building a state but to seeking the elimination of Israel entirely, and it continues to be a hostage to small bore thinking without seeing the larger trends at work in the region. Islamist groups throughout the Middle East, from Ennahda in Tunisia to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are devoting their attention to governing, and while they are not necessarily forces for moderation or social progress, they recognize that the key to long term survival and relevance is basic party politics and the nitty gritty of learning how to run a state. Hamas evinces zero interest in following this path, which should permanently kill the notion that it is a legitimate Islamist political party that also happens to have a military wing. It is everlastingly obsessed with the idea of resistance above state building, purity above compromise. Is there anyone left still so naive as to think that a complete and total Israeli pullout from the West Bank would put an end to Hamas rockets, attacks on civilians, and efforts to abduct Israeli soldiers? Rather than prepare its constituents to live with the inevitability of Israel and attempt to improve their lot, Hamas is more concerned with looking tough and whether other groups are damaging its street cred. What a terrible and pathetic representative for the people of Gaza.
Look at the revolutionary trends rocking the rest of the Arab world, and then compare that to the stale stasis that grips Hamas as it remains impervious to change or adaptation and refuses to embrace any new role other than resistance in the form of barbarism. It is as it always was: an opaque organization with a super secretive process for selecting its leaders and making decisions, with the only difference that it now shoots rockets at Israeli civilians rather than blowing them up on buses or in cafes. I desperately think that Israel needs to deal with the Palestinian Authority to end the occupation of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state, but Hamas is an altogether different breed and its actions yesterday were the latest abundantly clear demonstration of this. The attack from the Sinai and the rockets from Gaza are an important reminder that Israel lives in a nasty neighborhood and that there are some things which it will never be able to inoculate itself against no matter how it resolves the Palestinian issue. Nobody argues that Israel is threatening or occupying any part of Egypt and yet it still faces attacks coming from the Sinai, which pose a terrible dilemma for Jerusalem since it does not want to enter into any hostilities with the Egyptians but cannot afford to just let these provocations continue. This is where the double standard that governs all things Israeli kicks in, since every country in the world has the absolute right to respond to cross-border attacks (and this applies both to Egypt and Gaza) but by doing so Israel walks into an inevitable public relations trap. If Israel goes back into Gaza, every Palestinian civilian life that is lost will be an unqualified tragedy, but it will be entirely on Hamas’s head.
Evacuating Settlers Is Not The Same As Japanese Internment
May 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
Moshe Arens is a longtime Likud wise man, having served as foreign minister and three tours as defense minister, but his compass is off this morning. Writing in Haaretz, Arens argues that forcing the settlers in Ulpana to leave their homes is wrong similarly to the way that uprooting settlers as part of disengaging from Gaza was unjust. This is a perfectly understandable viewpoint, albeit one I disagree with. The problem is that Arens then makes an unfortunate comparison which is incorrect on a number of levels. Arens writes:
The government decision involved a blatant violation of the civil rights of thousands of Israeli citizens, and a petition against it was filed with the High Court of Justice – the ultimate protector of the civil rights of Israeli citizens and all those living under Israeli sovereignty or Israeli jurisdiction, the ultimate arbiter of complaints against injustice and unlawful acts. The court, nevertheless, upheld the government’s decision.
In retrospect, the massive uprooting of so many Israeli citizens from their homes, by force, is now seen by many as a gross miscarriage of justice, similar to the case of the expulsion of U.S. citizens of Japanese origin from their homes in World War II. That government decision was also upheld by a supreme court and regretted in later years. In both cases, force was used against citizens who had violated no laws.
No matter what your view is of the Gaza disengagement, the comparison with Japanese internment during WWII is a bad one. To begin with, Arens’s characterization of what happened during WWII is ahistorical to an extreme degree. Arens asserts that Japanese-Americans were expelled from their homes and thus compares them to settlers in Gaza who were also expelled from their homes. The problem with this is that U.S. citizens of Japanese origin were not simply expelled from their homes; they were also put in detention camps. It was not a matter of only telling Japanese-Americans where they couldn’t go, but also confining them to a specific area and keeping them there by force. The settlers who were forced to leave Gaza were placed under no such restrictions. Once the disengagement was carried out, they were free to go and live in any place of their choosing in Israel. Arens purposely muddies the waters here by referring to “expulsion” without once mentioning internment, thereby creating a false parallel between the two cases. No doubt he is aware of the entire history of the treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, even if he is counting on the fact that some of his readers are not.
Furthermore, Arens’s comparison between the two cases does not work because the circumstances are too dissimilar. Gaza was not Israeli sovereign territory but was under Israeli military control and administrative jurisdiction. This gave the state a lot more leeway in how it made and carried out decisions related to Gaza, and enabled the government and the military to take unilateral actions in the name of national security that would not be allowed within Israel’s borders. In addition, all settlers in Gaza were ordered to leave regardless of their race, ethnic origin, or any other category, because the disengagement applied to any Israeli citizen residing within a defined territory. No distinctions were made between different types of citizens since the military directive was a blanket one.
In contrast, the executive order signed by FDR designated parts of the West Coast as military areas despite the fact that they were on sovereign U.S. soil and were not under attack or part of any arena in which warfare was taking place. Their legal status was more complicated during wartime, but nobody was asserting that they constituted permanent extra-judicial territory. Furthermore, Civilian Exclusion Order Number 34 removed from the Western U.S. all citizens of Japanese ancestry and only citizens of Japanese ancestry. This was not a military order related to a particular territory like the Gaza disengagement, but was rather a military order related to a particular group of people. The dissents in Korematsu (with the exception of Justice Jackson’s) did not object to the notion of expelling citizens from a particular area for reasonable national security reasons but were predicated on the fact that citizens were expelled and then interned in camps solely because of their ancestry without regard to any other factor. This is certainly not what happened in Gaza. Arens implies that Korematsu is now viewed as a “gross miscarriage of justice” because it uprooted citizens from their homes, but that is only a half-truth. It is viewed this way because it uprooted citizens from their homes and then also detained them, and both of these decisions were based solely on race. As Justice Murphy wrote in his dissenting opinion:
The judicial test of whether the Government, on a plea of military necessity, can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger that is so “immediate, imminent, and impending” as not to admit of delay and not to permit the intervention of ordinary constitutional processes to alleviate the danger….Justification for the exclusion is sought, instead, mainly upon questionable racial and sociological grounds not ordinarily within the realm of expert military judgment.
The Gaza disengagement does not fit the facts of Japanese internment during WWII at all. The settlers were not deprived of their rights in any way (Israel has no constitution, which is a completely separate problem) since any right to live in Gaza disappeared once the order was given to evacuate a territory under military administrative control, and the settlers were not discriminated against in any way. Arens understandably wants to connect what is now universally viewed in the U.S. as a national disgrace to what he views as an Israeli national disgrace, but the situations are too completely different to successfully make that comparison without purposely misleading on the facts, as Arens does.
The settlers who were uprooted from Gaza in many ways got a raw deal. The state encouraged them to go there in the first place and subsidized their lives there, and then following the disengagement did an abysmal job of compensating them for their economic losses. Their standard of living has dropped dramatically and the government has not followed through on its efforts to make them whole again. Nevertheless, the comparison to Japanese internment during WWII is an atrocious one, and Arens undermines his larger argument by making it.
