Dani Dayan’s Terrifyingly Transparent Op-Ed
July 26, 2012 § 2 Comments
I had planned to write about something else today, but Yesha chairman Dani Dayan’s op-ed in the New York Times requires a comment or a thousand (be forewarned, this post is on the longer side). Dayan has written a good summation of the settler leadership’s views, and it is instructive in that it does not attempt in any way to hide the ball but also rests on a series of false assumptions and logical inconsistencies. I thought I’d go through it paragraph by paragraph, since there is a lot in here to unpack.
Whatever word you use to describe Israel’s 1967 acquisition of Judea and Samaria — commonly referred to as the West Bank in these pages — will not change the historical facts. Arabs called for Israel’s annihilation in 1967, and Israel legitimately seized the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria in self-defense. Israel’s moral claim to these territories, and the right of Israelis to call them home today, is therefore unassailable. Giving up this land in the name of a hallowed two-state solution would mean rewarding those who’ve historically sought to destroy Israel, a manifestly immoral outcome.
To begin with, you almost have to admire the fealty to terminology. You will never catch Dayan referring to the West Bank as anything but Judea and Samaria (Yehuda and Shomron in Hebrew), and much like Peter Beinart with his call to rename the West Bank “non-democratic Israel” Dayan seems to think that the term West Bank is somehow an ideologically loaded one. I disagree, but it is a good peek into Dayan and the settler leadership’s mindset that they think calling the West Bank by its biblical name is somehow going to change people’s minds, as if it is simply a matter of psychological trickery. The other interesting thing to note is the bait and switch between the Arab armies seeking to destroy Israel in 1967 and the Palestinians to whom the West Bank would be given. There is no question that Hamas has “historically sought to destroy Israel” but the implication is that yielding the West Bank would reward the losers of the Six Day War, which is not the case.
Of course, just because a policy is morally justified doesn’t mean it’s wise. However, our four-decade-long settlement endeavor is both. The insertion of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan would be a recipe for disaster.
The influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere would convert the new state into a hotbed of extremism. And any peace agreement would collapse the moment Hamas inevitably took power by ballot or by gun. Israel would then be forced to recapture the area, only to find a much larger Arab population living there.
Moreover, the Palestinians have repeatedly refused to implement a negotiated two-state solution. The American government and its European allies should abandon this failed formula once and for all and accept that the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are not going anywhere.
This is where Dayan begins his strategy of appealing to security and political reasons not to give up the West Bank rather than making arguments about moral and historical justifications. I suspect he is doing this because he knows the latter arguments will not be winning ones with this particular audience, but his case is built on some contentious assumptions. First, the notion that Palestinian refugees are universally extremist is not a given, and the idea that Hamas will “inevitably” take power is also not assured. A Palestinian state in the West Bank that emerges following negotiations with Israel will be accompanied with massive international financial and security assistance to the Palestinian Authority, and a Hamas takeover is not a fait accompli, as Dayan would have it. Furthermore, Hamas already does control Gaza, and Israel has not been forced to recapture the area despite the problems that Hamas rule in Gaza has presented, so again we have a logical leap here that is presented as fact. Finally, it is true that the Palestinians have repeatedly turned down Israeli offers for a two-state solution, but Israel has not been entirely blameless in this process and Dayan rejects the very premise of a Palestinian state on the West Bank anyway, so this point is not at all relevant to his argument.
On the contrary, we aim to expand the existing Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and create new ones. This is not — as it is often portrayed — a theological adventure but is rather a combination of inalienable rights and realpolitik.
This is what I mean about not trying to hide the ball. Dayan is extremely forthright about what he and the settlers for whom he speaks want, and I think his honesty in talking to a non-Israel audience is a good thing for which he should be commended. There is way too much dissembling on all sides when it comes to settlements, the peace process, and accepting Israel’s right to exist, so clear and open statements are welcome. The more noteworthy point here is that Dayan is claiming that settlement growth is a matter of rights and practical considerations rather than theology, and this is where he is not being entirely honest, as we shall see below.
Even now, and despite the severe constraints imposed by international pressure, more than 350,000 Israelis live in Judea and Samaria. With an annual growth rate of 5 percent, we can expect to reach 400,000 by 2014 — and that excludes the almost 200,000 Israelis living in Jerusalem’s newer neighborhoods. Taking Jerusalem into account, about 1 in every 10 Israeli Jews resides beyond the 1967 border. Approximately 160,000 Jews live in communities outside the settlement blocs that proponents of the two-state solution believe could be easily incorporated into Israel. But uprooting them would be exponentially more difficult than the evacuation of the Gaza Strip’s 8,000 settlers in 2005.
The attempts by members of the Israeli left to induce Israelis to abandon their homes in Judea and Samaria by offering them monetary compensation are pathetic. This checkbook policy has failed in the past, as it will in the future. In the areas targeted for evacuation most of us are ideologically motivated and do not live here for economic reasons. Property prices in the area are steep and settlers who want to relocate could sell their property on the free market. But they do not.
So now I am confused – are settlers motivated by material self interest or are they motivated by ideology? The explosion in the settler population has largely been fueled by the rising cost of living in Israel’s cities and the economic incentives provided by the government t0 move to the settlements, but Dayan does not mention that here. He then says that the 160,000 settlers living in areas not envisioned to be incorporated into Israel following a peace deal are ideologically motivated – read: theologically motivated – so despite his claim in the previous paragraph about rights and realpolitik, it now appears is if the issue is something else entirely, which is a religious attachment to the land. I understand and empathize with this position, but let’s then drop the charade that this about Israel’s strategic interests.
Our presence in all of Judea and Samaria — not just in the so-called settlement blocs — is an irreversible fact. Trying to stop settlement expansion is futile, and neglecting this fact in diplomatic talks will not change the reality on the ground; it only makes the negotiations more likely to fail.
Given the irreversibility of the huge Israeli civilian presence in Judea and Samaria and continuing Palestinian rejectionism, Western governments must reassess their approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They should acknowledge that no final-status solution is imminent. And consequently, instead of lamenting that the status quo is not sustainable, the international community should work together with the parties to improve it where possible and make it more viable.
This is bound to infuriate those who have been warning for the past decade about Israel creating facts on the ground in order to impede the possibility of a Palestinian state, and it also demonstrates why the Palestinian insistence on preconditions to negotiating has been such an unmitigated disaster. It also gives a good window into the emerging support on the right for a one-state solution, and what is so fascinating here is that Dayan is writing as if he thinks that there an actual possibility that Western governments will simply back off and watch Israel turn the current status quo into a permanent annexation of the West Bank. If you want evidence of the horrible miscalculation and naivete of the settler right, led by Dayan and MKs like Danny Danon, look no further.
Today, security — the ultimate precondition for everything — prevails. Neither Jews nor Palestinians are threatened by en masse eviction; the economies are thriving; a new Palestinian city, Rawabi, is being built north of Ramallah; Jewish communities are growing; checkpoints are being removed; and tourists of all nationalities are again visiting Bethlehem and Shiloh.
While the status quo is not anyone’s ideal, it is immeasurably better than any other feasible alternative. And there is room for improvement. Checkpoints are a necessity only if terror exists; otherwise, there should be full freedom of movement. And the fact that the great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees still live in squalid camps after 64 years is a disgrace that should be corrected by improving their living conditions.
Yossi Beilin, a left-wing former Israeli minister, wrote a telling article a few months ago. A veteran American diplomat touring the area had told Mr. Beilin he’d left frightened because he found everyone — Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — content with the current situation. Mr. Beilin finds this widespread satisfaction disturbing, too.
I think it is wonderful news. If the international community relinquished its vain attempts to attain the unattainable two-state solution, and replaced them with intense efforts to improve and maintain the current reality on the ground, it would be even better. The settlements of Judea and Samaria are not the problem — they are part of the solution.
There are many problems with this type of thinking, but one of the biggest is that the world is not static. Just because the West Bank is quiet now does not mean that it will be so forever. The first intifada took Israel by surprise, and then the second one was even more challenging and violent than the first. There is little doubt that the third one – and make no mistake, a third intifada is going to happen at some point – will be even worse than the previous two, at which point Dayan’s conclusion goes up in smoke.
The emergence of real support for a rightwing one-state solution is terrifying to me, and Dayan’s op-ed crystallizes in concise form why it is happening. The settlement movement is busy convincing itself that settlements have become permanent and immovable, and nothing that the Netanyahu government has done, from commissioning the Levy Report to the continuing efforts to push off the High Court’s order to evacuate Migron, have disabused them of that notion. More dangerously, the settler leadership is also convincing itself that Israel will be able to get away with a binational state. The Israeli public desperately needs to be convinced that this is a problem that cannot be ignored, because most Israelis are not going to like what happens if this outcome actually emerges, and unfortunately the far right seems to be the best motivated party at the moment. Dayan’s piece needs to be a wakeup call, since it is nakedly transparent on what the settlers want to accomplish while also being dangerously naive and shortsighted about what will happen if they are successful.
A Tale of Two Letters
July 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
Two letters were issued this week that tell very different stories about where Israel is going. The first was from the Shomron Residents Council and it was addressed to Shimon Peres. The settlement movement has never been in love with Peres, but they are particularly outraged at him at the moment following Peres’s comments last week about the need to take Israel’s demographic challenges into account and end the settlement project. The letter, which was also published as an ad in today’s Ha’aretz, calls for Peres to step down after accusing him of being a Palestinian agent working against Israeli and Jewish interests. It also states that Peres should join Meretz, Balad, or Kadima, but that he cannot continue serving as the president of the state.
Nobody who is thinking clearly would actually accuse Peres, the last remaining politically active member of Israel’s founding generation and literally one of the fathers of the state, of acting against Israel’s interests, so in that respect this is a fundamentally unserious letter. It does, however, tell us something serious about a significant portion of Israeli citizens, which is that they view Israel in a disturbingly parochial and sectarian manner. Calling for Peres to step down for crossing the settlers is rather unremarkable, but calling for him to join Meretz or Balad or Kadima is a statement that speaks volumes. First, it suggests that the settler leadership does not view those parties as legitimate, since it is apparently acceptable for Peres to be a member of Kadima despite not acting in the interests of the Israeli public or the Jewish public. Second, it implies that in order to serve as president of Israel, you must adhere to a certain line with regard to the settlements, and anyone that crosses this line also crosses the boundary of being unfit for office. This is a revolutionary view of citizenship, political participation, and public service. It imagines an Israel that is not simply split between citizens and non-citizens, or even Jews and non-Jews, but one that is officially and legally further fragmented along lines that delineate between acceptable viewpoints and unacceptable viewpoints. Peres is free to join Meretz or Kadima in the eyes of the settlement leadership since these parties, in their view, do not act in the state’s interests and are thus illegitimate.
The second letter was from the Israel Policy Forum and it was addressed to Prime Minister Netanyahu. The IPF letter was a response to the Levy Report, and it expressed the fear that adopting Levy’s recommendations will lead to the end of the two state solution. It referred to the importance of maintaining Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state, and stated that the Levy Report will actually weaken Israel’s hand in its conflict with the Palestinians by providing fodder to the delegitimization crowd. The letter was then signed by 41 leaders of the American Jewish community.
The letter itself was smartly worded with its acknowledgement that the Palestinian Authority has “abdicated leadership by not returning to the negotiating table” and thus negating any warrantless accusations that the letter is an effort to place all blame on Israel, and as I wrote last week, I think that framing the issue of settlements strategically by referencing the serious threat to Israel’s future is the way to go. What is more encouraging though is the list of signatories. Nobody will be surprised that the letter was signed by Charles Bronfman or Rabbi Eric Yoffie, people with a reputation for being in the center or the left on Israel issues. It was also signed by Rabbi Daniel Gordis, who is at the Shalem Center and recently held a well-publicized debate with Peter Beinart, and by Thomas Dine, who used to head up AIPAC. It suggests a different vision of Israel, one in which leaders from all sides of the spectrum are able to cooperate and come to an agreement on the big issues facing the Jewish state. Rather than viewing everything through a narrow prism, folks like Gordis and Dine, who might have very different views on settlements generally than someone like Yoffie, are able to recognize the unique problem that the Levy Report poses. In fact, Gordis wrote in Ha’aretz that he does not necessarily disagree with Levy’s legal reasoning, but that adopting the report would signal an annexation of the West Bank and the official abandonment of the two state solution. The letter represents a hopeful trend of moving away from political and ideological sectarianism and viewing Israel not as a disparate collection of tribal groups but as a whole. Quite frankly, it represents a more hopeful vision than the one displayed just yesterday by Bibi Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz, who could not maintain a unity government in the face of some tough decisions over whether Israelis should equally share in the burden of service or not. Let’s hope that going forward, the vision contained in the IPF missive trumps the that contained in the Shomrom Residents Council’s one.
Thinking Strategically on Settlements
July 13, 2012 § 1 Comment
Shimon Peres gave a speech this week in which he warned about the danger that settlements pose to Israel’s Jewish majority. He spoke about a “threatening demographic change” and pointed out that without a Jewish majority, Israel will cease to be a Jewish state. This prompted predictable outrage from the right, with Yesha head Dani Dayan inveighing that the only danger to the Jewish state is conceding the right to the West Bank and 350 rabbis sending Peres a letter in which they said he should beg for forgiveness for the peace process and criticized his “hallucinatory ideas.” Peres’s speech also, however, brought opprobrium from the left, as various people were upset that Peres framed the problem with settlements as a strategic problem rather than an ethical or moral one. In this view, the primary problem with the settlements is that they are furthering the occupation and preventing a Palestinian state, and thus the argument against them should be that Israel is perpetrating an unethical policy in the West Bank and settlements should be denounced primarily as conflicting with the value of a democratic state and a Jewish state.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but it ignores the politics of the situation and misses the long view. The left and center-left do not need any convincing on the need for Israel to abandon the settlement enterprise outside of the major settlement blocs that Israel will presumably keep in a peace deal. If there is to ever be real movement on this issue, it is the right that needs to be brought around, and arguments about Palestinian rights are unlikely to be convincing. I do not mean to suggest that everybody on the right is completely unconcerned with the status of the Palestinians on the West Bank, but this has historically not been a winning argument on the right. If the right is to be swayed, it will be by arguments about Israel’s security and future, and in that sense, the demographic argument is the only one in town. I’ve heard that people in the upper ranks of the government don’t take the demographic threat seriously and believe that time is actually on Israel’s side, and I have had similar impressions in talking to friends and colleagues who are more rightwing on Israel issues than I am. When I was in Turkey two years ago, I got into what turned into a heated discussion with an older American Jewish couple whom I met while their cruise ship was docked in Istanbul for the weekend. During a conversation about Israel where I brought up the argument that Israel was running out of time to separate from the West Bank, the wife heatedly insisted that I had no idea what I was talking about because her daughter lives in Israel and has five kids, and so she absolutely refuses to believe that in 20 years there will be just as many Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank as there are Jews. The only way to convince rightwingers and conservatives that settlements need to be dealt with is to keep on pushing the demographic argument and make people realize that every day that passes increases the possibility of a binational one state Israeli future. This is why Peres’s speech was the correct response to the Levy Report, and while it might make folks on the left upset, a little more strategic thinking on this issue is required.
On a similar note, this is why I think that the Levy Report is so dangerous and why I disagree with Brent Sasley’s argument that Levy does not represent anything new. Has Israel been extending its control over the West Bank? Yes, it has. But that doesn’t mean that the Levy Report is not a dangerous development, because by legally eviscerating the line between Tel Aviv in Israel proper and Efrat over the Green Line, and between authorized settlement bloc Ariel and unauthorized outpost Migron, it brings a one state solution ever closer (for those whose Hebrew is less than stellar, Elder of Ziyon has a useful translation of the legal reasoning section of the Levy Report). The report’s significance is not in what it signals about past Israeli intention in the West Bank, but in what it signals about Israel’s political future and survival as a Jewish state. Brent and others think that the report is simply more of the same and that the declaration that there is no occupation is just the Israeli right showing its true colors in a more public manner, but this loses sight of the fact that Levy represents the opening salvo in the growing calls for a rightwing one state solution. Quite simply, this will be the end of Israel as we know it, and the right needs to be convinced that this is a path to oblivion. If this requires hammering away at the demographic argument and dropping language steeped in morality and ethics, so be it. Peres is on to the right idea here, and people on the left and the center should start thinking along these lines as well.
Israel at a Dangerous Crossroads
July 9, 2012 § 4 Comments
The three member group led by former High Court justice Edmund Levy charged with investigating the legal status of unauthorized settlements in the West Bank issued its report yesterday, and its consequences cannot be overstated. The Levy Report found, in a nutshell, that the occupation of the West Bank is not actually an occupation because Israel’s presence there has spanned decades and is thus unique in modern history, and it therefore follows that settlements are not illegal as they are not being built in occupied territory. The report also states that because unauthorized settlement construction took place with the tacit agreement and implied support of successive governments, the unauthorized settlements can be retroactively legalized. So basically, for those following along at home, if you do something that is illegal for long enough, you can just call it legal later on down the road, and if the government decides to ignore the rule of law, that somehow changes the meaning of rule of law. In what can only be described as the most extreme of self parodies, Yesha head Dani Dayan praised the committee’s “impartial first rate jurists” and said that “it is clear that deep, basic and serious legal work was done.”
The report itself is bad enough, but more worrisome is the reaction from cabinet members, who are literally falling all over themselves to see who can be the one to most effusively praise the committee’s findings. The politics are such that there appears to be zero downside to pretending that Israel is not militarily occupying the West Bank because this occupation does not look like other occupations, and that is bound to create pressure for the government to formally endorse the committee’s findings. The fact that I haven’t seen any statements at all from people such as Benny Begin or Dan Meridor (and if they have issued statements or given interviews, please email me or post in the comments section) is even more worrisome yet, since their silence on this means that they either agree (unlikely) or are too cowed by the settler movement to speak out against it. Even Tzipi Livni, who is not a huge settlement advocate and who is not even formally in politics at the moment, said that “it is possible and necessary to use the Levy Report for matters of international law, while considering the current reality and continue negotiations on settlement blocs.”
Israel has reached a dangerous point, and I do not say that lightly. For years, Israel and Diaspora Jews railed against the idea of a one state solution, which was viewed – quite correctly – as a backdoor way of dismantling the Jewish state. With the Levy Report, Israel’s right wing has come up with its own one state solution, but the problem is that this one smashes any pretense Israel will have to being a democratic state unless it enfranchises all of the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Somehow, I don’t think that this is what Edmund Levy, Avigdor Lieberman, or Dani Dayan have in mind. If this happens, Israel can kiss any international support that it has goodbye, and that includes the U.S. I painstakingly made the case once before that U.S. support for Israel stems from the fact that it is a democracy and that should not be taken lightly. Israel does not want to live in a world in which it is forced to make common cause with China and Russia, and Jews of all stripes – Israeli and American, religious and secular – do not want to have to defend an Israel that openly annexes the West Bank while permanently and legally relegating the Palestinians to official second class status.
I refuse to believe, or perhaps just hope, that Netanyahu is stupid enough to take the Levy Report to its fullest logical conclusion. He is a smart guy and is well attuned to the challenges Israel faces, both military and otherwise, and he knows that what amounts to an annexation of the West Bank without corresponding political rights for all of its residents – in essence, the dreaded one state solution – would be suicidal. This is more than maintaining the status quo, in which Israel and the Palestinians negotiate on and off, the big settlement blocs that Israel is expected to maintain in a deal continue to grow, and Israel accepts that it is an occupying force that does not intend on remaining in the West Bank forever. The Levy Report represents a revolutionary and radical change, in which the occupation does not exist, the peace process is over, and the two state solution is finally dead and buried. There is no going back from this, since once the Israeli government declares that it is not occupying anything, it will be impossible to reign in the settlers if the government ever comes to its sense and changes its mind. The implementation of the Levy Report would make Israel a true pariah state on the world stage, and implementing it and then walking it back would mean civil war. Netanyahu knows all this, and he isn’t going to drive Israel into a ditch.
So, what happens next? I have been arguing again and again and again, and then one more time for good measure, that Likud is a party busting apart at the seams and destined to split. I think that this might be the final crack that splinters the party, depending on what Netanyahu does. The pressure from the settlers’ wing, triumphant in this gift that they have been handed, is such that Netanyahu cannot just blow them off or even water down the Levy Report. If he wants to keep them in the fold, he needs to implement the report, or else he is going to have a full blown rebellion on his hands and will be denounced up and down for betraying the settlers’ cause. If, on the other hand, he grasps the full enormity of what accepting the Levy Report means, then he is going to have split Likud in two. I stand by my prediction that he is going to choose keeping Israel in one piece and fracturing his party rather than the other way around, but if he doesn’t, then Israel is in for some dark days ahead.
