Dithering Over Dani Dayan’s Diplomacy
March 31, 2016 § 1 Comment
There was a revealing debate that played itself out in the pages of Ha’aretz earlier this week after the Israeli government announced that it was appointing Dani Dayan to be the consul general in New York. For those unfamiliar with him, Dayan is the former chairman of the Yesha Council, a position that is the de facto leader of the settlement movement, and he has become in many ways the international face of the settlements through his willingness to write, speak, and engage with foreign audiences. Prime Minister Netanyahu had initially appointed Dayan as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, but the Brazilian government was not willing to accept his credentials due to his settlement advocacy, so Dayan is now headed to the U.S., where many are looking at him askance.
Bradley Burston captures why Dayan is walking into a situation where he is already behind in the count, cataloguing the new consul general’s rejection of the two-state solution and his desire to annex the West Bank without any corresponding plan to grant the Palestinians living there any political rights. Burston consequently thinks that the American Jewish community should, like the government of Brazil, refuse to accept Dayan’s appointment and demand that he be replaced with someone who reflects American Jewish politics and values and is more in line with the outlook and communal mood of the majority of American Jews. As Burston writes, “To a Jewish community with grave reservations about the consequences of the settlement enterprise and its destructive impact on democracy and economics in Israel, and on peace, security, and human rights throughout the Holy Land, Israel is sending a man who declared, ‘The settlements of Judea and Samaria are not the problem — they are part of the solution.’”
Burston’s colleague Chemi Shalev takes a different tack. Shalev argues that the right way to approach Dayan’s appointment is not by looking at his audience, but by looking at his client. In Shalev’s view, since Dayan is being sent to New York to represent the government of Israel rather than the other way around and since Dayan accurately reflects the government’s views, he is in some ways the perfect envoy. Rather than pretending that the Israeli government embraces policies that American Jews would like to see, having Dayan as consul general in New York will make it clear that the government is not really interested in two states and put an end to the notion that the Netanyahu government is going to eventually come around.
I side with Shalev in this debate for a number of reasons. First, I don’t think it is appropriate to judge Dayan as a diplomat before he has even spent one minute in the job, and it is possible that he will surprise. I have observed Dayan in action on a few occasions, and while there is no question that he is an inveterate rightwinger, I found Burston’s description of him as vindictive and quick to anger as oddly off-base. Having watched Dayan address rooms where he is not only the most rightwing guy there but the only rightwing guy there, he is actually extremely diplomatic; he listens to the other side and then responds in a respectful and cogent way, with a heavy dose of humor. A diplomat isn’t supposed to nod and agree with everything his interlocutors say, but to listen well, argue well, and behave diplomatically. Perhaps Dayan’s intemperate and ill-timed comments on J Street being “un-Jewish” will turn out to be representative, but my limited observations of him point to the opposite.
More saliently, Shalev is right about what Dayan is here to do. A diplomat is supposed to reflect and advance his government’s positions rather than mold him or herself to fit the place where he or she is sent. The fact that Dayan may not be popular with American Jews doesn’t change the fact that he is a perfectly appropriate representative of the current government, and in some ways it would be more insulting to send a consul general to New York who would constantly dissemble and tell American Jews what they want to hear. There is a line between respectfully presenting unpopular positions, and obnoxiously asserting that you know better than everyone else. Some of Israel’s senior diplomats fall into the latter category, which is what makes them so ineffectual, but I don’t think Dayan is of the same ilk.
But the real lesson of Dayan’s appointment is a deeper one. His appointment is the clearest message that the Israeli government has sent yet that it does not view its policies as a problem, but rather the way in which they are presented. Dayan will not pretend to be anything but a rightwing one-stater who views the two-state solution as naïve and unrealistic. He will perfectly represent the current Israeli government as an unapologetic realist who views the bulk of American Jews as out of touch with the reality of Israel’s situation and neighborhood. Yet, the Israeli government sincerely seems to believe that forcefully and consistently presenting this message will change minds here, and that American Jews will eventually come around. Dayan as consul general lets us know that the Israeli government is blind as a bat to the damage caused by its policies, and that it is the naïve party here by assuming that it has a messaging problem rather than a policy problem. Israeli diplomats don’t need to be more forceful in pushing their message; they need a different message to push.
Nothing could illustrate this point better than yesterday’s news that Senator Pat Leahy and ten House Democrats have sent a letter to Secretary of State Kerry asking that he review U.S. military assistance to Israel and Egypt in light of alleged gross violations of human right by both countries. The fact that a relatively miniscule number of legislators signed a letter questioning military assistance to Israel will not matter in the scheme of things, but what is remarkable – and a bad harbinger of things to come – is that eleven members of Congress saw no problem lumping Israel with Egypt on the subject of human rights. It is a grossly inappropriate comparison, even if the intention was not to equate the two but to link their aid status as a legacy of the Camp David agreement, and there is no universe in which Israeli missteps are on the same plane as Egyptian killings and torture of political opponents. But Israel is not in Congressional crosshairs because its message needs to be more finely honed. It is in Congressional crosshairs because its policies in the West Bank are corrosive and inevitably lead to actions that no democracy should commit and that sully Israel’s reputation. This letter is a consequence of Israel mistakenly believing that it only has to explain itself better and give no quarter to its critics in order to make its problems go away. I wish Dani Dayan all the luck in the world, but he is sidling up to the table having already been dealt a losing hand.
Is It Wrong To Want A Jewish Mayor Of Jerusalem?
February 25, 2016 § 5 Comments
When Labor leader Buji Herzog rolled out his unilateral disengagement plan a couple of weeks ago – a plan that I think can be a positive step if it incorporates a number of critical components – he made a comment during a Knesset debate that rankled people and drew condemnations for appealing to racist logic. The comment was that if separation from the Palestinians does not happen soon, Jerusalem risks having an Arab mayor, with the obvious implication that this would be a bad thing that should be prevented. So at the risk of plunging into treacherous waters on this topic, is it wrong to want the mayor of Israel’s capital to be Jewish?
A simple answer might be yes. While discrimination and intolerance exist in Israeli politics and society – as they do in the politics and society of every country on Earth – Israel’s testament to being a democracy is that it has full political rights for all of its citizens. As there are Arab members of Knesset, Arab judges on the High Court of Justice, and Arab officers in the military, there is no reason why there cannot or should not be an Arab mayor of Jerusalem. To warn against such an eventuality is to transform Israel from being a Jewish state into a state only for Jews. It is easy to see why people took offense at what Herzog said.
But in this instance, this particular simple answer is insufficient. Let’s begin with some context. The idea of separation is not only Herzog’s main selling point but the animating idea behind the withdrawal plan itself, since it views separating from the Palestinians as soon as possible as so crucial that it throws out the Oslo framework with which the Labor Party is so strongly associated. The premise behind this is twofold, one that deals with the here and now and one that deals with the bigger picture. The here and now is the current security breakdown where violence has returned to Israel’s streets, and so Herzog is repeating an idea that has been largely associated with the right, which is to retreat behind a wall. The bigger picture is the more interesting one though, because it deals with the central principle of Zionism, which is the establishment of a Jewish state, and whether Zionism is a legitimate political movement.
When Herzog warned against the looming danger of an Arab mayor of Jerusalem, I don’t think this was a dogwhistle meant to appeal to anti-Arab sentiment. I get why some may think so, given the plain language involved and coming against the backdrop of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s infamous and abhorrent election night exhortation to rightwing voters to come to the polls and counter the Arab voters “coming out in droves.” I certainly cannot say definitively that Herzog wasn’t drawing from the same ugly well. But my reading of his comment in the larger context is that separation from the Palestinians is needed to secure the Zionist dream, and his invoking of Jerusalem was a clumsy shortcut to making that point. Zionism is nothing more and nothing less than an expression of Jewish nationalism, and the dream of Jewish nationalism necessarily involves Jewish officials exercising sovereignty in a Jewish state. Does it mean that only Jews are allowed into the political arena? Nope. But it’s not outrageous to express a wish that the mayor of the Jewish state’s capital city be Jewish, particularly given that Jews were barred from the Holy Basin when it was under Jordanian control between 1948 and 1967.
The entire premise behind the two-state solution is to preserve Jewish nationalist aspirations, which are at risk in a binational state when that state is no longer majority Jewish. I will not condemn anyone who suggests that Jewish leadership of a Jewish state is a desired goal, since to do otherwise is to flirt with the idea that Zionism is racism. Nobody will blink in the future at the suggestion that the mayor of East Jerusalem – presumably the capital of an independent Palestine – be Palestinian, and that will be neither a racist nor an unreasonable expectation. Herzog was expressing the flip side of that sentiment in the present, albeit in an awkward manner given that Jerusalem is not currently divided between two states. I don’t read it as an attempt to disenfranchise Jerusalem’s Arab residents – and I’d note that the fact that Herzog brings up the possibility is evidence that he isn’t trying to do so – but as an inarticulate way of expressing that without separation, the Zionist goal of a Jewish state is in danger. I for one would have no problem with an Arab mayor of Jerusalem, but there is little question that Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem is an integral part of Zionism and powerful imagery to evoke.
What Herzog said was largely deemed to be an ordinary statement in Israel because it resonated with many Israeli Jews as a simple explication of Zionist aspirations. This is not because Israeli Jews are racists seeking to keep their fellow Arab citizens down, and it is not because the state would ever prevent an elected Arab mayor of Jerusalem from taking office. It is because they rightly and justifiably view Zionism as just as legitimate as any other form of nationalism, and Jerusalem represents the very heart of Jewish nationalist aspirations. It is no coincidence that Herzog didn’t warn about an Arab mayor of Haifa or Ashdod. I do not begrudge anyone who calls out Herzog for his comment, but it is simply not the same as Netanyahu raising the alarm about the looming peril of Arab votes. It involves a larger question of whether one sees Zionism as inherently racist or as a legitimate nationalist movement of a long-oppressed people.
Why Should You Care About A Political Horizon For Palestinians?
December 3, 2015 § 3 Comments
Political horizon is a term that gets bandied about a lot, including by me, when talking about the Palestinians and how to lower levels of tension and violence in Israel. The basic idea is that a lack of a political horizon leads to desperation on the Palestinian side, fueling terrorism and violence against Israelis, and it is accordingly important to provide some sense of political optimism for Palestinians. The hope is that even if a Palestinian state is not imminently around the corner, progress toward that goal will make actual conditions on the ground better.
Nevertheless, this is not a truism that lies unchallenged. Just as there is research and theory demonstrating that violence in general is caused by a lack of political movement and the frustration of nationalist aspirations, there is research and theory demonstrating that it is caused by poverty, or lack of jobs, or humiliation, or youth, or sexual frustration, or religious motivation. Complex phenomena are complex for a reason and the reality is that political violence is rarely monocausal, but people like to boil things down to one issue that if altered would change the current reality. Prime Minister Netanyahu, for instance, despite his rhetoric about jihadi terrorism and radical Islamism, appears to believe that the way out of political violence emanating from the West Bank is economics. He and his circle have long pushed the idea of an economic peace on the theory that improving the Palestinian economy will create a set of alternative incentives that do not include violence against Israelis; essentially, the thinking is that prosperous people are happy people with too much to lose.
Let’s say that you are amenable to this argument – and I think there is something to it, although I firmly believe that political progress matters more in this sphere than economic progress. Why then should the idea of a political horizon matter for practical purposes (setting aside for the moment the moral considerations involved in preventing a group’s right to self-determination)? To take it even further, let’s say you are someone who has never read your Benedict Anderson and puts the word Palestinian in quotes, or – as someone emailed in response to one of my recent columns – refers to “Fakestinians.” You don’t believe that Palestinians should have a state and that they aren’t capable of statehood. Why should it still be important to you that Palestinians perceive some sort of political horizon?
I was reading an atlas with my six year old daughter earlier this week, and when she saw that it had geographical maps and political maps, she asked me what politics means. I told her that in the context of a political map, it means the way that people organize themselves into different groups, but there is of course more behind that answer. Politics is how people acquire power and use that power to govern in an ideal world. When politics is absent, violence inevitably fills the void. Politics can be messy and nasty and ultimately deeply unsatisfying – just look at the current Republican primary race – but it is also the only tried and true route to a peaceful resolution of problems. It is not a sufficient component, but it is a necessary component.
The history of our own country belies the idea that economics trumps politics, and that politics can be ignored or downplayed. The British citizen revolutionaries of 1776 did not rise up against their own government because of excessive taxation; they rose up because they had no say in that taxation. The wealthy landowners who largely made up the leaders that we now refer to as the Founding Fathers saw no alternative to armed rebellion not because they had no economic horizon, but because they had no political horizon. It’s not for nothing that the Israeli security establishment has fingered the precise same problem in its assessment of what is driving the violence in Israel and the West Bank.
I am not suggesting that providing some sort of optimism on the political front – and that means at the very least Netanyahu refraining from talk about the need to occupy the West Bank for generations to come – is a silver bullet to end violence, because it isn’t. A political horizon is not a miracle cure. What it does is demonstrate that there is an alternative path to armed violence in seeking to achieve political goals. Von Clausewitz famously called war a continuation of politics by other means, but it is often a breakdown of politics, not a continuation of politics. That Palestinian leaders have rejected Israeli peace offers is not a reason to stop trying, since what ensues is sadly predictable. I am not advocating for the resumption of negotiations or forcing the two sides together for another inevitable failure. I am advocating for Israel to minimally demonstrate that it sees a path to a Palestinian state that involves attainable conditions at some point in the future. That vision does not seem to now exist, and it is the absence of a horizon that makes things on the Palestinian side look so bleak.
It is not wooly headed peaceniks saying that the restoration of a political horizon is necessary; it is the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus. So even if you are a true believer in Greater Israel, or you think that a Palestinian state will become a base for more terror against Israelis, or you are adamant that Israel has demonstrated its willingness to compromise and that the Palestinians never will, this is something you should favor. As great as things like Rawabi and Palestinian economic zones are, they are the equivalent of removing a splinter from the finger of someone who is bleeding from the head.
A Zionism of Excuses
November 19, 2015 § 7 Comments
There is a familiar refrain that has been coming out of Israel for some time, and it was on display during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. last week. The refrain is that Israel must maintain the status quo – sometimes referred to in shorthand as “conflict management” – despite its desire to have peace because outside events beyond its control are hemming it in. The Palestinian refusal to negotiate without preconditions, the risk of the West Bank turning into a terrorist enclave akin to Gaza, threats to regional stability from a variety of state and non-state actors, European sympathy for the Palestinians, and the resurgence of jihadi terrorism all combine for an antediluvian environment in which Israel cannot afford to take any risks lest the flood waters come rushing in. It is a picture that portrays Israel as an ark in a stormy sea, an island of stability whose actions are constrained because of its environment.
In many ways, this picture is an accurate one. All of the above factors exist to one degree or another, and they all impact Israel’s security and economy. This notion that to act in the face of such a threat matrix would be to assume unmanageable risks was nicely explicated by Natan Sachs in Foreign Affairs recently, where he described Netanyahu’s strategy as anti-solutionism emanating from a belief that there are no current fixes for Israel’s myriad challenges. The Zionist project becomes an inward looking one that tries to passively fend off threats, rather than an outward looking one that attempts to actively solve problems. I have many quarrels with Netanyahu’s leadership of Israel, but perhaps the largest one is that I find this general philosophy to be fundamentally at odds with the Zionist ideal. The strategy of sitting back and waiting for the universe to present a more propitious moment would be unrecognizable to Israel’s founders and iconic leaders, and it reveals a Zionism of excuses rather than actions.
Like many American Jews of my generation, I was raised on a diet of stories about the Panglossian wonder of Israel. The narrative went from Israeli pioneers braving malaria and draining the swamps of Palestine, to building the institutions of a future state despite hostility from the British and the Arabs, to the unimaginable diplomatic accomplishment of having the two opposing Cold War superpowers both vote in favor of partition, to the successive military miracles of beating back the invading armies of 1948 and then achieving an unthinkable victory in a mere six days in June 1967, to the modern successes of Israel in a variety of economic and technological spheres. This was a wholly sanitized narrative that avoided many contradictions and unpleasant truths, but the running thread throughout was that Zionism meant taking action and working to better your circumstances, no matter how insurmountable the challenges may appear. Zionism did not wait for the world it inhabited to change; it changed the world it inhabited.
While the above story is an incomplete one, the point about Zionism was correct. The yishuv in Mandatory Palestine did in fact face huge challenges and nearly impossible odds, and those odds did not terribly improve with the establishment of Israel. Zionism was the personification of a can-do attitude and creating your own positive reality, and it is no accident that Israel was widely admired as a plucky underdog. The Zionist project was something to be admired because it represented the ultimate victory of hard work and persistence, and above all it was a philosophy of doing.
What Netanyahu now peddles is the polar opposite. After listening to Netanyahu last week in the U.S. and spending this week in Israel meeting with various Israeli officials and politicians, I can’t help but sink under the weight of the ingrained pessimism and various pretexts for inaction. To listen to the Israeli government is to hear about an Israel at the mercy of its military and diplomatic adversaries, an Israel that cannot act because the barely functioning Palestinian government is outmaneuvering it, an Israel that has a litany of excuses for why it is dependent on the good will of others in order to improve its own situation. If only Mahmoud Abbas would drop his preconditions for negotiating, if only Palestinians would stop incitement, if only the Palestinian Authority would acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state…if, if, if. I am not suggesting that these are not legitimate complaints, only that to allow them to bog you down and be held hostage by their very existence conveys a complete lack of imagination and confidence. It is a betrayal of Zionist ideals, pure and simple, and one that makes Israel look weak rather than strong.
It is accepted conventional wisdom that the solutions to the various elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are known to everyone, and it is just a matter of getting both sides to say yes. I think a better way of formulating this is that the solutions are simple, but they are not easy. They will involve painful concessions and even more painful actions, and neither side is going to come out of this with everything they want. The difference between the Zionism of the 20th century and Netanyahu’s 21st century Zionism is that the former understood that hardship is not the same thing as impossibility, whereas the latter conflates the two at the drop of a hat. I know which version of Zionism I favor.
Does What Palestinians Want Matter?
November 5, 2015 § 5 Comments
Yitzhak Rabin was no doe-eyed peacenik. He did not believe in the Palestinians’ good intentions. He was convinced that ceding the West Bank to the Palestinians was necessary to preserve Israel as a Jewish state, but was under no illusions that doing so would cure all ills and turn the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River into Switzerland. Above all, he was a champion of incrementalism, not allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good and dictate inaction.
I bring this up during the week that we mark twenty years since Rabin’s assassination because of a much-discussed long piece in Mosaic by Daniel Polisar that looks at hundreds of polls of Palestinian attitudes to ascertain what it is that Palestinians want. Polisar cites polls showing large majorities of Palestinians supporting armed attacks against Israeli civilians; justifying and supporting violence as a means to extract Israeli concessions; convinced that Israel wants to annex the West Bank and expel all of the Arabs; asserting that Israel wants to destroy al-Aqsa and replace it with a synagogue; denying Jewish history in the land; and so on and so forth. The picture that emerges is an ugly one of Palestinians harboring ill will toward Jews, not being willing to accept Israel, and ensuring that Israel is fated to live in an eternal state of war. It is not unreasonable to read the thousands of words that Polisar dedicates to documenting Palestinian survey responses about Israel and conclude, as many have, that Israel cannot and should not ever grant the Palestinians a state of their own in the West Bank, since to do so would be to take an irreversible step that would place Israel in grave danger.
However, to reach this conclusion would be the wrong response to this data, and this perhaps more than anything else is the lesson to be gleaned from Rabin’s legacy. There are two basic ways to approach the bleak picture painted by Polisar’s review of Palestinian opinion (and this comes with the caveat that I have not read through all 330 of the polls that Polisar has analyzed, so I will have to take it on faith that the picture he paints is an accurate and contextual one). The first is to say that Palestinian hatred and rejection of Israel is immutable, not primarily driven by anything that Israel has done and implacably unresponsive to anything that Israel will do in the future. For instance, in discussing the manner in which Palestinians view Jews, Polisar cites a 2011 Pew Research Center poll in which only 4% of Palestinians held favorable views of Jews, and 52% of Palestinians claimed that some religions were more prone to violence than others with 88% of those citing Judaism as the most violent offender. This type of attitude does not seem like it will change any time soon given the incredibly lopsided numbers, and in Polisar’s conclusion he writes, “Could anything change this state of affairs? It seems highly improbable that the Palestinian masses, whose views have been relatively stable for so long, will spontaneously shift gears in the foreseeable future… Similarly farfetched, but for other reasons, is the idea that Israeli leaders, by modifying their rhetoric or restraining the reactions of the security forces, can appreciably dampen Palestinian support for violence.”
There is, however, another way to approach this data, which is that Palestinian hatred and rejection of Israel is largely a response to Palestinian historical experience, and while this never justifies the deadly targeting of civilians it has engendered, it suggests that Israeli action can indeed dampen support for Palestinian violence. As a useful exercise, let’s look at another country’s response to the same questions in that 2011 Pew poll. In this country, only 9% of non-Muslim respondents had a favorable view of Muslims, and of the 63% of respondents who agreed that some religions were more violent than others, 91% fingered Islam as the most violent. Is immutable hatred at work here as well? If you haven’t already guessed which country this is, it is Israel. The overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews, American Jews, and supporters of Israel worldwide – and I am in this category – would reject the view that these numbers are driven by anything other than Israel’s experience with Palestinian terror, rejectionism, and violence, but it is always more difficult to see the context on the other side than it is on your own. It is foolhardy to pretend that Palestinians’ experience with statelessness, Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and dual standards for Israelis and Palestinians both inside and outside the Green Line does not contribute to Palestinian attitudes in a major way.
Let’s bring this back to where we started, with the legacy of Rabin. A Rabin approach to the Palestinians – one that looks at the longterm and existential threats to Israel and shapes the strategic environment in the face of those threats – dictates a two state solution and separation from the Palestinians in the face of these survey numbers irrespective of how you interpret them. If you think that Palestinians will eternally hate Israel and want to kill Jews, then deepening a situation where Israelis and Palestinians are intertwined throughout the West Bank is sheer madness, and presents a security nightmare with no permanent solution. The only possible way out is a divorce with a heavily guarded and patrolled border in between Israel and Palestine. Likewise, if you think that Palestinian hatred of Israel is driven in some part by Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the consequent lack of a Palestinian state, then reversing course will indeed have a constructive effect on Palestinian attitudes that support violence against Israelis. Israel cannot be held captive by Palestinian attitudes or wait for them to change, but must act according to its own interests and without regard to what it sees on the other side.
I heard Dan Meridor last week repeatedly make the point that Israel is paralyzed by a lack of leadership, and he referenced the examples of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat as leaders who would not have taken the steps they did in service of peace between Israelis and Egyptians had they been enslaved to public opinion. While Israel may be facing hostile Palestinian public opinion, the fact is that the Palestinian Authority, while far from perfect, has demonstrated its willingness under Mahmoud Abbas to work with Israel and prevent violence from erupting in the West Bank. Prince Turki al-Faisal, who spent a quarter century as the Saudi Arabian intelligence minister and also served as ambassador to the U.S., told IPF last week in a meeting that the Arab world would like to engage Israel, and that the Arab Peace Initiative is not a take-it-or-leave-it offer but one that is open to negotiation and awaiting an official Israeli response. The upshot is that there is an opening here for Israel to do something constructive no matter what Palestinians think. Were Rabin still alive, he would undoubtedly take advantage of this opening and run through it.
