Your Guide to Settlements and Ethnic Cleansing
September 13, 2016 § 6 Comments
Prime Minister Netanyahu stirred up a cocktail of controversy on Friday when his latest attempt at creating a viral video did not get the reception he anticipated. In the two minute clip, Netanyahu opened by saying he was perplexed by the charge that “Jewish communities” in the West Bank are an obstacle to peace since it is clear that Arabs living inside Israel are not an obstacle to peace. He then alleged that the sole precondition the Palestinian leadership has demanded for a future state is that it be free of Jews, which he said is an example of ethnic cleansing. He went on to criticize this demand as outrageous, criticize the world community for not finding this outrage to be outrageous, and firmly state that those who say that Jews cannot live somewhere should think through the implications. Since the video has provoked responses all over the map from the right, the left, the Israeli opposition, and the U.S. government, here is your concise and handy guide to Jews in the West Bank, ethnic cleansing, and what Netanyahu is up to.
Netanyahu is right. It is outrageous that a future Palestinian state won’t allow any Jews to live in the West Bank! Yes, it would be if that were the case. If an independent Palestine forced out all of its Jews and barred any Jews from living there, it would certainly be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing, and there is no defensible argument to construct such a policy.
What do you mean, “if that were the case” – haven’t Palestinian leaders said there will be no Jews allowed? Nope. Netanyahu was in all likelihood referring to Mahmoud Abbas’s statement in 2013 that he would not accept the “the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands” in the aftermath of an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement. As Matt Duss helpfully points out, PLO leaders have explicitly said that Jews are welcome to live in a Palestinian state while categorically ruling out Israelis living in settlements where they maintain their Israeli citizenship. To put this into some perspective, this would be like a presidential candidate saying that Syrian Muslims are welcome to come and live in the U.S. so long as they are not living in extra-territorial enclaves that are sovereign Syrian territory and they are subject to the laws and authority of the U.S. Makes sense, right? A presidential candidate would be on much shakier and more discriminatory ground if he, say, I don’t know, ruled out all Syrian Muslims entirely just because they are Syrian Muslims. Now, it is certainly possible – and even likely – that there are members of the Palestinian leadership who have said they would bar all Jews, Israeli citizens or not. Given the way that the Old City of Jerusalem was administered while under Jordanian control between 1948 and 1967, or the calls from various quarters to ban Jews from the Temple Mount entirely today, there is certainly some precedent that warrants suspicion. But given the public record of Abbas’s comments, it is clear that he was referring to Israelis living in Palestine as Israeli citizens under Israeli sovereignty. So much like Netanyahu’s rhetorical excess back in October regarding Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Holocaust, once again his imprecision with pesky little details has cost him some credibility.
So it comes back to settlements? Indeed it does. Note Netanyahu’s rhetorical sleight of hand in the video, where he begins by talking about Jewish communities in the West Bank, and then pivots to talking about Jews writ large. It is one thing for Israel to absorb the large settlements blocs into Israel proper once an agreement is signed, but it is quite another for Israel to maintain settlements that are in Palestinian state territory, that are only open to residents who are Jewish, and that are Israeli sovereign territory guarded by Israeli soldiers. That is what Netanyahu was actually arguing for in the video and positing that there is no reason that such an arrangement should be an obstacle to peace, when the reality is that describing it for what it actually is, as I have above, demonstrates precisely what an enormous problem it is. If Palestinians who before 1948 lived in territory that is now part of Israel wanted to come back and live in their old houses but as Palestinian citizens subject to the law and authority of the government of Palestine, they’d be dismissed out of hand, and rightly so. Once a permanent status agreement is signed, the Israeli government should make every conceivable effort to persuade settlers to relocate to Israel and provide compensation for them to do so, which will likely result in the evacuation of the overwhelming majority of settlers. Any settler who greets the IDF with violent resistance should be arrested and immediately moved out of the West Bank. But any peaceful, law-abiding settler who is willing to renounce Israeli citizenship and wants to remain in his or her home should absolutely be allowed to do so, but only as citizens of Palestine under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian government. In other words, settlers are fine; settlements are not.
So why would Netanyahu put out a video like that? This brings us to the essence of Netanyahu, which is that he subsumes all policy goals to political ones. There is a reason that Netanyahu has provoked the wrath and scorn of nearly every general and intelligence chief who has served under him. Why negotiate a new defense package when you have maximum leverage when you can instead shore up your rightwing base at home by giving a speech before Congress instead? Why keep an extremely competent and respected and supremely qualified defense minister during the midst of a wave of violence – and following an Iran deal that you say has put Israel at greater risk – when you can enlarge your coalition and neutralize an ultranationalist foe by making him defense minister despite a pitiful lack of qualifications? In this case, Netanyahu was coming off the debacle of shutting down train repairs on Shabbat in order to mollify his Haredi coalition partners and then having the public squarely blame him for putting politics ahead of soldiers trying to get home for the weekend, and then facing down polls that show Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party besting Netanyahu and Likud were an election to be held now. On top of that, the polls show Likud losing ground to its farther right coalition partner Habayit Hayehudi. In this instance, the obvious move for Netanyahu was to say something controversial that would fire up the rightwing base, provoke rebukes abroad, and thus benefit Netanyahu even further as he rails against foreign interference and vows to stand up to those who would smear Israel and try to discriminate against Jews. I’d be surprised if Netanyahu anticipated quite the depth of the pushback that he would face, but this is all part of his domestic political calculations.
So in conclusion, I agree 100% with the principle that Netanyahu espoused, namely that it is outrageous bigotry to prevent Jews from living in the West Bank. Unfortunately, in this instance Netanyahu was not speaking theoretically, and everyone should see through the smokescreen that he constructed in order to use anti-Semitism as a cover in defending settlements.
Opining On Outposts
September 8, 2016 § 2 Comments
In 2011, the Israeli High Court ruled that Migron, an outpost in the West Bank built without government approval on private Palestinian land, had to be dismantled. After the government ignored the court order and instead worked out an agreement with Migron’s residents that delayed the evacuation, the court stepped in again and ordered Migron evacuated before the deadline that had been agreed upon with the settlers. The Israeli government complied, but rather than end the Migron experiment entirely, it simply moved Migron slightly to the south, where it would now sit on state land, and retroactively legalized its status.
Were Migron an isolated incident, it would be bad enough. But as the current fights over Amona and Netiv Ha’avot – two other unauthorized outposts ordered to be demolished by the High Court – make clear, the story of Migron is the rule rather than the exception. Just like with Migron, Amona is slated to be torn down at the end of the year but the government is planning on relocating it a few hundred yards away and retroactively approving it as an authorized settlement. The fight over Netiv Ha’avot is only just beginning as the High Court ruled last week that it had to be demolished and could not be retroactively legalized, but given the parade of ministers who vowed to prevent its destruction, there is no doubt Netiv Ha’avot will live on. It is critical to understand what is taking place in these unauthorized outposts and to recognize the “solutions” for just how damaging they are, since they are critical to a key talking point that Prime Minister Netanyahu uses when speaking to foreign audiences and point to just how malleable rule of law is within Israel.
While there is controversy over any and all Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank, Israel has attempted to deal with the contested legality of settlements in general by establishing rules and processes for determining when Israeli law deems a settlement legal or not. The two main components that a settlement requires to be legal in Israel’s eyes are government approval in a formal planning and authorization process, and being built on land that is not privately owned by Palestinians. The outposts, which number in the hundreds, violate both of these requirements, which is why the High Court continues to order their demolition. Yet, either because the orders are ignored, the state retroactively legalizes the construction, or the outposts are relocated to the closest parcel of state land, once an outpost goes up it almost never disappears. Even though outposts do not, by definition, have formal government approval, they are often supported by government officials and ministries.
Migron, for instance, was funded by the Housing Ministry at the behest of then-Minister Yair Rafaeli despite never having been formally approved or planned. The best way to understand how outposts get built, evade government efforts to tear them down, and manage to leverage political support and connections to tie up the bureaucracy and keep expanding, is not by reading the news but by reading Assaf Gavron’s 2014 novel The Hilltop, which is an engrossing work of fiction but also a cutting analysis of the dynamics that allow illegal outposts to thrive.
And as Isabel Kershner’s recent New York Times article on illegal outposts makes clear, they are indeed thriving, as the Israeli government retroactively legalizes them and does everything in its power under Israel’s legal system to let them stay. I am not someone who thinks that the presence of a few caravans on isolated hilltops makes it impossible to create a fair and contiguous Palestinian state, but I still think that the largest spotlight possible needs to be shined on this process for a variety of reasons.
First, one of Netanyahu’s favorite rhetorical devices is to note that Israel has not built any new settlements during his current run in the prime minister’s office. He uses this fact to shut down criticism of Israeli settlement activity and as proof that it is only the Palestinians, and not he, who are the real obstacles to achieving a two-state agreement, and when he trots it out before sympathetic or uninformed audiences, it is an effective trick. The trick is that while it is technically and narrowly correct, it ignores the fact that Israel under Netanyahu’s – and his predecessors’ – watch may not be authorizing brand new settlements, but the government doesn’t have to when it can just take the illegal ones that exist and make them legal. The more that interested observers get the sleight of hand at work, the less Netanyahu will be able to make unsubstantiated claims that muddy the waters.
Second, and more substantively important, the process of making illegal outposts legal is devastating to a two-state solution, not because the outposts themselves are such an obstacle but because they point to just how hard it will be for Israel to undertake the big moves that will be necessary down the road. If the government cannot commit to evacuating tens of settlers living in caravans and tents, what will happen when it agrees to evacuate thousands of settlers living in stone structures, like in Kdumim or Shilo or even Ariel? These outposts are a test of the government’s will, and it almost always fails the test miserably. If settlers can establish a community in contravention of Israeli law, clash with the IDF, repel government efforts to make them evacuate, refer to politicians and IDF commanders as Nazis, dictators, and enemies of Jews (all of which routinely happens), and still draw support from ministers and face little worse than having their homes picked up and relocated just yards away, then I wish the government good luck in working up the courage to move tens of thousands of settlers out of the West Bank who actually followed the rules.
Third, the process of dealing with illegal outposts shows how the rule of law in Israel can be more dependent on whom you are than on what you do. When Israeli Jews build illegally in the West Bank, the government has to be dragged kicking and screaming by NGOs who file lawsuits before it takes an action, and that action more often than not is to legalize what was illegal. When Palestinians build illegally in the West Bank – something that they are often forced into by circumstance as Israel issued only one building permit for Palestinians in Area C in 2014 and issued zero in 2015 – their homes are not retroactively legalized or relocated to Area B on the state’s dime, but are torn down. When Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced that he was going to comply with the order to tear down Amona, he made sure to add that he was going to comply with the order to tear down the Palestinian village of Susya as well, which seems defensible on its face since the same rules should apply to everyone until you consider that Israel is going to rebuild Amona right next door while the residents of Susya are more likely going to have to fend for themselves.
In the greater scope of things, a tiny illegal outpost deep in the West Bank is irrelevant compared to the problems presented by places like Givat Hamatos or Givat Ze’ev, neighborhoods that do indeed make a contiguous Palestinian state with access to East Jerusalem overwhelmingly difficult. But these outposts matter because of what they say about the Israeli government and its willingness to give in to extremists and small interest groups at the slightest hint of political pressure. In many ways, as the fate of these outposts go, so goes the fate of the two-state solution.
A Primer on Building Beyond the Green Line
July 7, 2016 § 2 Comments
Israel announced its plans this week for new construction in a number of different places in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the variety of locations provides a great primer for why I think that not all settlements should be treated equally. Whenever Israel announces that it is constructing new units across the Green Line, it is instinctively condemned, but this is not always the most productive approach. There is no question that settlements are a large problem that cannot and should not be brushed aside as if they are ancillary to the difficulty in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is also no question that the problem that the settlements present has grown exponentially as a direct result of purposeful Israeli policy to move as many Jews into the West Bank as possible. I do not give the Israeli government a free pass on this issue nor do I justify the activity after the fact, and look no further for why the Palestinians are so rightly distrustful of Israel constantly seeking to establish facts on the ground. Nevertheless, while I wish that we were not at this point, it does not change the fact that some settlements are a lot worse than others. Looking at the most recent announcements demonstrates precisely why.
Following the horrific terrorist attacks last week in Kiryat Arba and Route 60, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Lieberman approved a tender for 42 new homes in Kiryat Arba, intended partly to signal that terrorism against Israelis in the West Bank will never drive them out. Netanyahu and Lieberman also approved plans for 560 new units in Ma’ale Adumim, and 140 and 100 new units in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Ramot and Har Homa respectively. Finally, they approved 600 new homes for Palestinians in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Safafa. None of these announcements are helpful in that they all complicate matters to one degree or another, but the question to be asked is to what extent they make arriving at a permanent status agreement more difficult. These announcements taken as a group represent four distinct types of areas, all of which should be treated differently: settlements that will have to be evacuated in a final deal, settlements that will be annexed to Israel, neighborhoods of East Jerusalem that will remain under Israeli sovereignty, and neighborhoods of East Jerusalem that have the potential to be the decisive nail in the coffin of the two-state solution.
Kiryat Arba is an example of the first category. It sits right next to Hebron and was one of the first settlements that was built after the Six Day War, and has historical and emotional resonance given the millennia-old Jewish connection to Hebron, considered to be the second holiest city in Judaism after Jerusalem. It is also a settlement that will unquestionably have to be evacuated when the time comes. Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank and Kiryat Arba is located far into what will be the future state of Palestine. It was not part of the Jewish state envisioned in the 1947 partition plan, it is outside the current security barrier, and was not included in the areas to be annexed by Israel under its own proposals at Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001, or at Annapolis in 2008. The Israeli government could approve one thousand new units there tomorrow and all it would do is complicate the eventual evacuation of Kiryat Arba. This type of housing approval is completely unproductive and unnecessarily provocative, but it thankfully does nothing to change the facts on the ground by making a two-state solution more difficult to negotiate.
Ma’ale Adumim is an example of the second category, although it is more problematic than some of the other settlements that share this distinction. It anchors one of the five settlement blocs, is the third largest settlement in the West Bank and one of only four Jewish cities across the Green Line, and it is inside the planned route for the security barrier. The vast majority of Israelis consider it to be completely non-controversial and part of Israel, and it has been included in the territory that Israel would like to annex during each negotiation with the Palestinians, including in the 2003 Geneva Initiative. If one takes the position, as I do, that settlement construction inside the blocs should be treated differently than construction outside the blocs, then more housing in Ma’ale Adumim should essentially be ignored. What makes Ma’ale Adumim a little different is that because it is significantly east of Jerusalem, its continued growth poses problems for Palestinian contiguity in the West Bank and – depending on which way it expands – Palestinian access to Jerusalem. But assuming that the new construction does not move north or west, the new units in Ma’ale Adumim are ultimately going to be part of Israel under a permanent status agreement.
Ramot is one of the ring neighborhoods attached to West Jerusalem to the north, and there is an even smaller likelihood than there is with Ma’ale Adumim that it does not remain part of Israel under an eventual peace deal. Far more complicated is Har Homa, which was approved by Netanyahu in 1997 during his first term as prime minister, and is one of only two Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem to be built post-Oslo. What makes Har Homa so controversial is that it is one of two pieces in the jigsaw puzzle cutting off Bethlehem from Jerusalem, and it seriously damages Palestinian continuity in the area south of Jerusalem. Despite being inside the security barrier and the municipal boundary of Jerusalem, it is obvious in glancing at a map why Har Homa makes a final resolution far more difficult, and the fact that its boundary has now outgrown the territory that Israel proposed to annex at Camp David and that it was not included by the Geneva Initiative in Israeli territory illustrates this point further. Its population is now over 25,000 and when push comes to shove it is likely to be part of Israel under a permanent status agreement, but it is one of the best examples there is of how Israel establishes facts on the ground that are specifically intended to make an agreement harder to reach, in this case by strategically expanding what is considered to be part of Jerusalem and cutting off Palestinian access from the southern West Bank.
This leaves the second part of the jigsaw puzzle between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, which is Beit Safafa and Givat Hamatos. The former is an Arab neighborhood, the latter a planned Jewish neighborhood and one of two absolute red lines for the U.S. when it comes to Israeli construction (the other being E-1, across from Ma’ale Adumim) since it would cut off the last remaining corridor between Bethlehem and Jerusalem and make dividing Jerusalem in any permanent status agreement exponentially more difficult. The importance of Givat Hamatos to opponents of two states is evident in the reactions to the approval for Palestinian construction in Beit Safafa, with Zeev Elkin slamming the construction announcement since it does not also include Jewish housing in Givat Hamatos and Naftali Bennett calling it a “Palestinian arrow in the heart of Jerusalem” and a de facto division of the city. The government didn’t have much choice in the matter as the Jerusalem District Court in May ordered the construction of housing in Beit Safafa to move forward since it had already been planned and approved, but the fact that it instantly created pressure on Netanyahu from his right is dangerous. There is no more precarious area beyond the Green Line than Givat Hamatos, and should the neighborhood ever be built, it is hard to see a worse obstacle for the two-state solution.
The policy of the United States is to criticize any building by Israel over the Green Line, and this week’s announcement prompted the expected deep concern from the State Department. Were I the president, however, knowing that Israeli politics and public opinion are where they are and understanding that some construction is nearly innocuous while other construction is deeply deleterious, I would criticize the new units in Kiryat Arba, keep my mouth shut about Ramot and Ma’ale Adumim, project concern over Har Homa with a call not to expound the boundaries of the neighborhood in any way, and make it clear that any moves in Givat Hamatos will be treated as the equivalent of a nuclear option. Yes, this is much more complicated than just criticizing any and all new building, but it would be a policy designed to prevent Israel from doing harm in places where it really matters and get to a two-state solution that both sides will be able to live with.
Sunshine and Rain
June 30, 2016 § 2 Comments
I’ve spent the last week in Israel with IPF exploring the security situation in depth, spending days in the Gaza envelope, Jerusalem seam line, southern West Bank, and Jordan Valley to get a firsthand sense of Israel’s security challenges and requirements. This included meeting with former Israeli generals and national security advisers, American security officials, and Palestinian security and local government officials to get their assessments. The amount that I have absorbed will take awhile to fully process, but let me start with one reason for despondence and one for encouragement.
The most disheartening thing I have seen this week – aside from Hebron, where I hadn’t been for two decades and which provoked in me a unique brew of shock, rage, sadness, and apathy all at once – is the complete lack of daring on both sides. Let’s start with the Israelis. One thing you immediately hear when talking to Israeli officials about doing anything on the Palestinian front is incitement. There is no question that incitement is a genuine problem that should not be dismissed by anyone who takes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seriously. One high-ranking IDF officer told us how terrorism in the area under his command has morphed from “organized” to “inspired” and is enabled by a social media echo chamber, and incitement is certainly a component in the wave of attacks on Israelis that has only recently abated. Nevertheless, the IDF’s assessment of the wave of terrorism that began in the fall is that twice as many terrorists were motivated by nationalism – i.e. lack of political progress – than by incitement. This should logically warrant the conclusion that it is more important to take constructive steps now, unilaterally or otherwise, to change conditions in the West Bank than to sit pat until all incitement everywhere stops. But using incitement as a reason not to take any steps at all is easy politics, particularly because it provides perfect evidence for the argument that there is no partner and allows the government to maintain the status quo, such as it is, indefinitely.
Notwithstanding the fact that incitement is a concern that must be addressed, and that the Palestinian Authority must answer for its role in fomenting it, ultimately the laserlike focus on incitement is something of a shell game. Initially, Israel argued that the Palestinians were not serious because the PA supported terrorism. Now that the PA has become a full-fledged security partner and has by all accounts cracked down on terrorism to the best of its ability in the West Bank, the new argument becomes that the Palestinians are not serious because of incitement. None of this is an argument that incitement is irrelevant, because it decidedly isn’t. President Abbas’s feet must be held to the fire over the virulent and criminal ugliness that emanates from official Palestinian channels, and hopefully the forthcoming Quartet report will do just that, as expected. But it is pretty clear that Palestinian cooperation is achievable on a number of fronts, and maintaining the status quo everywhere because it is politically safer and more potent to rail against incitement is a wasted opportunity. I understand that the coalition politics of it is difficult for Netanyahu and that nobody justifiably wants to come out and embrace Abbas when he is off accusing Israelis of poisoning Palestinian wells, but sacrificing opportunities to move the ball forward on the altar of political expediency does Israel no favors.
The Palestinians are equally guilty of shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of narrow politics, and in their case they are losing out even more. At nearly every opportunity that presents itself, Netanyahu reiterates his offer to sit down with Abbas and negotiate without preconditions anytime, anywhere. Rather than accept, Abbas jumps through hoops not only to avoid Netanyahu but to also avoid having to meet with any Israeli officials at all, such as just last week when he wouldn’t sit down with President Rivlin in Brussels. Palestinian officials offer a litany of excuses as to why Abbas won’t sit down with Netanyahu, from there not being enough advance notice to refusing to believe that he will actually negotiate once in the room, but what it boils down to is the politics on the Palestinian side. It costs Abbas every time he sits across the table from Bibi and ultimately doesn’t come away with a deal, and so just entering into negotiations is now deeply unpopular. That does not absolve Abbas; leaders are supposed to lead, and he is not. Much like the Israelis, the Palestinians like to shift the goalposts too. First the problem was that Netanyahu wouldn’t negotiate; then the problem was that they could only negotiate once settlements were frozen; then they couldn’t negotiate until building was frozen in East Jerusalem as well; and now it is back to insisting that Abbas can’t meet until Netanyahu first demonstrates good will by again freezing settlement construction. In the meantime, literally every day the situation gets worse for the Palestinians, and Abbas’s own stubborn obduracy not only allows Israel to shift the blame for the impasse entirely onto him – after all, Netanyahu will sit down while Abbas will not – but telegraphs that the political costs to Abbas are more important to him than the policy costs to the Palestinians as a whole. Overall, it is overwhelmingly clear that nothing is going to happen without some shakeup that changes the political calculus for one side or both.
Nonetheless, I came away with two data points that I hadn’t expected to see and that actually make me more optimistic than anything I have seen in years. The first was on the Palestinian side, where multiple Palestinian officials conceded that they had made mistakes by walking away at Camp David and breaking things off with Ehud Olmert in 2008. This was unprecedented for me and for other people I asked with far more experience dealing with the Palestinians, and it genuinely took me by surprise. Whether it heralds a newfound openness and realism I don’t know, but I can only take it as a positive sign.
On the Israeli side, we talked to a number of rightwing policymakers, from retired four star generals to regional council heads and mayors, and to a man, each one of them without hesitation said they would choose a two-state solution over one state. None of them hedged, none of them claimed that there is a realistic outcome other than those two options, and while all of them had a litany of reasons why two states is a bad idea or not implementable, they all reluctantly embraced it as the preferable of the options available. While I do not expect this to translate into a sudden policy shift, it is striking the way that serious people on the right do not pretend that the choice is avoidable, and even more striking just how much the concept of two states has been socialized into the thought and discourse across the political spectrum. I don’t think we are anywhere close to a successful round of negotiations or a permanent status agreement, but I leave Israel thinking that given the right set of circumstances, perhaps things are not quite so bad as many – myself included – have long assumed.
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.
Blocs and Borders
March 14, 2016 § 3 Comments
Shaul Arieli has a smart op-ed in Ha’aretz today arguing that the concept of the sanctity of settlement blocs is leading Israel astray. Arieli goes through the history of how the blocs came to be, and more importantly demonstrates the way in which their contours have changed, from security zones in the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem envelope to settlements intended to obliterate the Green Line to more recent efforts on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s part to include areas that bifurcate the West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Arieli argues that the blocs have no security, demographic, economic, or political logic, and that in fact the idea of these inviolate blocs that Israel will keep in any permanent status agreement actively harms Israel by establishing an incoherent and unstable border. Were Israel to adopt a border that incorporated only settlements not separated by the Green Line from Palestinian towns or infrastructure, Arieli writes that it would significantly shorten the length of the border, leave 75% of Israelis living over the Green Line in their current homes, and create a border that is more secure without hurting the social fabric and contiguity of Palestinian locales.
It’s an excellent piece and I want to highlight it so that people go and read it, but I also want to make two brief complementary points. First, the history of the changing definition of blocs to include, in Netanyahu’s current formulation, places like Ofra, Kiryat Arba, and Kfar Adumim demonstrates the urgent need to define the border of the blocs. The idea that negotiations for two states proceed with an assumption about Israel keeping blocs and nobody knows what those blocs entail means that an agreement in principle might easily blow up once the details have to be hammered out. Furthermore, allowing the blocs to gobble up more and more area destroys any semblance of trust among the Palestinians, and is fundamentally unfair to Palestinian society in the West Bank. The current government’s definition of a border for the blocs would be a very different one than I would draw, but limiting things at all would still be a positive step. It would also force the Israeli government to provide a visual for its current settlement policy, which would make it more difficult for it to insist that everything is fine as is. “Blocs” cannot continue to be an amorphous concept that everyone tiptoes around as if it is – pardon the pun – settled, when in fact the blocs continue to be defined differently depending on who’s doing the talking.
Second, Arieli’s rundown demonstrates to me why a complete settlement freeze is unworkable. I get the argument that any deviation from the 1967 lines as a starting point undermines the core Palestinian conviction that agreeing to negotiations on that basis was their key concession. But Israeli politics cannot be ignored either, and a complete settlement freeze that includes Jerusalem neighborhoods like Gilo is going to be anathema to 95% of Israeli Jews. Each side is going to have to bend on something, and defining the blocs in a fair manner and then freezing everything outside of them – along with a concurrent declaration that everything, including territory inside the borders of the blocs, is subject to future negotiation – is my view of what constitutes a reasonable and likely way of moving forward. Just as the Palestinians view their core concession as recognizing the 1967 lines as relevant at all, Israelis view their core concession as recognizing the PLO and agreeing to negotiate towards a Palestinian state. The reality is that both sides are destined to be deeply disappointed in some manner, and that is how agreements are forged.
