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.
Your Handy Guide To Netanyahu’s Coalitional Maneuvering
May 19, 2016 § 1 Comment
On Tuesday, center-left opposition leader Isaac Herzog was set to become the new Israeli foreign minister after bringing the Zionist Union into a national unity government. On Wednesday, rightwing gadfly and Bibi Netanyahu frenemy Avigdor Lieberman was set to become the new defense minister while Herzog was consigned to losing his party’s leadership and his potential new cabinet post. Looking for answers to your questions about all of the political shenanigans? You’ve come to the right place.
Isn’t there supposed to be a new unity government?
Netanyahu and Herzog have reportedly been talking about bringing the Zionist Union into the coalition ever since the government was formed with the Zionist Union on the outside last spring, and these negotiations burst into the open in recent weeks. For Netanyahu, the appeal was primarily twofold. First, despite the fact that his 61 seat coalition does not have any huge ideological fissures, a government with a one seat majority is never a comfortable place from which to operate. Bringing in Herzog and the approximately fourteen Labor Party members from the Zionist Union faction that he would have brought along would give Netanyahu breathing space and not make every coalition member a potential hostage taker. Second, there is something of a perfect storm gathering on the horizon on the diplomatic front, with the French initiative, the forthcoming Quartet report that is expected to be harsh on Israeli settlements, the end of the Obama administration (bearing in mind that Clinton and Bush both made a renewed effort at Israeli-Palestinian peace on their way out the door), and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war all looming. Appointing Herzog as foreign minister would give Israel a friendlier face in Western capitals and offset some of the pressure that is hurtling down the road by signaling that Israel is more serious than assumed about finding a way to get to two states.
From Herzog’s perspective, he leads a party that has been plummeting in the polls, is completely ineffective in its opposition to the government, and he himself was facing massive discontent within the ranks. Entering into talks to join the government only sealed his inevitable demise within the Labor Party, as everyone from Zionist Union co-chief Tzipi Livni to Herzog’s predecessor Shelley Yachimovich to popular rising Labor star Stav Shaffir was opposed to joining the government. Indeed, Shaffir and other Labor members have now called for him to step down. Even if he were successful in joining the government, Herzog would have only brought a rump contingent with him. Nevertheless, if he was going to be ousted for ineffectiveness at some point, Herzog clearly believed that he may as well join the government as a top minister and also clearly believed in his ability to affect change from the inside. Not only did this make sense for him, it was the only way for him to maintain any real relevance. There was also the added wrinkle of Herzog mysteriously claiming earlier in the week that there was a secret regional diplomatic opportunity that might disappear if not immediately acted upon and that he was the man to make it happen, and then Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Tuesday offering warmer relations with Israel if it would reach a settlement with the Palestinians. Some saw this confluence of events as a bit too convenient, speculating that Netanyahu and Herzog had coordinated this with Sisi in order to pave the way for the unity government to happen.
So what happened?
Suddenly, everything turned on a dime, and it became apparent that Netanyahu had been using Herzog to instead entice Avigdor Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu to join the coalition, a move that prompted Herzog to cut off talks on a unity government. Netanyahu and Lieberman have a long and tortured history, and after serving as foreign minister in the last government (with a corruption trial that forced him to temporarily step down from the post for a year), Lieberman decided to remain in the opposition after the last election and has been sniping at Netanyahu from the right ever since, accusing him of selling out the rightwing and not being a true nationalist or Zionist. It has been a smart political move for Lieberman, as Yisrael Beiteinu has six seats in the current Knesset and a poll released this week by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv shows that going up to eleven, but ultimately Lieberman has always wanted power, and being in the government is the only way for him to do it. Becoming defense minister – particularly in the wake of the Hebron shooting and the Yair Golan speech and at a time when there is concern within the nationalist camp over the direction of the IDF – is perfect for Lieberman, and he will get to demonstrate that he is more hawkish than anyone else in Israeli politics while using the power of his post to protect the settlement enterprise
From Netanyahu’s angle, he gets to remove a thorn in his side and also shore up his own internal political position. There has been serious friction between him and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and major discontent within the Likud ranks over where Ya’alon’s priorities lie, and now Netanyahu gets to remove him and mollify the right by creating the most rightwing government that can be assembled. He also gets to neutralize the critiques coming from his biggest long-term threat, Naftali Bennett, by removing the basis for the charge that Netanyahu is not sufficiently attuned to the concerns of settlers or in step with the nationalist camp. Netanyahu also still gets to expand his coalition, but does so in a way that makes his base happy rather than making them think that he is selling out rightwing principles.
How can Netanyahu pursue Herzog and Lieberman at the same time? That’s like a voter who thinks that the economy is rigged supporting a billionaire who lives in an apartment made of gold and marble and whose success is based on borrowing money from banks based on family connections and his last name.
There are a couple rules of Bibi politics that you need to know to make sense of this. The first is that Netanyahu is constantly in search of room to maneuver, but don’t ever presume to know what he wants to do with that space. The smart take on Tuesday was that he needed the flexibility to deflect the pressure from the French and the Quartet and to take advantage of the regional overtures about which he is constantly boasting, but he then went and ignited a wildfire on his own lawn. There is literally no more inflammatory figure as defense minister than Lieberman, who is on record as wanting to execute the terrorists that Israel captures alive and keep in perpetuity the bodies of those they don’t. Any caution that Ya’alon has exercised in the West Bank, where the defense minister has final decision making power, is now going to dissipate overnight. Not only has Netanyahu decided not to deflect the diplomatic pressure, he has taken the move that will ramp it up to the highest possible level.
This segues into the second rule, which is that Netanyahu is always more worried about threats that come from his right than about threats that come from his left, and he will always guard his right flank irrespective of anything else that is going on. He perpetually faces the choice of going in a more moderate direction and mollifying the center and Israel’s allies, or tacking right and mollifying the rightwing, and he always chooses the same way. The surprise here is not that he played Herzog in order to reestablish his rightwing credentials, but that anyone thought that he would actually go through with it. In one fell swoop, Netanyahu has silenced Lieberman’s continuing criticism of the government, removed the specter of a hard right rebellion against Ya’alon that would have reverberated against him as well, cut off any discontent from the settler wing by ending talks with Herzog that might have led to measures curtailing settlement growth, and set himself up for the next election as the man who puts Zionism and nationalism first no matter what the rest of the world thinks. The threats that were massing against him on the far right are now largely – although not entirely – neutralized.
This is a long piece. Anything else we should be looking out for while you are in a talkative mood?
Yes, and thanks for asking. This whole thing is not as entirely straightforward as it seems, and there are some potential surprises and some potential pitfalls. It is important to know that during the Kerry negotiations two years ago, American officials found Lieberman during his time as foreign minister to actually be a helpful presence and willing interlocutor. Despite the fact that he is a hardliner on settlements and the Palestinians more generally, he seems to understand far better than Netanyahu that international opinion is not meaningless and that protecting the U.S.-Israel relationship is truly an existential issue. Amir Tibon’s excellent Tablet profile of Lieberman last May noted that he has surprisingly strong links throughout the Middle East and has promoted himself as the person to unite Israel and its Arab neighbors, and so while he is no longer foreign minister, the fact that there appear to be regional opportunities abounding as Lieberman returns to power is interesting.
On the domestic side, including Lieberman in the coalition will generally make Netanyahu’s Likud members happy, but it will infuriate the Haredi parties. They do not coexist well with Lieberman given the importance among his Russian constituency of breaking the Haredi monopoly of control over marriage and conversion, and it is bound to cause Netanyahu some serious unpleasantness.
This move also empowers Yair Lapid and Yesh Atid, who would have been the largest non-Likud vote getter in the next election anyway and who will now be the unquestionable de facto alternative to Netanyahu as the Labor infighting between Herzog and his adversaries destroys the party from within. This entire episode gives him a much larger megaphone, and he consequently may actually be able to present a serious electoral threat to Netanyahu the next time around.
Finally, and perhaps most seriously, I predicted in December that civil-military relations were going to be potentially explosive in 2016, and with the tension between the IDF and the government over a range of issues, that has sadly been a topic that I got right. Replacing Ya’alon – a former IDF chief of staff and staunch defender of the military, which is what has prompted the tension between him and Netanyahu during the last couple of months – with Lieberman, who had a relatively undistinguished stint in an IDF artillery unit and has been attacking the military leadership over its values, is not going to improve this situation, to say the least. Netanyahu has made his choice, and I am afraid that it will mean a rocky period ahead on a number of fronts.
The Slow Self-Immolation Of A Political Party
April 14, 2016 § 1 Comment
Imagine a political party that finds itself in what appears to be a permanent bind. The elites who run the party and make up the senior elected officials represent an establishment rightwing view, and it is one that has been electorally successful for decades as it stayed within a national consensus that allowed it to attract a wider array of voters beyond its natural base. At the same time, many of the party’s voters have been steadily moving rightward and taking more extreme positions that are being embraced by people on an order of magnitude that would have been unimaginable a couple of elections before. The party honchos have not been unaware of this trend, and have been playing a timeless game in which they rhetorically support the more extreme positions of the base in an effort to keep them in the fold and win their votes, while rarely following through on the promises they make during the heat of a campaign. They are careful to give the base some small victories, but generally tend to pull back from the edge of the cliff of truly revolutionary proposals, always providing an array of excuses and promises that patience will pay off in the end, and that the eventual victory of remaking the country wholesale is just around the corner.
With each heightened expectation that is inevitably dashed, the base of the party becomes more upset and more radicalized. They eventually turn to even more rightwing movements that are seen as more authentic and more grassroots, and even though these more extreme movements are smaller and will never be able to win an election on their own outright, the effect is to push the larger and more establishment party to the right as it becomes terrified of being cannibalized by its more ideologically pure sibling. This of course only encourages the extremist base, and it creates a spiral in which the party becomes more extreme but can never go far enough to satisfy its most strident voters, and eventually the voters who happily kept returning the party and its standard bearers to national office turn on those standard bearers, branding their former heroes traitors to the cause and embracing new politicians who tell them what they want to hear, no matter how absurd or devastating the consequences of the proposed policies would be.
This is a rough portrayal of what has been taking place in the Republican Party, but it is also the story of what is right now taking place in Likud. The Likud establishment has been winning elections for decades, but the impatience of many in its base – particularly religious settlers – has led to challenges from smaller parties demanding greater fidelity to nationalist ideology, Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi being the most prominent recent example. Prime Minister Netanyahu comes off as unapologetically rightwing to many American Jews, but the fact is that to the Israeli right, he is seen as too cautious and not viewed as a true believer. His rhetoric meant for the rightwing base has become more extreme over time, from the infamous election night warning about Arab voters coming to the polls in droves to his all but calling Mahmoud Abbas a terrorist, but it is never enough. The fact that he and his government have placed any brakes at all on settlement activity in the West Bank, let alone refused to seriously consider annexation, makes him and other Likud luminaries automatically suspect. And thus Netanyahu keeps on being returned to office, but each time the grumbling becomes louder and keeping his coalition satisfied becomes increasingly Sisyphean.
In the U.S., this trend has led to a Republican Party circular firing squad, where whomever or whatever emerges is going to be barely breathing politically. In Israel, however, the consequences have been more serious, since this trend is not only ensnaring one of Israel’s two historically major political parties, but the IDF as well. This has been laid bare by the fallout from the Hebron shooting, in which an IDF soldier shot and killed an injured and immobilized terrorist with a bullet to the head. Both Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot immediately moved to make sure that the soldier was detained and that a proper investigation was conducted, and Ya’alon forcefully condemned the soldier as one who had gone bad. The fact that they did not instead unequivocally support the soldier – who may yet turn out to be guilty of something less serious than murder, but whose actions were captured on tape and appear to be as ugly as it gets – was immediately seized upon by those on the far right, led by Bennett who accused Ya’alon of selling out the IDF. Netanyahu’s zigzag, from initially supporting Ya’alon and criticizing the soldier to then calling the soldier’s family and seemingly playing all sides, was sadly predictable. All of this was naturally followed by images circulating of Ya’alon’s face in the crosshairs of a rifle, comparisons to Hitler, and posters hung all over Tel Aviv calling on Eisenkot to resign and accusing him of failing to safeguard Jewish lives. The sad fact that Bennett is more representative of the public mood, as a majority of Israelis do not believe that the solider should have been arrested and investigated, does not make his conduct any less dangerous or reprehensible, since he is deliberately undermining the institution that is most trusted by the Israeli public in order to further his own political career. That Netanyahu is continuing to calibrate his own actions based on what Bennett does should finally put the notion to bed once and for all that Netanyahu is a leader rather than a man with his finger perpetually in the air testing the wind.
The IDF is what holds Israel together; once it has been undermined for short term political gain, there is no going back. And yet after years of treating its base as simplistic fools and seeing it boomerang in the faces of its leaders, the Likud is now haplessly watching by as its own defense minister is savaged for actually acting correctly and responsibly, and the IDF leadership is questioned for acting like armies in democratic countries act. That Republican leaders in the U.S. completely lost control of their own political vehicle and are now faced with the prospect of a nominee that many of them refuse to support – whether it is Donald Trump or Ted Cruz – is not a good thing for American democracy; no matter which party owns your sympathies, competition is both good and necessary for a healthy and functioning democracy, and the corrosion of the Republican Party is not good for the country. But ultimately, the damage is likely going to be limited to Republican institutions and not the institutions of the state. In Israel, the same cannot be said. Likud has been fighting a losing battle against its own Tea Partiers, whom it tacitly encouraged under the assumption that it could contain them, but the chaos is now spilling over and has the potential to bring the rest of the country down with it. When you wink at extremism while laughing at it behind its back, the joke is often on you. This time, it is coming at all of Israel’s expense.
What To Watch For In Israel In 2016
December 23, 2015 § Leave a comment
2015 was a busy year in Israel, with elections, the Iran deal and the accompanying fiasco of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress, the return of routinized violence in the streets, and other stories big and small occupying headlines. While 2016 will (presumably) not bring another election, there will be plenty of other momentous events and slow-burning stories that occupy Israel. At the risk of opening myself up to some serious embarrassment at this time next year, here are some issues that I think will manifest themselves in a major way over the next twelve months.
Civil-military relations
Israel is a rare case when it comes to the relationship between the political and military leadership. Since most Israelis – and virtually all of the political leadership – do mandatory military service, military issues are not unfamiliar to any policymakers. On the other hand, because the IDF is Israel’s most revered institution, military leaders are accorded enormous respect and deference by the Israeli public. It means that Israel’s elected officials are in a better position than elected officials in many other countries to challenge the military leadership when disagreements arise, but are simultaneously constrained by a public that itself has firsthand familiarity with the military.
When the politicians and the generals are on the same page, this is not a problem. When they are not, the potential exists for things to get hairy. Netanyahu has famously been on the opposite side of issues with IDF chiefs of staff and Mossad and Shin Bet directors in the past, but it has seemed over the past two years that the current government is never in the same place as the upper echelon of the security and intelligence establishment. The disagreement over whether to attack Iran before the Iran deal has given way to disagreement over how to deal with the growing terrorist violence erupting from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and it almost seems inevitable that at some point down the road, the IDF is going to be asked to take actions to which it is adamantly opposed. I do not in any way mean to suggest that Israel is in danger of a military coup, since that seems about as far-fetched a possibility as Netanyahu all of a sudden embracing the BDS movement, but there is no question that the recommendations and priorities of the security leadership are clashing head on with the desires and priorities of the political leadership. Look for this to become an even bigger issue in 2016 as Palestinian violence grows and what to do in the West Bank becomes a more acute problem.
Political scandals
While you wouldn’t necessarily know it in the U.S. unless you regularly read beyond the headlines of the Israeli press, there are a couple of political scandals besetting Netanyahu that are ripe for explosion. The first surrounds his unusual process of appointments and suspicions that his primary criteria for evaluating whether someone is fit to lead Israel’s police force or become the next attorney general is if those appointees will turn a blind eye to the second, which is Sara Netanyahu’s household financial chicanery. It was reported this week that attorney general Yehuda Weinstein will allow the police to question Mrs. Netanyahu over allegations of misappropriating state funds in running the official Netanyahu residence, which comes on the heels of the search committee for the next attorney general recommending Avihai Mandelblit, who is seen as beholden to Netanyahu and likely to shield him and his wife from any future investigations. Possibly connected to this is Netanyahu’s strange decision to try and hold the primary for Likud chairman – which would normally happen six months before a Knesset election – as soon as two months from now in a blatant effort to forestall any challengers to his primacy. While Netanyahu’s motives may just be to get his ducks in order and catch rivals such as Gideon Sa’ar off balance well ahead of an election campaign, he also may be trying to get this out of the way before the scandals nipping at his heels catch up with him. Whatever the case, this will be a story to watch over the coming year.
Orthodox vs. Orthodox
Yedioth Ahronoth ran a feature over the weekend on the “new elites,” who are largely in the Naftali Bennett mold – young religious Zionists who are supportive of the settlement movement. While I think it is too soon to write the obituary for the secular liberal Ashkenazi elite that dominated Israel since its founding, there is no question that the fortunes of the national religious community – largely analogous to American Jewry’s modern Orthodox – are on the rise. The proportion of religious IDF officers and elite commandos has been skyrocketing for some time, and the heads of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Israeli police all come from the national religious camp. Bennett and Tzipi Hotovely are the political figureheads of this new elite, and there is no question that their influence is rising.
The Orthodox are not monolithic, however, and the fact that the Haredi population is on the rise as well – not to mention that Shas and UTJ are back in the coalition and are Netanyahu’s favorite political partners due to their general quiescence to his agenda – almost guarantees more intra-Orthodox friction in 2016. As it is, there is bad blood between the Haredi parties and Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi, stemming from Bennett’s alliance in the last coalition with Haredi bogeyman Yair Lapid and the fight between the Haredim and the religious Zionists over the chief rabbinate, and the tension will continue to rise. The new religious Zionist elite is not willing to live with the status quo that grants the Haredi rabbinate a monopoly over the state’s religious institutions, and religious Zionist and Haredi priorities are frequently not in alignment, with the former caring first and foremost about hanging onto the West Bank and the latter caring first and foremost about stamping out secularism and continuing the state subsidies for yeshivot and other Haredi mainstays. The clashes that have so far been mostly below the radar are likely to burst into the open the longer these two camps have to coexist with each other in the same narrow coalition.
So there are some of my broad predictions for what we will see, and keep on following this space over the next year to see whether I’ll be completely wrong or just a little wrong. Happy New Year to all.
A Glimmer of Light Through the Clouds
October 8, 2015 § 7 Comments
This piece can also be found on IPF’s website here.
These are not auspicious times for supporters of two states. The generally despondent mood was captured by Chemi Shalev this week in a column where he declared the death of whatever remaining optimism to which he had been clinging, and resigned himself to Israelis and Palestinians never resolving their differences and continuously battling – a “war of the cowards” in his formulation. This comes on the heels of Mahmoud Abbas’s UNGA declaration that the Palestinian Authority no longer feels bound by the Oslo Accords and will pick and choose which elements it cooperates with; the mounting terrorist attacks targeting Israelis of all stripes and ages; the unrest wracking Jerusalem and its immediate environs; and the rumbling conflict and potential wider conflagration over the Temple Mount.
The most immediately pressing problem is the intifada that is taking place in Jerusalem, despite the reluctance of most politicians and other observers to call it what it is. There are multiple attacks and arrests taking place every day, too many incidents of rock throwing to catalogue, seizures of caches of weapons and firebombs, and entire neighborhoods in Jerusalem that are rapidly becoming battle zones. This does not even take into account what is going on in the West Bank, where attacks and arrests are both up as well, or the riot in Jaffa on Tuesday night. The intelligence and security forces have assured Prime Minister Netanyahu that there is no intifada yet, only a wave of increased violence, but this is a distinction without a difference that is based on an outdated fallacy. The fallacy is that an intifada can only erupt with the complicity of the Palestinian leadership, and since Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have been cracking down and trying to prevent the violence from spinning out of control, ipso facto there must not be an intifada.
This ignores a very basic lesson in political science, which is that just because something has always happened in one particular manner does not mean it is fated to always unfold the same way. Civil uprisings have a logic of their own, which is what makes them so difficult to predict. One of the main lessons of the inaptly termed Arab Spring is that Middle Eastern authoritarian governments –which the PA most certainly is – do not have absolute control over their subjects, and this is particularly the case for regimes that are already hampered by questions of legitimacy. Just because the first and second intifadas were encouraged and planned by the Palestinian leadership does not mean that the next one must take the same path. The PA does not have a monopoly on violence in the territory under its control, and nationalist entrepreneurs seeking to foment civil unrest for their own political goals will not necessarily heed the PA’s preferences or follow its lead. In addition, Palestinian politics is more fragmented than it was fifteen years ago, and Hamas and other even more extreme groups do not have the same incentive structure as the PA. Finally, given what we have seen from seemingly leaderless social movements around the globe over the course of this decade, expecting the PA to turn the intifada switch on or off at its discretion may be foolhardy.
Adding to the tension is that the current unrest is centered around Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. While the second intifada was set off following Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount visit but was not driven by the Mount itself, the recent increase in violence is centered almost entirely around the Temple Mount and the allegation that Israel is attempting to alter the status quo that establishes the plaza as a site exclusively for Muslim prayer. Anything having to do with the Temple Mount is inevitably explosive given that it is a symbol simultaneously religious and nationalist for both sides, and the fact that actors who should know better – such as Abbas and King Abdullah of Jordan – are fanning the flames by making grossly exaggerated accusations about Israeli actions only furthers the prospects of violence spreading out of control.
It is not only the Palestinians or the Jordanians who are using attacks on Israelis to further their own political ends, but members of the Israeli government as well. The more hardline rightwingers in Netanyahu’s coalition, including ministers from Likud such as Haim Katz and Yariv Levin and Habayit Hayehudi ministers Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, have been agitating that Netanyahu needs to adopt harsher responses to terrorist attacks on Israelis, and some went so far as to demonstrate outside his house in protest of policies that the government in which they serve has adopted. Netanyahu batted them down earlier this week by implicitly threatening to disband the government should the friendly fire continue, but adding a dose of political unrest to the soaring civil unrest makes for a poisonous mix.
So what is the silver lining, if any, to be found in this doom and gloom? It is that Netanyahu is actually behaving like the reasonable adult in the room and doing his best to prevent the situation from spiraling further downward. Aside from appearing to finally understand the threat that expanded settlement activity poses to Israel internationally and continuing to enforce an unpublicized settlement freeze, Netanyahu is doing his best to actually maintain the status quo on the Temple Mount despite the enormous political pressure on him to establish new facts on the ground (and despite the inherent injustice of preventing Jewish prayer at Judaism’s holiest site). Furthermore, Netanyahu has ordered the police to ban all government ministers and MKs from the Temple Mount, an extraordinary step that speaks to how seriously he understands that there will be no capping the eruption should tensions over the site escalate.
Folks on the left and the center tend to come down hard on Netanyahu – and rightly so – when he does and says things for his own political gain that deepen Israel’s isolation or contribute to illiberal trends in Israeli politics and society, yet Abbas is often given a free pass due to the uncomfortable political situation in which he must operate. While the estimation of the Israeli security establishment is that Abbas is doing his best to tamp down the violence erupting throughout Jerusalem and the West Bank and that Israel is going to miss him enormously when he is gone, this is not the whole story. He certainly deserves credit for all positive steps, but the fact that he has his own political survival at stake should not inoculate him from criticism over fanning the flames on the Temple Mount, or refusing to condemn terrorist activity that can in no way be chalked up as legitimate political protest or civil disobedience or resistance against an occupying power. The Israeli occupation is not a trump card when it comes to irresponsible rhetoric that will inevitably lead to incitement or the murder of civilians, and holding Netanyahu to an exceedingly higher standard than Abbas is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
A rightwing Israeli prime minister who presides over the narrowest possible coalition in the Knesset and is under constant assault from those to his right, whose commitment to two states is in question, and who has spent decades caving to the most irredentist elements of his party and coalition, has now halted new settlement growth, banned elected officials from the Temple Mount in an effort to protect exclusive Muslim rights on the site, and has so far refrained from a large and public show of force in the West Bank in response to multiple firebomb attacks, shootings, and stonings, all in recognition of the fact that the volume must be turned down in a major way. While some of these actions may be less just than others (and the Temple Mount issue in particular is one that I will write about in depth next week), they all point to a prime minister putting pragmatism over politics for the moment. Shalev opens his otherwise depressing column by noting how anyone watching Anwar Sadat emerge from his plane at Ben Gurion Airport in November 1977 could not help but believe that miracles do happen, and that it showed how calamity could transform into opportunity. Let’s hope that Netanyahu’s new leaf demonstrates that history always holds open the possibility of new beginnings.
Lessons To Be Learned From Netanyahu’s Victory
March 18, 2015 § 9 Comments
I’m going to pat myself on the back for predicting on Monday that Likud and Bibi Netanyahu would win the most seats, that Buji Herzog would have no viable path to becoming prime minister, and that the government formed would boil down to Moshe Kahlon deciding whether to go with Netanyahu or force a national unity government (for the record, I think Kahlon going with Netanyahu is now an inevitability given how things turned out.) But my specific seat predictions were way off, and it’s easy to see how. I expected two things to happen, which I closed out the post with: “First, I think that Likud will gain back some votes at Habayit Hayehudi’s expense as rightwing voters are freaked out by the late Zionist Camp surge in the polls, and decide to throw their support behind Netanyahu despite their general fatigue with him. Second, socioeconomic issues are dominating people’s concerns, and that will translate into unexpectedly strong showings for Yesh Atid and Kulanu at the expense of Zionist Camp and Shas.” I was more right than I knew about that first statement, and vastly underestimated just how much that shift from BY to Likud was going to occur. I was dead wrong about that second statement, which is what led me so far astray. Let’s dive into the numbers a bit to see what actually happened yesterday, and I have some thoughts on what the various consequences might be.
The most useful comparison is between this year’s results and the 2013 results. In 2013, the rightwing bloc of Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Habayit Hayehudi won 43 seats; the leftwing bloc of Labor and Meretz won 21 seats; the two state solution bloc (which was only Hatnua) won 6 seats; the socioeconomic reform bloc (which was only Yesh Atid) won 19 seats; the Haredi bloc of Shas and UTJ won 18 seats; the Arab bloc won 11 seats. The last two seats went to Kadima, but frankly nobody at the time could explain what Kadima stood for and was running on, and I’m not going to try.
In yesterday’s election, the rightwing bloc of the same three parties won 44 seats; the leftwing bloc of the same two parties plus Hatnua (since it formed an electoral alliance with Labor) won 28 seats; the socioeconomic reform bloc of Yesh Atid and Kulanu won 21 seats; the Haredi bloc won 13 seats; the Arab bloc that is now the Joint List won 14 seats. Compared to the last election, the nationalist right picked up only one seat, the left picked up only one seat (since Zionist Camp plus Meretz in 2013 added up to 27, and it’s unfortunately impossible to tease out which Zionist Camp votes were for Labor and which were for Hatnua), the socioeconomic camp picked up two seats, the Arab bloc picked up three seats, and the Haredi parties lost five seats. Nothing about this is a surge for the right, or for any side for that matter; the various blocs remained more or less constant, with the exception of the Haredi bloc losing seats due to the Shas-Yachad split. But it is unquestionably a surge for Likud itself, which went from 19 seats in the current Knesset to 30 seats in the next one. Where did those seats come from? It’s pretty evident that they came from the two other rightwing nationalist parties, Habayit Hayehudi and Yisrael Beiteinu, which respectively won 12 and 11 seats in 2013 but fell off a cliff to 8 and 6 yesterday. When you add in the seat that Likud picked up once Eli Yishai’s Yachad party did not make the threshold, you account for pretty much all of Likud’s gain. There is simply no denying that Netanyahu’s eleventh hour tactics worked, which were to drum up turnout on the right and explicitly make the case that rightwing voters could only vote for Likud or they would be risking a leftist government. He successfully cannibalized his natural allies, and in so doing increased Likud’s share of the pie without making the pie any bigger.
The related questions of turnout versus polling are interesting as well. My initial instinct yesterday was that the polling – both pre-election and exit – must have been garbage, and I noted on Monday that there are many reasons not to trust Israeli polling, which proves to be inaccurate in some measure every cycle. After thinking about it a bit more though, now I’m not quite so sure. The legal moratorium on polls in the last few days before an election meant that no poll could be conducted after Thursday, and the exit polls were concluded two hours before the actual election itself (since they aren’t interview surveys, but require Israeli voters to cast their actual vote and then go and cast a dummy vote in a fake voting box for the exit pollsters, which then get collected and tallied). Netanyahu’s huge campaign push – in which he gave an unprecedented number of interviews and turned up the nationalist rhetoric – occurred over the weekend and through election day itself, so the pre-voting polls would have had no way of capturing this effect. As far as the exit polls go, final voter turnout was up 4% from 2013, but if you were obsessively keeping track of the turnout numbers throughout the day yesterday as I was, you know that this turnout surge did not take place until very late in the day, so that the exit polls (which aren’t really polls) missed much of it. The exit polls may very well have been correct in reflecting a 27-27 deadlock between Likud and Zionist Camp at 8 PM Israel time, and the anecdotal evidence suggests that there was a flood of rightwing voters in the last couple of hours. The takeaway from this is not necessarily that Israeli pollsters are incompetent, although that can’t be ruled out, but that the accuracy of Israeli polling is not served by the legal blackout at the end of the campaign. On turnout, it should be noted that Netanyahu’s old-fashioned barn-burning turnout efforts destroyed the get out the vote campaign run by V-15 and Jeremy Bird. Likud increased its share of the rightwing vote, while Zionist Camp didn’t increase the percentage of leftwing voters or even get more of them to vote for Herzog. The money spent in this campaign to unseat Netanyahu was as big of a waste as what GOP groups spent in 2012 to get rid of Obama.
If there is one big thing that jumps out at me the day after, it is that ideology and identity distinctly trump economics in Israeli politics. Like in 2013, voters overwhelmingly listed socioeconomic concerns as their top issue in the run-up to the election, but ultimately that made little difference. There was no flock of new voters to Yesh Atid and Kulanu, which both ran on the economy and quality of life issues and had very little of substance to say on security. Likud, which barely bothered to campaign on specific policies, hugely increased its vote share by essentially saying, trust Netanyahu on security and send a message to the leftists and their foreign backers trying to take over your country. It was an emotional and identity-based appeal to nationalism that resonated with many voters, and it is a tactic that is sure to be replicated on both sides in the future.
There are many dangers in overt appeals to nationalism, one of which is that when you win, it makes it easier to demonize your opponents and claim that you have a mandate to do whatever you please. For Exhibit A through Z on how this works in practice, take a gander through the increasing ugliness of Turkish politics that has been wrought largely by Tayyip Erdoğan. Israel’s political system makes this even messier because of how it is structured. Netanyahu will act like he has been granted an enormous mandate following a landslide victory; after all, he beat the next largest party by a 25% margin in seats, obliterated the predictions for Likud based on the polls, and is going to control the winning coalition and be prime minister. Taking a step back though, Israel’s proportional representation political system means that in reality he won only 23% of the votes cast, which translates to 25% of the seats in the Knesset. He is simultaneously the clear winner and on the receiving end of 77% of Israeli voters preferring someone else. This does not in any way make his win illegitimate, and anyone who argues otherwise does not want to face reality, but the fact of the matter is that the system itself encourages post-election overreach. Netanyahu and his supporters are going to insist that his win validates his entire approach to politics, the Palestinians, the international community, etc. because voters were presented with a choice and they choose him. The true answer to that is in some ways yes and in some ways no, and as he will be leading the government fair and square, he can do as he pleases since that is how democracy works. But objectively, when the clear victor can only manage to get 1 out of every 4 votes cast, the system is probably not translating voters’ preferences into the appropriate policy outputs.
I don’t think much needs to be written on what Israeli policy will look like under a third consecutive Netanyahu government, since there aren’t very many surprises left. Netanyahu is who he is, and he is not going to undergo a late in life conversion that convinces him to shift course. I am more interested in what happens to Israel in the U.S., since Netanyahu’s reelection is going to keep on affecting one political trend that is already in full swing and may influence another, and perhaps more important, social one. The first is the partisanization of Israel in the U.S., which was very much laid bare by the machinations surrounding Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. The blame for this lies partially on both sides, although I certainly think one side is far more to blame than the other. Everyone with a dose of common sense knows that the White House badly wanted to see Netanyahu get tossed out by Israeli voters and that Netanyahu is now just biding his time until January 20, 2017 so that he never needs to think about Obama again, so it goes without saying that relations between Obama and Netanyahu for the next 22 months are going to be abysmal, and probably even non-existent. Will U.S.-Israel ties survive and come out the other side intact? Of course they will. But there will be more ugliness ahead and short-term relations are going to be very rocky, and if I worked in the prime minister’s office, starting today I would be spending all of my time coming up with a strategic plan for operating in the world without an automatic U.S. veto in the UN Security Council, because I think that era is now officially over. Netanyahu clearly and explicitly rejected a Palestinian state on Monday, and there is no walking it back or dissembling after the fact. That he did so wasn’t and shouldn’t be a surprise, but it destroys the legal fiction that he had constructed, and so when the Israeli government talks about the Palestinians not living up to their Oslo obligations or their promises to the Quartet (which in many ways they aren’t), that now officially goes both ways. You cannot insist that Palestinians must establish a state through the sole route of negotiations with Israel after you have declared unequivocally and without reservation that there will be no independent Palestinian state in the West Bank so long as you are prime minister. It was electioneering, but electioneering is not consequence-free.
Lastly, there is the pink elephant in the room that I have been ignoring so far in this blog post. Assess the following quote: “The right wing government is in danger. Black voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left wing NGOs are bringing them on buses. We have no NAACP; we have the National Guard, we have only you. Go the polls, bring your friends and family. Vote Republican in order to close the gap between us and the Democrats. With your help and with God’s help, we will form a nationalist government that will protect the United States.” Nobody with any sense of decency would call that a legitimate effort to counter a get out the vote drive targeting minority voters. So when Netanyahu said it yesterday about Arabs – which everyone by now recognizes as the direct quote from him, with the specifics altered of course to make the analogy work – it wasn’t simply a legitimate attempt to just bring voters to the polls, as the usual suspects are reflexively arguing. Does this mean that Netanyahu is racist and has been harboring views all of these years that he just now allowed to come out, or that he made a racist appeal in a desperate attempt to boost his prospects? I don’t know, and frankly it doesn’t matter, since neither explanation is acceptable. The prime minister of any country should be nothing short of proud when more citizens vote, and exhorting only the right kind of citizen to get to the polls in order to counter the wrong sort of citizen is disgusting and unworthy of the leader of a democracy. That some people are falling all over themselves to pretend that there is nothing out of the ordinary or objectionable about this reflects just as poorly upon them as Netanyahu’s comments do upon himself. What all of this leads to for me is to wonder how this will affect American Jews. Just as the rejection of a Palestinian state under any circumstances will have political consequences, the blatantly racist appeal is going to have social consequences among American Jewry. American Jews as a group proudly support Israel, and one of the reasons is a conviction that Israel is in a tough spot but is genuinely trying to do the right thing. That argument, both internally and externally, becomes harder by some degree or another after yesterday. Are people going to look at the Jewish state bill in a new light? Is Netanyahu still going to get nearly universal support from establishment groups? Most crucially, what is the effective counter when the odious Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement takes this quote and argues incessantly that it proves official and institutional racism in Israel? I don’t know the definitive answer to these questions, but I suspect that it will ultimately prove to be a significant aspect of Netanyahu’s eventual legacy.
