Thinking Strategically on Settlements
July 13, 2012 § 1 Comment
Shimon Peres gave a speech this week in which he warned about the danger that settlements pose to Israel’s Jewish majority. He spoke about a “threatening demographic change” and pointed out that without a Jewish majority, Israel will cease to be a Jewish state. This prompted predictable outrage from the right, with Yesha head Dani Dayan inveighing that the only danger to the Jewish state is conceding the right to the West Bank and 350 rabbis sending Peres a letter in which they said he should beg for forgiveness for the peace process and criticized his “hallucinatory ideas.” Peres’s speech also, however, brought opprobrium from the left, as various people were upset that Peres framed the problem with settlements as a strategic problem rather than an ethical or moral one. In this view, the primary problem with the settlements is that they are furthering the occupation and preventing a Palestinian state, and thus the argument against them should be that Israel is perpetrating an unethical policy in the West Bank and settlements should be denounced primarily as conflicting with the value of a democratic state and a Jewish state.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but it ignores the politics of the situation and misses the long view. The left and center-left do not need any convincing on the need for Israel to abandon the settlement enterprise outside of the major settlement blocs that Israel will presumably keep in a peace deal. If there is to ever be real movement on this issue, it is the right that needs to be brought around, and arguments about Palestinian rights are unlikely to be convincing. I do not mean to suggest that everybody on the right is completely unconcerned with the status of the Palestinians on the West Bank, but this has historically not been a winning argument on the right. If the right is to be swayed, it will be by arguments about Israel’s security and future, and in that sense, the demographic argument is the only one in town. I’ve heard that people in the upper ranks of the government don’t take the demographic threat seriously and believe that time is actually on Israel’s side, and I have had similar impressions in talking to friends and colleagues who are more rightwing on Israel issues than I am. When I was in Turkey two years ago, I got into what turned into a heated discussion with an older American Jewish couple whom I met while their cruise ship was docked in Istanbul for the weekend. During a conversation about Israel where I brought up the argument that Israel was running out of time to separate from the West Bank, the wife heatedly insisted that I had no idea what I was talking about because her daughter lives in Israel and has five kids, and so she absolutely refuses to believe that in 20 years there will be just as many Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank as there are Jews. The only way to convince rightwingers and conservatives that settlements need to be dealt with is to keep on pushing the demographic argument and make people realize that every day that passes increases the possibility of a binational one state Israeli future. This is why Peres’s speech was the correct response to the Levy Report, and while it might make folks on the left upset, a little more strategic thinking on this issue is required.
On a similar note, this is why I think that the Levy Report is so dangerous and why I disagree with Brent Sasley’s argument that Levy does not represent anything new. Has Israel been extending its control over the West Bank? Yes, it has. But that doesn’t mean that the Levy Report is not a dangerous development, because by legally eviscerating the line between Tel Aviv in Israel proper and Efrat over the Green Line, and between authorized settlement bloc Ariel and unauthorized outpost Migron, it brings a one state solution ever closer (for those whose Hebrew is less than stellar, Elder of Ziyon has a useful translation of the legal reasoning section of the Levy Report). The report’s significance is not in what it signals about past Israeli intention in the West Bank, but in what it signals about Israel’s political future and survival as a Jewish state. Brent and others think that the report is simply more of the same and that the declaration that there is no occupation is just the Israeli right showing its true colors in a more public manner, but this loses sight of the fact that Levy represents the opening salvo in the growing calls for a rightwing one state solution. Quite simply, this will be the end of Israel as we know it, and the right needs to be convinced that this is a path to oblivion. If this requires hammering away at the demographic argument and dropping language steeped in morality and ethics, so be it. Peres is on to the right idea here, and people on the left and the center should start thinking along these lines as well.
Israel at a Dangerous Crossroads
July 9, 2012 § 4 Comments
The three member group led by former High Court justice Edmund Levy charged with investigating the legal status of unauthorized settlements in the West Bank issued its report yesterday, and its consequences cannot be overstated. The Levy Report found, in a nutshell, that the occupation of the West Bank is not actually an occupation because Israel’s presence there has spanned decades and is thus unique in modern history, and it therefore follows that settlements are not illegal as they are not being built in occupied territory. The report also states that because unauthorized settlement construction took place with the tacit agreement and implied support of successive governments, the unauthorized settlements can be retroactively legalized. So basically, for those following along at home, if you do something that is illegal for long enough, you can just call it legal later on down the road, and if the government decides to ignore the rule of law, that somehow changes the meaning of rule of law. In what can only be described as the most extreme of self parodies, Yesha head Dani Dayan praised the committee’s “impartial first rate jurists” and said that “it is clear that deep, basic and serious legal work was done.”
The report itself is bad enough, but more worrisome is the reaction from cabinet members, who are literally falling all over themselves to see who can be the one to most effusively praise the committee’s findings. The politics are such that there appears to be zero downside to pretending that Israel is not militarily occupying the West Bank because this occupation does not look like other occupations, and that is bound to create pressure for the government to formally endorse the committee’s findings. The fact that I haven’t seen any statements at all from people such as Benny Begin or Dan Meridor (and if they have issued statements or given interviews, please email me or post in the comments section) is even more worrisome yet, since their silence on this means that they either agree (unlikely) or are too cowed by the settler movement to speak out against it. Even Tzipi Livni, who is not a huge settlement advocate and who is not even formally in politics at the moment, said that “it is possible and necessary to use the Levy Report for matters of international law, while considering the current reality and continue negotiations on settlement blocs.”
Israel has reached a dangerous point, and I do not say that lightly. For years, Israel and Diaspora Jews railed against the idea of a one state solution, which was viewed – quite correctly – as a backdoor way of dismantling the Jewish state. With the Levy Report, Israel’s right wing has come up with its own one state solution, but the problem is that this one smashes any pretense Israel will have to being a democratic state unless it enfranchises all of the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Somehow, I don’t think that this is what Edmund Levy, Avigdor Lieberman, or Dani Dayan have in mind. If this happens, Israel can kiss any international support that it has goodbye, and that includes the U.S. I painstakingly made the case once before that U.S. support for Israel stems from the fact that it is a democracy and that should not be taken lightly. Israel does not want to live in a world in which it is forced to make common cause with China and Russia, and Jews of all stripes – Israeli and American, religious and secular – do not want to have to defend an Israel that openly annexes the West Bank while permanently and legally relegating the Palestinians to official second class status.
I refuse to believe, or perhaps just hope, that Netanyahu is stupid enough to take the Levy Report to its fullest logical conclusion. He is a smart guy and is well attuned to the challenges Israel faces, both military and otherwise, and he knows that what amounts to an annexation of the West Bank without corresponding political rights for all of its residents – in essence, the dreaded one state solution – would be suicidal. This is more than maintaining the status quo, in which Israel and the Palestinians negotiate on and off, the big settlement blocs that Israel is expected to maintain in a deal continue to grow, and Israel accepts that it is an occupying force that does not intend on remaining in the West Bank forever. The Levy Report represents a revolutionary and radical change, in which the occupation does not exist, the peace process is over, and the two state solution is finally dead and buried. There is no going back from this, since once the Israeli government declares that it is not occupying anything, it will be impossible to reign in the settlers if the government ever comes to its sense and changes its mind. The implementation of the Levy Report would make Israel a true pariah state on the world stage, and implementing it and then walking it back would mean civil war. Netanyahu knows all this, and he isn’t going to drive Israel into a ditch.
So, what happens next? I have been arguing again and again and again, and then one more time for good measure, that Likud is a party busting apart at the seams and destined to split. I think that this might be the final crack that splinters the party, depending on what Netanyahu does. The pressure from the settlers’ wing, triumphant in this gift that they have been handed, is such that Netanyahu cannot just blow them off or even water down the Levy Report. If he wants to keep them in the fold, he needs to implement the report, or else he is going to have a full blown rebellion on his hands and will be denounced up and down for betraying the settlers’ cause. If, on the other hand, he grasps the full enormity of what accepting the Levy Report means, then he is going to have split Likud in two. I stand by my prediction that he is going to choose keeping Israel in one piece and fracturing his party rather than the other way around, but if he doesn’t, then Israel is in for some dark days ahead.
The Likud Maneuvering Begins In Earnest
May 11, 2012 § 2 Comments
For those who are not familiar with him, Silvan Shalom is Bibi Netanyahu’s political nemesis and constant foil. He is also somewhat inconveniently one of the vice prime ministers and Netanyahu’s erstwhile main challenger for the Likud leadership. I wrote this in March:
Netanyahu and vice premier Silvan Shalom are long time rivals who do not like each other. The two go out of their way to antagonize each other by scheduling conflicting events and trying to embarrass the other through tactical voting on legislation, and Netanyahu even made sure that Shalom’s face was blocked in the official picture from the Cabinet meeting in which the Gilad Shalit deal was approved. While Shalom often comes across in these confrontations as bumbling and hapless, his resentment of Netanyahu is at the boiling point and Bibi cannot afford to make any of the younger MKs unhappy and risk a genuine leadership challenge within Likud.
Shalom has formally challenged Bibi to be head of Likud twice and both times he has lost, but he is still constantly looking for an opening. Today, while speaking to Moshe Rosenbaum, who is the chairman of the Beit El regional community council which has jurisdiction over Ulpana, Shalom called for an authorization law that would retroactively legalize all settlements and outposts since he believes that fighting for individual hilltops on a case by case basis is not supportive enough of the settlement project at large. These comments came after a cabinet meeting of senior ministers (which did not include Shalom) in which no decision was taken on whether to comply with the High Court order to demolish Ulpana by July 1, and in the midst of pressure from Likud MKs for the government to pass a law bypassing the High Court entirely.
As I have said a couple of times this week, bringing Kadima into the government gives Netanyahu lots of room to maneuver within the larger coalition, but it does nothing to alleviate – and even intensifies – his problem within his own party. Shalom is naturally trying to seize upon this, knowing that Netanyahu needs to placate the hardline members of what is after all a pro-settlement party but that doing so will cause trouble for Netanyahu with Mofaz and Kadima. Likud’s fault lines are being exposed, and it is going to be a Herculean task to try and keep the party in one piece without causing a major political crisis between the Knesset and the High Court. I don’t know that doing so is feasible, and I remain convinced that Likud is going to fracture and that an official split is coming at some point. Meridor staked out his position yesterday and Shalom has staked out his position today – the question is, where does Netanyahu ultimately stand? The answer is not one that he is going to be able to avoid providing for too much longer.
Evacuating Settlers Is Not The Same As Japanese Internment
May 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
Moshe Arens is a longtime Likud wise man, having served as foreign minister and three tours as defense minister, but his compass is off this morning. Writing in Haaretz, Arens argues that forcing the settlers in Ulpana to leave their homes is wrong similarly to the way that uprooting settlers as part of disengaging from Gaza was unjust. This is a perfectly understandable viewpoint, albeit one I disagree with. The problem is that Arens then makes an unfortunate comparison which is incorrect on a number of levels. Arens writes:
The government decision involved a blatant violation of the civil rights of thousands of Israeli citizens, and a petition against it was filed with the High Court of Justice – the ultimate protector of the civil rights of Israeli citizens and all those living under Israeli sovereignty or Israeli jurisdiction, the ultimate arbiter of complaints against injustice and unlawful acts. The court, nevertheless, upheld the government’s decision.
In retrospect, the massive uprooting of so many Israeli citizens from their homes, by force, is now seen by many as a gross miscarriage of justice, similar to the case of the expulsion of U.S. citizens of Japanese origin from their homes in World War II. That government decision was also upheld by a supreme court and regretted in later years. In both cases, force was used against citizens who had violated no laws.
No matter what your view is of the Gaza disengagement, the comparison with Japanese internment during WWII is a bad one. To begin with, Arens’s characterization of what happened during WWII is ahistorical to an extreme degree. Arens asserts that Japanese-Americans were expelled from their homes and thus compares them to settlers in Gaza who were also expelled from their homes. The problem with this is that U.S. citizens of Japanese origin were not simply expelled from their homes; they were also put in detention camps. It was not a matter of only telling Japanese-Americans where they couldn’t go, but also confining them to a specific area and keeping them there by force. The settlers who were forced to leave Gaza were placed under no such restrictions. Once the disengagement was carried out, they were free to go and live in any place of their choosing in Israel. Arens purposely muddies the waters here by referring to “expulsion” without once mentioning internment, thereby creating a false parallel between the two cases. No doubt he is aware of the entire history of the treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, even if he is counting on the fact that some of his readers are not.
Furthermore, Arens’s comparison between the two cases does not work because the circumstances are too dissimilar. Gaza was not Israeli sovereign territory but was under Israeli military control and administrative jurisdiction. This gave the state a lot more leeway in how it made and carried out decisions related to Gaza, and enabled the government and the military to take unilateral actions in the name of national security that would not be allowed within Israel’s borders. In addition, all settlers in Gaza were ordered to leave regardless of their race, ethnic origin, or any other category, because the disengagement applied to any Israeli citizen residing within a defined territory. No distinctions were made between different types of citizens since the military directive was a blanket one.
In contrast, the executive order signed by FDR designated parts of the West Coast as military areas despite the fact that they were on sovereign U.S. soil and were not under attack or part of any arena in which warfare was taking place. Their legal status was more complicated during wartime, but nobody was asserting that they constituted permanent extra-judicial territory. Furthermore, Civilian Exclusion Order Number 34 removed from the Western U.S. all citizens of Japanese ancestry and only citizens of Japanese ancestry. This was not a military order related to a particular territory like the Gaza disengagement, but was rather a military order related to a particular group of people. The dissents in Korematsu (with the exception of Justice Jackson’s) did not object to the notion of expelling citizens from a particular area for reasonable national security reasons but were predicated on the fact that citizens were expelled and then interned in camps solely because of their ancestry without regard to any other factor. This is certainly not what happened in Gaza. Arens implies that Korematsu is now viewed as a “gross miscarriage of justice” because it uprooted citizens from their homes, but that is only a half-truth. It is viewed this way because it uprooted citizens from their homes and then also detained them, and both of these decisions were based solely on race. As Justice Murphy wrote in his dissenting opinion:
The judicial test of whether the Government, on a plea of military necessity, can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger that is so “immediate, imminent, and impending” as not to admit of delay and not to permit the intervention of ordinary constitutional processes to alleviate the danger….Justification for the exclusion is sought, instead, mainly upon questionable racial and sociological grounds not ordinarily within the realm of expert military judgment.
The Gaza disengagement does not fit the facts of Japanese internment during WWII at all. The settlers were not deprived of their rights in any way (Israel has no constitution, which is a completely separate problem) since any right to live in Gaza disappeared once the order was given to evacuate a territory under military administrative control, and the settlers were not discriminated against in any way. Arens understandably wants to connect what is now universally viewed in the U.S. as a national disgrace to what he views as an Israeli national disgrace, but the situations are too completely different to successfully make that comparison without purposely misleading on the facts, as Arens does.
The settlers who were uprooted from Gaza in many ways got a raw deal. The state encouraged them to go there in the first place and subsidized their lives there, and then following the disengagement did an abysmal job of compensating them for their economic losses. Their standard of living has dropped dramatically and the government has not followed through on its efforts to make them whole again. Nevertheless, the comparison to Japanese internment during WWII is an atrocious one, and Arens undermines his larger argument by making it.
Migron and What Comes Next
March 26, 2012 § 1 Comment
Migron is the kind of place that should never be in the news. It is a relatively small outpost in the West Bank that was started, vacated, and started again, built on land privately owned by Palestinians, and will never in a million years be part of any land swaps that might take place should the Israelis and Palestinians work out a peace agreement. Last August, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered it to be evacuated and demolished by the end of this month, and there is no reason that anyone but the government and the residents of Migron should have thought about it ever again. Yet, Migron is now all over the news because the government negotiated a deal with Migron’s residents to allow them to stay for another three years and then amazingly asked the Supreme Court to ignore its own ruling and approve the new agreement.
This might seem at first glance like a strange strategic move, but it was actually a smart one on its face because the makeup of the Court has changed. The new president, Asher Grunis, is a conservative who was able to assume his new position last month despite being less than three years away from the mandatory retirement age of 70 after the Knesset passed a law clearing the way for him to be appointed. The reason this was done is because his predecessor, Dorit Beinisch, who was responsible for the Migron decision among others, was seen as extremely activist and the assumption was that having Grunis at the helm would make the Court more compliant with the government’s wishes. In the first real test of this theory, however, the government has been unpleasantly shocked, as Grunis was part of the three judge panel that unanimously ruled yesterday that the deal between the government and Migron’s residents does not supersede the Court’s order from last August, which means that Migron must be demolished by the end of the week August 1.
No matter what your political persuasion, it is tough to view this as anything but a victory for the rule of law and judicial independence. The Court’s order was clear, and the fact that the government and Migron’s residents petitioned the Court to approve their deal casts aside any doubts as to whether the government has the power to simply disregard the original decision. The question now is whether the Knesset will scramble to pass a bypass law that nullifies the Court’s decision through a legislative override. If this happens, it will be a truly disastrous move on a number of fronts. With all of the attention that has been focused – including by me – on the various anti-democratic legislation moving through the Knesset, passing a law to avoid enforcement of a Court decision that was itself an attempt to enforce a previous Court decision would add unnecessary fuel to the fire, and provide ammunition to people who erroneously declare Israel to no longer be a democracy. A legislative override will also further doom any last shred of prospect that remains for a peace agreement with the Palestinians, since if the government cannot bring itself to evacuate a place like Migron, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine ever uprooting any settlements as part of a negotiated deal for a Palestinian state. Bypassing the Court is also terrible timing given that Israel is about to face Goldstone Redux, since the new UN committee set up to investigate the settlements is without a doubt going to issue a damning report, and Israel is making the same ill-considered mistake it made last time by refusing to cooperate at all and cutting off all communication with UNHRC commissioner Navi Pillay. What is going to happen next is sadly predictable – Israel will not try to lobby the committee at all in the belief that doing so would grant the committee legitimacy, the committee will blast Israel in every possible way and the government’s strategy will be an utter failure when nobody ignores the report or accepts Israel’s argument that its lack of cooperation makes the report illegitimate, and Israel will then spend months, if not years, complaining that its side of the story was not represented and that it is being unfairly demonized by a one-sided version of the facts.
So for a variety of reasons, this is just not the time to create an even bigger mess by sending the message that Israeli Supreme Court decisions can be ignored whenever they put the government in an uncomfortable position or conflict with the politics of Likud’s coalition. Yet, I’ll bet almost anything that Migron is not evacuated and demolished by week’s end August 1, and that Likud’s younger rightwing vanguard does everything in its power to make sure that the Migron decision is consigned to nothingness. The Knesset’s current coalition politics will not allow anything less, and Israel will continue to fight a losing battle to convince the world that it is blameless for the situation with the Palestinians and that it will be able to withdraw from part of the West Bank whenever the Palestinian leadership is interested in returning to the negotiating table. Migron and all of the machinations surrounding its eventual fate is a crushingly sad symbol of the state of Israeli politics and the inertia of the peace process.
Why I Do Not Agree With A Settlement Boycott
March 19, 2012 § 1 Comment
A couple of people have queried as to whether I agree with Beinart’s call to boycott the settlements, since it was not apparent from my earlier post. The answer is that I do not. A deeper dive into this will come when I have a little more time to write on it extensively, but the quick version is that I think it gives dangerous cover to BDS groups, whom I do not support in any way, and I also do not think it would have the intended effect of galvanizing Israel to pull out of the West Bank. The problems with the global BDS movement are manifold, from its double standards to its singling out of Israel to its masking its true motives, and as I alluded to earlier, I think a move to boycott settlement goods gives legitimacy to the wider BDS narrative and goals. From a purely logistical point of view, the West Bank settlers who would be most reluctant to leave are not there for economic reasons but for ideological reasons. A boycott will not only be unpersuasive in getting them to leave, but will probably reinforce their views on the importance of remaining right where they are. As for Israel at large, the Israeli economy does not depend on the settlements to a large enough extent to make a settlement boycott effective at forcing the government’s hand in evacuating the West Bank.
So in sum, I see no compelling reason to grant a victory to the undeserving BDS movement, and I do not believe that a settlement boycott will achieve its stated goals, and in fact might have the very opposite effect. Does this mean that I want to see Israel hold on to the West Bank indefinitely? Of course not. I would love to see Israel leave the West Bank as soon as is feasible, help in setting up a Palestinian state, and move on the to the next stage of its political development, but a settlement boycott is not the path to a comprehensive and fair negotiated two-state solution.
Obama and Israeli Politics
March 14, 2012 § 1 Comment
There is a lot of buzz about this Peter Beinart piece on President Obama’s mismanaging his strategy toward the Israel and the peace process. Leaving aside the larger question about what it says about whether Obama is pro-Israel or not (and for the record, I firmly believe that he is, and I think it becomes clear when looking at the substance of his actions rather than his sometimes puzzling rhetoric) a couple of things jump out at me.
First, Obama and his team criminally misread the state of Israeli politics and public opinion. Beinart reports that the White House believed that no Israeli PM could afford to alienate any U.S. president and that American pressure on Obama would force Netanyahu to back down. Yet the administration did not take into account the high levels of unpopularity and mistrust Israelis felt toward Obama in 2009. The president’s popularity rating, which had been 31% in according to a Jerusalem Post poll in May 2009, plummeted to 6% following his public push for a settlement freeze, and his Cairo speech -with its emphasis on the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s creation despite the decades of pre-WWII Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine – did himself no favors with the Israeli electorate. Furthermore, Israelis were then and still are baffled by Obama’s trips to Ankara, Cairo, and Jakarta without a stopover in Jerusalem. So while it is generally true that Israeli PMs have suffered politically following high profile disagreements with American presidents, the deep wariness Israelis had for Obama made this situation different. The complete misreading of the situation is all the more surprising considering that one would expect Rahm Emanuel to have had a good grasp of the state of Israeli politics.
Second, the theory that Netanyahu would fold like he had during the Clinton administration completely ignored the fact that Israel has a proportional representation voting system that requires building a coalition to control the Knesset, and that Bibi’s coalition this time is different from his last one. In the late 90s, the Netanyahu coalition consisted of Likud, a religious bloc of Shas, Mafdal, and UTJ, Third Way, and Yisrael BaAliyah. While Likud was obviously not a big advocate of the peace process, it was the entity that Bibi controlled and would have gone along with any decision he made. Certainly the later example of Ariel Sharon orchestrating the Gaza pullout and the formation of Kadima demonstrates the power of the PM to carry out initiatives that run contrary to his or her previous positions. Shas and UTJ have always been concerned first and foremost with securing subsidies for their ultra-Orthodox constituents, and have in the past been part of governments that were less extreme on settlements and conducted peace negotiations. While Mafdal during the last decade of its life was largely a settler party, it was not one when it was in the Netanyahu coalition between ’96 and ’99, and also would have acquiesced to a shift in policy. Third Way was a Labor breakaway, and Yisrael BaAliyah was Natan Sharansky’s party and existed to cater to the needs of Russian olim. The point here is that Bibi’s coalition during his first stint as PM was not dependent on settler support and continued settlement growth, and thus pressure from an American president on settlements and peace process issues was able to be effective.
Fast forward a decade to 2009, and the situation was completely flipped. In 2009, Likud came in second in Knesset elections, losing to Kadima by one seat, but Kadima was not able to form a coalition precisely because of its stance on settlements and the peace process. This meant that when Netanyahu and Likud got their chance to build a coalition to control the Knesset, they were overly dependent on hawkish and settler-dominated parties, and thus the coalition was Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu (led by Avigdor Lieberman, himself a settler), Shas (which has become far more hardline on settlements due to its member feeling alienated by pro-peace upper and middle class secular Ashkenazi Jews), and Labor, which served in the government so that Ehud Barak could be defense minister. For Obama’s pressure to work on Netanyahu in 2009, he would have had to reverse himself on the settlement issue, which would have fatally blown up his coalition. The only way he would have been able to stay in power would have been through an alliance with Kadima, but having won more seats than Likud did, Tzipi Livni would never have consented to joining a coalition in which she was not PM.
So while the Obama administration’s idea about Israeli PMs not being able to survive public conflicts with American presidents may be correct in theory, they neglected to think the entire strategy through and take into account the various ways in which the Israeli political climate in 2009 was going to present them with a number of insurmountable roadblocks.
