The Palestinians: Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity

Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel: Pressure from America on Israel? Well, perhaps, but not relevant. The Palestinians refuse to talk... to each other.

Israel: Economic Refuge?

Blogging from an airport, quickly:

The numbers in this item are rather small, but apparently there's a rise in the number of Jews immigrating to Israel this year. Countries of origin: France, UK, and the US. Reason for the uptick: economic. It's better in Israel.

The Messiah is almost here.

Traveling

I'm doing a spot of globetrotting, and will be offline more than usual. Blogging may be sporadic for the next 10 days or so. But anyway, it's summer. Why read depressing politcal blogs at all?

A First for an American President

Obama's policy is failing in Israel. He's strengthening the resolve of the wrong part of the nation.

I can't prove this, of course, and anyway, it's far too early days. But there is mounting anecdotal evidence, and now here's an inconclusive poll, to say that Obama's decision to single out Israel for high-profile public pressure in the Mideast is achieving the opposite goal. Israel's political center is hardening its positions.

The survey by Dialog, conducted Thursday under the auspices of Prof. Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, found Netanyahu's approval ratings were 18 percent higher than Tzipi Livni's - a much larger margin than when they were competing for prime minister. Asked who was better suited to be prime minister, 52 percent said Netanyahu, while only 34 said Livni.
Netanyahu's approval ratings may have jumped 5 points since the last Dialog survey, on June 15. In the most recent survey, 49 percent of the 500 respondents said they were satisfied with Netanyahu's performance. The survey results have a margin of error of 4.5 percent. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman jumped 9 points since a May 14 survey, with a 40-percent satisfaction rate. Defense Minister Ehud Barak improved by only one point. Forty-six percent of respondents said Israel should continue construction in the West Bank even if this causes a confrontation with the U.S., and 44 percent said the opposite.

These are not decisive figures, but seen in historical perspective, they're rather startling. So far as I know, no Israeli prime minister, not even Ben Gurion in 1956, has ever faced down an American president with an explicit demand; because no Israeli electorate would tolerate such a thing. Moreover, the issue this time is one on which a majority of Israelis would usually agree with the American president's position anyway. There is no large political camp in Israel in favor of the settlement project anymore.

But there is a very large political camp which is exceedingly well versed in the issues including the minutiae. Non-Israelis who don't know us well cannot conceive the degree to which politics fascinate Israelis. I've never seen any Western electorate to remotely resemble us in this - probably because there's no other place where the issues are so immediately existential. Since we know the score, we can see the extent to which Obama's positions are detrimental to us. Pretending the Bush-Sharon agreements of 2004 didn't happen is dishonest but also cautionary. Insisting Upper Modiin is the same as Kiryat Arba, and perhaps also East Jerusalem, is not intelligent by any measure. Making believe pressure on Israel alone will bring peace is beyond childish.

Porkers

It's been a busy week, and it isn't over yet. Along with everything else going on, we've had an encounter with Swine Flu (everyone's fine now).

The reason I mention this is to tell that I was very impressed by the way the authorities are organized. Everyone involved knew exactly what was supposed to happen and by whom, and what wasn't supposed to happen. The procedures were clear and concise, there were leaflets with explanations, there was a no-nonsense approach with a seriousness about directives which is almost anti-Israeli. Can you imagine a situation where Israelis all do what they're told? Where they even accept who gets to do the telling? Where the tellers have their message honed?

Apparently if everyone knows what they're doing, it's simply a nasty flu, not a threat to humanity. So we seem to have decided to make it be that way.

Israel is the Only Conceivable Culprit

I'm way too busy to blog these days, as you may have noticed. This week, however, a gaggle of Israeli far left organizations published a document about the Gaza operation. It's not online yet, but it probably will be. In spite of being too busy for such nonsense I did take half an hour to race over it. Next week I've got some long boring plane trips ahead of me, so perhaps I'll decide to be systematic in my reading and then write about it.

In the meantime, the same coalition of organizations has put up a short video on how evil Israel is to the Gazans. You can see it here.

Things in Gaza really are bad. Don't you really wish the Palestinians would decide to be greedy and egoistic, like the folks in America, and put their personal gain and material goals ahead of their hatreds and grievances? If they did, Gaza might soon be on its way to being a fine place; why, many of the grievances might even simply disappear.

What a thought, huh?

Vocal Pontificating

I'm not going to have any time for blogging today. Fear not, however! This brave new world we live in enables a person from Virginia whom I've never personally met to connect me to a fellow from Melbourne I've never met to interview me and put it up on the Internet so readers from Jerusalem whom I've never met can listen. Or not. As you wish. Still, think about it before you turn elsewhere: instead of reading me pontificating, you can listen. Even on your iPod.

Mondowiess Expose

Jay Adler has a long, thoughtful and empathic analysis of the Mondoweiss folks. It hinges on Jewish identity, and how it can function or malfunction. Jay's reading is as compelling as it is, precisely because he more or less shares a starting point with the Mondoweiss folks - though of course he then took a different road. Read the whole thing.

Can we say all this of Mondoweiss? No, we cannot. Not really. For while Mondoweiss may at times espouse these positions, none of them are the end it seeks to serve, not even the ultimate end of a just settlement and a lasting peace. In conflict, a just settlement recognizes the legitimate desires of all parties, not the moral claim of only one. But the active agents behind Mondoweiss do not believe that Israel, or the Jewish people in relation to Israel, has just desires. Horowitz does not support the existence of a Jewish state. Blumenthal, like him, believes that Zionism (Jewish nationalism) – in apparent contradistinction to any other nationalism – is inherently racist. Weiss, a deeply anti-Semitic work in progress, in his haziest, most narcotic fantasy of peace, envisions as its ecstatic end not the peace, but the end of Israel.

American Philanthropy in Israel

There's a fellow who has been writing me recently to convince me, I suppose, of his opinion. His thesis is that American Jews should be donating to worthy causes near home and in their own communities, while Israel should wean itself of its dependence on them.

It's a compelling argument, and I can see his point. Except he's missing most of the picture.

The national budget weaving its way through the Knesset these days is for almost $64billion. I've spent the past half hour or so Googling to find how much American Jews give annually to Israeli philanthropic causes (investing, supporting one's children who are in Israel, maintaining an apartment here and so on, don't count as philanthropy). Or for that matter, all Jews outside Israel. I'm somewhat out of my depth, and short of spare time, so I haven't found the number. But by all accounts I have found, it lies somewhere between 1-5% of the total. Probably closer to the lower sum.

Which means at least 95% of the financial cost of having a Jewish State is covered by the people who live in it. (Not to mention other types of cost, such as defending it). This is as it should be: states and their citizens are meant to cover their costs. But it does raise a different question: if the entire effort of having a Jewish State and 95% of its cost is borne by the 45% of the Jews who live in it, in what way do the others participate? Not by coming here often, alas: something like 80% of America's Jews have never been here, not even once.

I agree with my correspondent that philanthropy, or what used to be called "check-book Zionism", is not the best way for America's Jews to participate in the most important Jewish effort of the past 2,000 years. Investing here, coming often, owning an apartment and spending time here most years, sending each child to study one year at one of our fine universities or yeshivas – all these and many other options are preferable to the check-book variant of Zionism. But they're also all more time consuming, more of an effort, and probably costlier in an immediate way, though eventually they give far better returns.

Philanthropy is a time honored tradition in Judaism. If a majority of America's Jews have decided to marginalize themselves from the Zionist project, I wouldn't try to break one of the most important bonds they still do have (if they do). They need the connection.

Jews Can Be Our Worst Enemies

A Dutch organization whose aim is to convince Dutchmen to boycott Israel has been rebuked by a local "truth in advertising" watchdog for, how shall we put it, fibbing.

So we've got some folks blatantly lying so as to hurt the Jewish State. I think that's a reasonable early warning sign of antisemitism, don't you? I continue to think so, even after reading the item all the way through:

Peace chairman Joost Hardeman, who is Jewish and says he supports Israel
but opposes its occupation of Palestinian land, told Haaretz earlier this year
that he rejected the center's allegations. "We do not propose a comprehensive
ban on Israeli goods, and we are opposed to this," he said. "We only demand that
consumers be made aware, through labeling, of the origins of the goods they are
purchasing."

Khaled Meshaal, Peacenik

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal responds to the positions of Obama and Netanyahu:

"We reject the position taken by Netanyahu... on east Jerusalem, settlement activity, the right of return of Palestinian refugees and his vision of a demilitarised Palestinian state deprived of sovereignty over its land, air space and territorial waters," Meshaal said.Meshaal said Hamas opposed Israel as a Jewish state because that would amount to the denial of the rights of the six million Palestinian refugees."The enemy's leaders call for a so-called Jewish state is a racist demand that is no different from calls by Italian Fascists and Hitler's Nazism," Mashaal said.

This is actually mildly funny, since the Hamas Charter blames the Jews for World War Two (along with WWI and the French Revolution). It's also not in any way new; I'm linking to it not to inform y'all of something you didn't already know, but simply to record the re-iteration of these well-worn positions after all those speeches.
(Via Jeffrey Goldberg)

American Pressure on Israel can Cost Lives

I'm having a second look at Elliot Abram's article "Hillary is Wrong".

There is nothing in it that we didn't already know, of course, yet let's look at this section:

In June 2003, Mr. Sharon stood alongside Mr. Bush, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas at Aqaba, Jordan, and endorsed Palestinian statehood publicly: "It is in Israel's interest not to govern the Palestinians but for the Palestinians to govern themselves in their own state. A democratic Palestinian state fully at peace with Israel will promote the long-term security and well-being of Israel as a Jewish state." At the end of that year he announced his intention to pull out of the Gaza Strip.
The U.S. government supported all this, but asked Mr. Sharon for two more things. First, that he remove some West Bank settlements; we wanted Israel to show that removing them was not impossible. Second, we wanted him to pull out of Gaza totally -- including every single settlement and the "Philadelphi Strip" separating Gaza from Egypt, even though holding on to this strip would have prevented the smuggling of weapons to Hamas that was feared and has now come to pass. Mr. Sharon agreed on both counts.
These decisions were political dynamite, as Mr. Sharon had long predicted to us.

Noteworthy points:

1. Sharon, like Barak before him, publicly accepted Palestinian statehood, but this made it no more likely to happen.

2. The Bush administration (Bush!) pressured Israel to go beyond what it intended, and Israel complied. This made Palestinian statehood no more likely than before, since the fundamental Palestinian demands are incompatible with Zionism, and therefore won't happen.

3. The Bush administration forced Israel to take severe risks, namely leaving the strip of territory along the Gaza-Egyptian border. The idea was that only by totally leaving Gaza could Israel claim it had really left, and this was regarded as neccessary for the rise of a functioning Palestinian quasi-state in Gaza. The hope was that the Palestinians would indeed take advantage of the opportunity, and it would be possible to build on it. The danger was that the Palestinians would not try to get their act together and would prefer to continue waging war against Israeli civilians.

4. After the Bush administration forced Israel to take the risk, and the calculation misfired, there was no cost to the Americans. Israelis died, and lots of Palestinians, but no Americans. On the contrary: the Americans held an election, replaced their administration, and the new one is repeating the mistakes of its predecessor.

The Palestinians Missed Again

Ehud Olmert and Saeb Erekat both agree that Olmet made on offer to the Palestinians in September 2008 that goes way beyond what any Israeli prime minister ever offered, and the Palestinians didn't respond.

At the end of Olmert's term he tried one last maneuver in an effort to secure a legacy. Olmert told me he met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in September 2008 and unfurled a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories. He says he offered Abbas 93.5 to 93.7 percent of the Palestinian territories, along with a land swap of 5.8 percent and a safe-passage corridor from Gaza to the West Bank that he says would make up the rest. The Holy Basin of Jerusalem would be under no sovereignty at all and administered by a consortium of Saudis, Jordanians, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans. Regarding refugees, Olmert says he rejected the right of return and instead offered, as a "humanitarian gesture," a small number of returnees, although "smaller than the Palestinians wanted—a very, very limited number."

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, confirmed that Olmert had made the offer. "It's very sad," Erekat said. "He was serious, I have to say." Erekat said that he and Abbas studied the materials and began to formulate a response, coordinating with the Americans. But time eventually ran out. A few months after Olmert presented his offer, war erupted in Gaza. Shortly after that, Olmert was out of power.

The line about how time ran out is unconvincing. In September 2008 Olmert was about to be replaced by Livni; that this didn't happen was not something anyone could have counted on at the time. Basically, there was an offer on the table that gave the Palestinians considerably more than the Israeli public intended, made by a prime minister who had nothing to lose since his political career was over, and the Palestinians dithered. They always do: either because they're incompetent, or because they'll never give up on their precious right of return – and we'll never allow it. Which means they're holding out for what they can't have, and in the meantime they live without what they could have.