So who is Shaked (pronounced “shah-ked”)? Her background is typical for a third-generation Israeli, combining Ashkenazi and Sephardi (her mother’s family came from Russia in the 1880s, her father’s from Iran in the 1950s), liberal and conservative, secular and religious elements. Growing up in Tel Aviv, the most sophisticated and progressive city in the Middle East, she served in the army and — like so many conscripts — moved seamlessly into computer engineering. Promoted to marketing manager for Texas Instruments, she might easily have made a career among the entrepreneurial yet left-leaning Tel Aviv elite. But she had already made Judaism and Zionism the core of her outlook and, while still secular, gravitated to centre-right politics. By the age of 30 she was running the office of Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, the prime minister, and seemed poised for a stellar career in Likud, the dominant party of the Right.

The first sign that this might not happen came in 2010 when, with Netanyahu’s former chief of staff Naftali Bennett, she launched a new Zionist ginger group, My Israel. Then, in 2012, Shaked demonstrated the boldness that would become her trademark. She left Likud and joined Bennett, who had become leader of Jewish Home. A year later Shaked was elected to the Knesset, where she made a dynamic impression as the only secular woman in a religious party. During the Gaza war in 2014, she caused outrage by sharing an article on Facebook that referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes”. By last year’s general election, Jewish Home had become a key part of the ruling coalition and Netanyahu appointed Shaked to the key portfolio of justice.

In just over a year, she has dominated the headlines on several different issues. Most controversially, she has challenged the Supreme Court, accusing it of usurping the powers of executive and legislature. The court, a bastion of the Israeli liberal establishment, has reined in successive governments of the Right. But when the court recently blocked Netanyahu’s plan to push through the Leviathan offshore gas project — on which the prime minister has staked his reputation — it fell to Shaked to respond. In her view, the court, influenced by the doctrines of its former chief justice Aharon Barak, has cultivated not judicial independence but judicial activism, and she insists that Israel’s constitutional balance now needs to be redressed. She would give the Knesset the right to overrule the court under certain circumstances, though many disagree with her view that a simple majority should be sufficient. She may soon have the chance to reshape the court: five justices, a third of the total, are due to retire.

Shaked has provoked the international community too. She wants to force NGOs that receive most of their funds from “foreign government entities” to be identified as such. Though she insists this is about transparency, her critics claim that she plans to close down such NGOs, which are mainly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. She also wants to reintroduce a law defining Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, opposition to which brought down the last coalition. Most controversially, she wants Israel to abandon the two-state solution, annex the borderlands of the West Bank (“Area C”), which are home to 400,000 Jewish settlers, and offer the 90,000 Palestinians there Israeli citizenship. Eventually, she envisages a confederation between the remaining Palestinian territories and Jordan. Both Jews and Palestinians would finally obtain security, prosperity and peace.

Shaked knows such radical ideas won’t gain a hearing in the chancelleries of the West, let alone at the UN. But by outflanking Bibi, who still pays lip service to the two-state solution, she has staked a claim to the leadership of the Right. To a country that feels besieged and unloved, Shaked offers tough love. “We will not commit suicide because of pressure from the international community,” she tells Der Spiegel. “A Palestinian state is not possible at the moment.” She knows that Israelis won’t vote for another Gaza on the West Bank, capable of bombarding Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. She knows that the new, unapologetic Israel of which she is a symbol must use its global economic and cultural success to make its case. And she knows that women never succeed in politics unless they stand up to the men. Her old boss Bibi had better beware.

The post Underrated: Ayelet Shaked appeared first on Standpoint.

Known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Christians, and as al-Haram ash-Sharif — the Noble Sanctuary — to Muslims, the religious compound at the heart of Jerusalem’s old city was formerly the site of two Jewish temples, Byzantine and crusader churches, and today the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

From the first Arab revolts in the days of the British Mandate, the claim that Al-Aqsa was under threat was commonly used by leaders such as the Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini to incite the Palestinian society to violence. More recently, it was the visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon in 2000 that was seized upon by Palestinian extremists to justify the wave of suicide bombings that became the Second Intifada.

While Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been hailed internationally as a moderate counterbalance to the Islamist Hamas, Abbas has in fact also repeatedly appealed to hardline Islamic sensibilities, denying the Temple Mount’s significance to other faiths, and encouraging the hallucinatory belief that Al-Aqsa is under threat. In the West we are ever alert to racial supremacism, but when it comes to such religious supremacism we have a blind spot.

Throughout the summer tensions in Jerusalem rose as Islamist activists became increasingly aggressive in protesting against Jewish visitors to the compound. On several occasions Israeli security forces clashed with Palestinian rioters who took to barricading themselves inside Al-Aqsa.

With the onset of the Jewish religious festivals in September the violence picked up dramatically. Yet, just as tensions reached fever pitch, Abbas — Israel’s supposed peace partner — used this opportunity to fan the flames further. Abbas declared that Jews have “no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet” and told his people that “every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by Allah.”

Yet astonishingly Abbas then stood before the UN and warned the world that Israel is attempting to transform the conflict from a political to a religious one, before repeating the claim that the Israeli government is acting to undermine Al-Aqsa. There is no evidence to suggest Israel has any such policy, but by repeating this allegation, Abbas was ensuring the very transition to the kind of religious conflict he accuses Israel of seeking.

Clearly, Jerusalem’s sacred compound is of overwhelming historical and religious significance to adherents of all three Abrahamic faiths, particularly Judaism and Islam. Yet the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to recognise this fact encapsulates a basic truth about this conflict and why it remains unresolved. Evidently, even Palestinian leaders who are presented as moderates in fact endorse religious supremacist notions about the holy sites that sit at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.

The post Mounting Mendacity appeared first on Standpoint.

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza after a 38-year occupation presented new opportunities for the Palestinians. As CEO of the Palestine Economic Development Company (PED), Jabir had a daunting task before him, yet one which could produce the crowning achievement of his career so far. He would spearhead the first major economic project in Gaza that could turn round the fortunes of his people. The project carried great risks but also immeasurable rewards, perhaps even for the future of the Palestinian state as a whole.

Until August 2005, close to 8,000 Israeli Jewish settlers lived in the Gaza Strip. Occupying approximately 30 per cent of the land, they were guarded by thousands of Israeli soldiers, who imposed restrictions on the movements of the approximately 1.5 million Palestinian residents.

Ask former Israeli settlers about life in Gaza at the time, and many will wax lyrical about the “paradise on earth” — the endless sandy beaches, the bountiful farms, the sense of community with others who had decided to establish a home on territory conquered from Egypt during the 1967 Six Day War.

Ask a Palestinian the same question and you will get the distinct impression that you are talking about two separate continents, not the same meagre strip of land measuring 45 kilometres in length and just five kilometres in width at its narrowest point.

Five years before David Cameron and others called the coastal enclave a “prison camp”, many Israeli NGOs had already been using the term to describe life in Gaza. Since 1967, Israel exercised a military occupation, controlling its airspace and territorial waters. This was relaxed after the Oslo Accords, but following the Palestinian suicide bombings, rocket attacks and angry protests of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, Israel reimposed restrictive measures that took a heavy toll on the lives of the Palestinians: strict entry and exit regulations, and control of airspace and naval borders. Egypt controlled Gaza’s southern entry crossing. Gazan militants continued fighting, firing more than 500 rockets and 3,000 mortar shells into southern Israel between 2000 and 2005; 124 Israelis and hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza were killed, with many more injured. Palestinian trade was curtailed and unemployment rates soared sky-high as people struggled to make ends meet. Poverty rates in Gaza had risen by more than 40 per cent in just five years, the Israeli NGO B’tselem reported.

Life under military occupation meant two tiers of existence — huge villas by the sea for the Israeli settlers; cramped, decrepit dwellings inland for the Palestinians. This was one of many reasons why so many rejoiced so wholeheartedly when the Israeli withdrawal, directed by prime minister Ariel Sharon, began in August 2005. But for Dr Jabir, the main concern was what had been left behind: the greenhouses which he was hoping to use in order to jump-start the Palestinian economy and propel it into a new age of prosperity.

American Jewish donors paid the Israeli settlers $14 million to leave the 400 hectares of greenhouses. At first, Jabir planned to keep them running, providing employment for up to 4,000 workers. There were further plans to  turn PEDC into “a sort of equity fund for local start-ups”, with hopes of having “$1 billion invested within five years”, the Economist reported enthusiastically at the time.

Three months after the withdrawal, work was in full swing and the situation looked promising. Damage to the greenhouses inflicted by both departing settlers and Palestinian looters had been repaired, and in November 2005 Gazan farmers were preparing for their first harvest — $20 million worth of cherry tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. Even US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was given a bag of Gazan bell peppers for her birthday that month.

“I think we have made this a success in a very short period,” Jabir told the New York Times. “I think we surprised even ourselves by how quickly we reached this stage . . . We are employing thousands of people in these greenhouses. We kept the growing cycle intact. We have pumped a lot of money into the Gaza economy.”

Within just another three months, however, this rosy picture turned bleak. Businessmen hit a brick wall in the form of the sudden closure of the Karni crossing, then the only passage for Gazan produce into Israel and beyond to lucrative foreign markets.

The Karni crossing had been targeted by terrorists in the past — an attack by Palestinian militants in January 2005 killed six Israelis and injured five. Condoleezza Rice personally negotiated for this and other crossings to be opened. Yet, despite there having been no attacks on the crossing since August 2005, and just as the initial harvests stood in lorries waiting to be exported, Karni was kept almost continuously closed between January and March 2006. Losses translated into missed salaries. In February 2006, when guards still awaiting their pay abandoned their posts, Palestinian looters attacked Jabir’s greenhouses and caused a further $1 million of damage. The following month, demonstrators took to the streets demanding salaries or the resignation of the Palestinian government.

Whether because of security threats from the Palestinians or a lack of Israeli goodwill following Hamas’s electoral victory that January, the crossing’s closure meant a viable export industry stood no chance. The $20 million invested by PEDC in the project was swiftly evaporating — long before Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in the summer of 2007 and assumed overall control of the strip. “We have buyers around the world,” Jabir told the BBC in March 2006. “Everyone is interested in buying our produce. But we can’t get it out of Gaza. On a daily basis we are losing $120,000.”

By April, the project had collapsed, money ran out and  Jabir quit. A miasma of rotten fruit and vegetables had become the stench of defeat and decay spreading through Gaza, as the hopes of an economic renaissance evaporated. In 2007, Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza.

The former Israeli settlers shook their heads and said, “I told you so.”

Together with his wife and children, Dror Vanunu, 39, was ousted from Gaza in August 2005. They were forced to spend five months living out of suitcases in a hotel, and were moved around the country before eventually settling in Nitzan, a small village where many former settlers of Gush Katif — the biggest cluster of settlements in Gaza — came to live, just an hour’s drive from their erstwhile homes. “My children went to 11 different elementary schools,” he says.

He sits just a few metres away from the Gush Katif Memorial Centre, where visitors are guided through a sentimental audio-visual presentation of the Gaza withdrawal as seen through the eyes of the strip’s Jewish former residents.

Melancholic piano and clarinet music pipes through the speakers as visitors sit on symbolically-hacked palm tree stubs and watch videos of soldiers in tears trying to evacuate settlers while bulldozers destroy one pastel-hued villa after another. Ten years on, many of the ex-Gazan residents still live in makeshift “cara-villas” — temporary homes akin to caravans, searingly hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter. They are waiting to buy land which would relocate them next to their former neighbours. They are bitter about having to leave their homes in Gaza — and their bitterness is compounded by the rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled strip which keep them running to improvised air-raid shelters in the shape of giant sewage pipes, open at both ends and with a single bench in the middle.

Looking out towards Gaza, Vanunu talks angrily of the Palestinians who now reside where he used to live. “We left behind infrastructure worth billions of dollars,” he says. “The fact is that the Palestinians had the chance to do something positive — but the opposite happened. When we left Gush Katif [the Israeli settlement community in Gaza], instead of encouraging the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, they came directly into our communities, they vandalised our synagogues, they burned them. They took the agricultural tools that we left there and they turned them into tools of terror. The metal of the greenhouses of Gush Katif was used for the Qassam [rocket] industry. And many  of the Qassam rockets that were fired into southern Israel were fired from the ruins of our homes.”

In the year of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, 488 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel — the fewest in a year since such attacks began in 2001. But the following year, the number more than doubled to 1,123 rockets fired. In 2007, 2,427 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza. Three wars between Israel and Gaza-based Hamas have followed, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. “We knew exactly that it would be a terrible mistake,” says Vanunu.

Yet some maintain that the Gaza withdrawal was the only viable path forward. Chemi Shalev, a columnist in the daily newspaper Haaretz, argues that the disengagement “was the very essence of those times. Israelis longed to rid themselves of terrorist bombings and to discard their despair of a failed peace process. Lacking partners, they preferred to do it themselves.”

Shalev draws an analogy with the withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 after 18 years of military occupation, which was also at first supported, then criticised. The biggest achievement of the Gaza withdrawal, says a former high-ranking Israeli government source who played a key role during the disengagement, is that it was executed promptly, without a single casualty, and set a solid precedent for further withdrawals. Alongside the 21 Gaza settlements, four West Bank settlements were also evacuated. Ariel Sharon “was convinced it was the right thing to do and to continue with [withdrawal] in the West Bank.”

The parameters of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are well-known, and were most recently outlined in detail during bilateral negotiations in 2008. The peace plan, as championed by former prime minister Ehud Olmert, would see the establishment of a non-contiguous Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, linked by a land corridor, with land swaps and an internationalisation of the Old City of Jerusalem. And yet, a decade on from the Gaza retreat, further withdrawals from the West Bank do not appear to be on the Israeli government’s agenda.

Since 2005, aside from a brief hiatus in 2009 following pressure from the US, settlement expansion has continued almost unabated. A rebellion is on the horizon, warn many in Israel — not a third intifada, but rather an uprising of Israeli settlers against their country’s secular and democratic forces. Events over the past ten years demonstrate time and again the swift rise of the violent hilltop settlers.

The Gaza withdrawal was completed peacefully and even ahead of schedule. But it may have been the last time settlements will be evacuated in such a manner and on such a large scale.

The withdrawal was completed on September 12, 2005. Just six months later, in February 2006, the evacuation of nine empty homes in Amona, an outpost determined as being illegal by Israel’s Supreme Court, descended into a bloodbath. More than 200 people were injured, including many policemen and two Israeli parliamentarians. Ten thousand officers from the police, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and security services were unable to contain the uprising. Today, Amona still stands, now the biggest Jewish illegal outpost in the Palestinian Territories — a symbol of settler defiance in the face of Israeli law.

As recently as July this year, the government attempted to implement a Supreme Court ruling and take down two illegally built structures in the settlement of Beit El — itself considered illegal under international, though not Israeli, law. Rather than support the rule of law, the pro-settler Israeli parliamentarian Moti Yogev called for the bulldozing of the Supreme Court. Hundreds of protesters violently clashed with the police and security forces. One of the leaders of the people trying to prevent the police from approaching the structures was an elected Knesset member, Oren Hazan, from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own party.

“I want to state it clearly,” said Naftali Bennett, education minister and leader of the right-wing pro-settler party Jewish Home, “Ten years after the disengagement to the day, we are here so that things will look different. The answer to Palestinian terror is settlement, not cowardice.”

The same day that the Beit El structures were demolished, Netanyahu announced the construction of 300 new housing units in another part of the settlement. A further 504 housing units were approved in five settlements in annexed East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisage as their future capital.

Yuval Diskin, former director of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, warned in August: “Religious Zionism is on the way to taking over the state of Israel. We are witnessing a new situation of ‘two states for two peoples’. The ‘state of Judea’ is arising de facto, alongside the state of Israel. In the state of Judea, there are different guidelines, a different set of values. There are two justice systems — one for Jews (Israeli law) and one for Palestinians (security legislation).”

This is evident in the extent to which senior IDF officers increasingly employ religious terminology. During the 2014 Gaza conflict, the commander of the IDF’s Givati Brigade, Colonel Ofer Winter, issued a battle order of the day setting the fighting in an explicitly religious context: “O Lord, God of Israel, make our path successful as we are about to fight for the sake of your people Israel against an enemy who blasphemes your name.” The effect is such that Israeli soldiers are encouraged to see the fighting as a “holy war”. Sound familiar?

Such incidents are not unusual. In 2009, former chief military rabbi Avihai Rontzki said soldiers should forego democratic and legal processes when dealing with terror suspects. Instead, they should rely on the “wisdom of commanders and fighters” and “kill [the suspects] in their beds”.

Many predict that this, coupled with the spread of nationalistic religious Zionism within the ranks of the Israeli army, will make further territorial pull-outs virtually impossible.

“What Sharon did in 2005, using the army to evacuate 10,000 settlers from Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, is going to be much more complicated if you have 33 to 40 per cent of junior officers coming from that religious background,” notes Amos Harel, a veteran military analyst for Haaretz.

“Who are they going to listen to — the prime minister and the officers or the rabbis?”

In 2004, Dov Weissglas, a key adviser to Ariel Sharon, dropped a bombshell when he told Haaretz that the Gaza withdrawal was actually intended to “freeze the peace process”. By evacuating Gaza and four West Bank settlements, “effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Sharon later denied this, implying that he would consider evacuating further Israeli settlements in the West Bank — but he fell into a coma before he could be held to his word.

Today, the facts on the ground suggest that Weissglas’s prophecy may be coming true. Moreover, Israeli opinion polls show a reversal in public attitudes to the Gaza withdrawal, with many now seeing it as a mistake. A recent poll by the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies found that 51 per cent believe that Israel should return to Gaza. The Palestinians are unilaterally working towards the establishment of an independent state — a move Israel is trying to block.

Dr Jabir has long since left Palestine, and now works for an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm. Meanwhile, the situation in the Gaza Strip has only worsened. Unemployment continues to rise: it is estimated to be more than 50 per cent. Last May, some 27,000 applications were received for 200 UN teaching jobs.

In August, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which plays an essential role in providing health, education and other services to more than 70 per cent of the population, reported that the infant mortality rate in Gaza has risen for the first time in 50 years.

Israeli and Palestinian officials alike increasingly warn of “Gaza 2020” — a complete structural collapse and the point of no return being reached, which threatens to plunge the territory and its people into a dark age of despair and devastation.

Many  Israelis shrug their shoulders. Gaza is Hamas’s responsibility now, they say.

The post Gaza Withdrawal Symptoms appeared first on Standpoint.

This kind of deadpan humour in the face of life’s absurdities is quintessential Keret, who considers Kafka his greatest influence. Keret is widely celebrated for his short-story collections, including The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories (2004) and The Nimrod Flipout (2006). His short stories are quirky, surreal and eerie. They’re often told in fragments.

In contrast, Keret’s most recent book, The Seven Good Years, which is a memoir and his first work of non-fiction, is much more mellow and cohesive. He chronicles the seven years between his son’s birth and father’s death. Just as in his previous books, Keret’s voice reads like that of an old friend in these 36 self-contained, enchanting and captivating stories.

We accompany Keret on his travels to readings and book festivals. He loves flights, because on a plane “there’s no real time or real weather, just a juicy slice of limbo that lasts from take-off till landing”. At book signings he likes to make up dedications like “To Sinai. I’ll be home late tonight, but I left some cholent in the fridge” and “Bosmat, even though you’re with another guy now, we both know you’ll come back to me in the end” until the latter gets him into trouble.

Keret’s son Lev is born on the day of a suicide attack. At the hospital Keret meets a reporter who is disappointed that Keret did not see the attack, because a reaction from a writer, “someone with a little vision”, would have been good for his article. “After every attack, I always get the same reactions,” laments the reporter. “‘Suddenly I heard a boom’, ‘I don’t know what happened’, ‘Everything was covered in blood’. How much of that can you take?” he asks Keret, who takes the reader right into the most painful reality on a day that is at the same time one of his life’s most joyful.

We accompany Keret and his son on their trips to the neighbourhood playground. There, parents discuss whether they would let their children join the army later on. Keret is surprised to discover that his wife (the poet Shira Geffen) has already decided that she doesn’t want their son to join the army. “So what you’re saying is that you’d rather have other people’s children go into the army?” Keret asks hotly. “No,” she replies, “I’m saying that we could have reached a peaceful solution a long time ago, and we still can. And that our leaders allow themselves not to do that because they know that most people are like you: they don’t hesitate to put their children’s lives into the government’s irresponsible hands.” In interviews Keret has said that Israelis boycott him as a traitor, while foreigners boycott him as an Israeli.

The members of Keret’s family provide an astonishing range of insights into Israeli society. Keret’s ultra-Orthodox sister has 11 children, and lived in a settlement at one point. His peacenik brother used to work in high-tech and now campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis from his new home in Thailand.

His parents were Holocaust survivors. Keret’s father hid in a hole in a Polish town for almost 600 days. He is a warmhearted businessman who discusses the treatment options to his terminal illness as if they are a new business opportunity. Some of the book’s most glowing stories are based on the memories he leaves behind. This includes the story “Love at First Whisky”, on how he met his future wife while being arrested for drunkenly peeing against the wall of the French embassy in Tel Aviv.

At a book fair in Sicily Keret begins to understand the context of the bedtime stories his father used to tell him. The heroes of these stories were always drunks and prostitutes, says Keret, “and as a child, I loved them very much. I didn’t know what a drunk or a prostitute was, but I did recognise magic.”

 His father’s  stories were full of magic and compassion, and they were based on the time he lived on the Sicilian coast from 1946-48 in lodgings provided by the local Mafia. As he walks through the streets Keret imagines this time in his father’s life and comes to a realisation: “Compared with the horrors and cruelty he witnessed during the war, it’s easy to imagine how his new acquaintances from the underworld must have appeared to him: happy, even compassionate.”

In this universe of absurd tales and harsh realities, we find the most extraordinarily life-affirming views. Keret’s stories are deeply moving and powerful, full of wit in the face of tragedy. For all their depth, they are no longer than about four pages each. It’s possible to read them on a short commute across one zone in London or a few stops on the subway in New York, and you’re bound to leave the carriage with a slightly different view of the world.

Kafka said a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us. Keret’s stories certainly break that ice.

The post Israel’s Impish Ice-Breaker appeared first on Standpoint.

Tenenbom has been compared to the documentary film-maker Michael Moore and described as a “gonzo” journalist, which is generally taken to mean an anti-establishment type with a cavalier disregard for facts. It is presumably why Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman declined to be interviewed by him. They may have missed a trick because Tenenbom came up with a rather different picture of his native land, and of the Palestinian territories, than might have been expected.

What he found was a country full of self-hating Israelis and foreign NGOs, often funded by the European Union, combining to promote a distorted and largely untruthful image of the place.

He described himself as a German journalist and did not reveal that he spoke fluent Hebrew. The result was that Palestinian leaders and spokemen spoke openly to him, thinking he was on their side, as Germany finances many NGOs. The result is not flattering to them, revealing for instance widespread Holocaust denial, although they were reluctant to let Tenenbom see too much for himself on the ground, so used are they to European journalists doing little more than take dictation.

Things are just as bad in Israel itself, he found. He accompanied a group of young Italians, sponsored by an EU-funded “peace organisation” called Casa per la Pace Milano, on a tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. Amazingly, their Israeli tour guide (who called himself “an ex-Jew”) used the tour to compare Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and asylum seekers with the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews in Europe: “What happens here in Israel is Holocaust,” Tenenbom quotes him as saying. Tenenbom muses: “It is interesting to see what the EU people are busy with these days, using Yad Vashem, the monument for millions of Jews slaughtered at their hands, as a platform for poisonous propaganda against the survivors of their butchery.” What impressions the young Italians took home with them are all too easy to imagine.

Wherever he goes, Tenenbom finds European busybodies monitoring Israel’s activities in the West Bank and boosting the Palestinians’ feeling of victimhood: Medecins sans Frontieres, EAPPI (the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel) and, worst of all in his view, the ubiquitous International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): “I don’t know why a bunch of Swiss-only nationals, individuals who were never elected in any democratic process and whose meetings are secretive, have so much power,” he comments and concludes: “The age-old story of Europe’s hatred of the Jews is continuing to this very day.”

As for the NGOs, they may find life more difficult in the coming months. The new justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, of the right-wing Jewish Home party, whose appointment was greeted with horror by liberals, advocates a law banning foreign funding of NGOs, and is now in a position to do something about it. 

The post NGOs NBG appeared first on Standpoint.

She also quizzed me about my public rebuttal of the Labour party, which began in these very pages. A chance encounter with Ed Miliband had knocked at my funnybone, followed by his naïve decision (too soon and without defined borders) to back a back-bencher’s bill for a Palestinian state, and my response garnered me more unwanted PR than Russell Brand would get for leaving Katie Hopkins’s pad at dawn. I was viralled (take that and groan, my fellow pedants) into the online stratosphere with my article, based on  single issue, after a lifetime’s support for Labour. Thank you Rupert Murdoch.

What I didn’t tell the researcher was that when the postal vote form arrived, I stared at it dumbly for days, knowing the Lib-Dems and Greens are even more anti-Israel than Ed. Given the Bedroom Tax and the Mansion Tax, the growing economy and the burgeoning deficit, the choice seemed to be between the Tories, UKIP and the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party. In my neck of the diocese the Tories need no help from me; I’d rather be trepanned than vote UKIP; and the other lot don’t hand out free samples. It pains me to admit that I voted the same way I’ve voted for the last 50 years.

Now, as I watched a Dimbleby from the lawn in Tel Aviv and wondered if my Labour vote would count, a version of the Baltimore riots was exploding in Jerusalem. A policeman beat up a young Ethiopian soldier who was in his IDF uniform and the result was the same old-same old: a peaceful demo turned violent. Predictably, it all ended in tear gas.

I have visited Ethiopia, seen its beautiful artefacts, and witnessed its poverty. The  rock churches of Lalibela are an unsung eighth wonder of the world. The Ethiopians were some of the gentlest, most hospitable people I have ever encountered. Our hosts were beautiful, with oval faces, soulful eyes and spotless white muslin clothes. The men greet each other by gracefully bumping alternate shoulders, left right left.

I was also aware of the lower echelons of their society. In the Semien Hills I was shocked at the endless lines of peasant women carrying branches the weight of a wardrobe on their doubled-over spines. Enchanting children crowded on to our bus, dazzling us with their smiles and calling in English not for pennies or food but stationery: “Pencil please, paper please?”

I was there to write a piece at the behest of my friend Irene Beard. On her own return from the country, Irene had set up a charity called Book-Link which for several years sent out half a million remaindered textbooks to Ethiopian schools from British publishing houses. I was accompanied by the distinguished photographer Fritz von der Schulenburg, and I still have a treasure trove of the most exceptional wine-gold photographs of a woman absorbing a country. The newspaper which commissioned my article used a single fuzzy black-and-white one, of me looking sheepish on a camel.

Irene invited me to the Ethiopian embassy in London to discuss boosting tourism in the country. A red carpet was laid. Twenty-five people sat around the table. Suddenly, silently, the powerful then-president, Meles Zenawi, materialised. Irene smiled beatifically as only a woman who’s about to drop you in it can, and said, “Welcome, everyone. My friend, the actress Maureen Lipman, will begin with an account of her trip to Ethiopia.”

Never has my brain emptied and my bladder filled so rapidly. “Handwoven carpet, swallow me up,” I murmured. “The country is so unspoiled — ” I began, and then stopped. The room waited. “Well, actually it could do with a bit more spoiling. There’s almost no indigenous art or available culture to be seen and what there is has zero presentation. Lucy, the oldest female skeleton ever discovered, is laid out unprotected on a plastic trestle table. The Ark of the Covenant is shielded from the eyes of tourists.” On and on I burbled. Mr Meles watched me as a cobra watches his next meal.

Back in the ’90s, though, he became prime minister when his citizens were under threat from the end of the Mengistu regime. Jewish life was repressed and only one tiny mud-hut synagogue remained. The Falashas, descended from the Biblical tribe of Dan, were declared Jewish by the rabbinate and therefore had the right of return to the Promised Land. Operation Solomon, the airlift of more than 14,000 Jews, took place on May 24 and 25, 1991. Five babies were born in mid-air. When they landed in Israel, the Falasha Jews kissed the ground.

Now, nearly 25 years later, it appears they’re not wanted in certain residential areas and barred from giving blood. This generation of black Jews feels they are treated as second-class citizens — although, ironically, the Israeli Ethiopians are accused of looking down on Sudanese asylum seekers. “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” as they sing in Avenue Q.

Oh, but how easily the word apartheid springs to curled global lips. It implies that apartheid is official government policy in Israel: I don’t believe that to be the case. It always takes several generations for immigrants to be wholly accepted; after all, “No Dogs, No Blacks, No Jews,” was a notice displayed in British hotels well into the 1950s. It’s not right, but it was ever thus. The first generation keeps their heads down, accepts institutionalised prejudice, lives in ghettos, cooks traditionally and disapproves of inter-marriage. The next generation, hopefully, begins to feel at home.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s in again despite my vote. Fifty-six seats in Scotland went to the SNP based on remorse for a lost referendum, a flurry of nationalism and stirred-up mistrust of the English. Nearly four million voted for UKIP based entirely on fear of Europe and prejudice about foreigners. Nigel Farage has just rejected his own resignation — deemed unaccepted by the unacceptable face of his party. So soon, and at our peril, we forget our history.

The post Israel And Integration appeared first on Standpoint.

Netanyahu’s comments about Arab Israelis voting in droves came in a video posted on election day to his Facebook page (electioneering on television on election day is restricted in Israel). He said:

The rule of the Right is in danger. Arab voters are coming in droves to the ballot boxes. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses. We have no V15 movement. We have only a call to arms, and we only have you. Go to the polling stations. Bring your friends and family members. Vote Likud to close the gap between us and the Labour Party. With God’s help and with your help we will establish a nationalist government that will protect the State of Israel.

For these words he was pilloried in Israel — mocked by confident Arab candidates, criticised by the president, condemned as racist by liberals — and similarly rebuked abroad by, among others, the New York Times and President Obama. In an interview, Obama said that Netanyahu’s statement “starts to erode the name of democracy in the country”.

On the face of it, the comments do indeed seem a little jarring; Israel, after all, routinely (and rightly) trumpets its vibrant democracy, free elections and the participation of its Arab minority. For an Israeli prime minister to make remarks apparently lamenting that participation is hardly a public relations coup. And after the election, Netanyahu felt the need to issue an apology.

However, there was more to Netanyahu’s statement than his critics cared to acknowledge. First, there was the electoral concern underpinning the statement. Following all Israeli elections, the president meets with all the faction leaders in parliament to hear their endorsement for prime minister. The parliamentarian with the most endorsements is rewarded with the first opportunity to form a coalition government with the confidence of a majority of the Knesset. With many pre-election polls suggesting Isaac Herzog’s Labour held a slight lead over Netanyahu’s Likud, and with some Arab politicians suggesting they could countenance endorsing Herzog, Netanyahu fretted that the anti-Zionist Arab parties could hand Herzog the first shot at forming a government. Hence Netanyahu’s statement, carefully parsed, was not concerned with the Arab voters per se, but with the prospect of a Labour victory, and the Arab demographic effecting it.

The reference to V15 is also highly significant. This election was seen principally as a referendum on Netanyahu’s premiership. As Labour’s campaign slogan bluntly declared, “It’s us or him.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s global unpopularity is well-known in Israel, but it actually endears him to his supporters because they share his anxieties. Therefore one of the recurring themes on the Right during the election was the influx of foreign money into the campaign to unseat Netanyahu. Among these “left-wing NGOs” funded from abroad was V15. This group, it was repeatedly pointed out during the campaign, is headed by a former Obama 2012 campaign staffer, a useful fact that drew upon Obama’s unpopularity here. There is also a suggestion that V15 is financed by American groups that receive federal funding. This would be legally problematic in both Israel, where foreign funding for elections is restricted, and the US, where political use of federal money is prohibited. Israeli judicial authorities declined to investigate V15 during the election, a decision that, along with several others, confirmed for Netanyahu’s supporters the establishment’s bias against him. Netanyahu’s allies in the US Congress, however, condemned any possible involvement by the Obama administration and are investigating any illegal use of federal funds. In any case, V15’s strategy was a get-out-the-vote drive among those demographics that would be unlikely to vote for Netanyahu. The reference to V15 in Netanyahu’s election day statement thus fed into the Right’s suspicion that foreign forces were conspiring to remove him and, by doing so, were manipulating Israeli democracy.

Netanyahu’s comments were aimed partly at his own supporters, whom he was urging to go to vote. But they were primarily directed towards those considering voting for other right-wing parties. The election was not simply a referendum on Netanyahu’s premiership but on his leadership of the Right. He spent the last several days of the campaign pleading with nationalist voters to return to Likud, once a titanic faction in the Knesset that has been reduced in recent elections to a smaller, if still dominant, force (in part because conservative voters presumed Netanyahu would be prime minister so voted for the more hawkish parties they wanted to see in his coalition).

Even supposing the nationalist bloc won a majority of Knesset mandates (as it was predicted to do by the polls), if Likud were not larger than Labour (which the polls were also predicting), then Herzog could still have won the first chance to form a government. Netanyahu needed as much of the Right to return to Likud to prevent that happening. Judging by the final results — which saw a mammoth surge for Likud and a decline for Jewish Home and other hawkish parties — the voters heeded Netanyahu’s call.

That was Netanyahu’s electoral calculation, but was it correct? Was it really a last-minute plea to the Right to vote for Likud that secured victory? The pollsters are divided. John McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who worked on Netanyahu’s campaign, says Likud knew it was ahead in the polls in the days leading up to the election — but that makes Netanyahu’s statement about Arab voters all the more perplexing. Others take a different view. Mina Tzemach, one of the country’s leading pollsters, contends that Likud was down in the polls on the morning of the election, and that Netanyahu’s noontime statement about foreign funding and Arab voters turned the tide. The problem with this side of the argument, though, is that Israeli pollsters historically have been wide of the mark — even the exit polls grossly underestimated the final gap between Likud and Labour. There are a number of reasons for this: under-polling of settlers and religious communities who vote conservatively, distrust of the mainstream media by conservative voters who therefore refuse to disclose their preferences, manipulation of polls by pollsters and the media to impact the race rather than report it, and, more innocuously, the reality that a vast proportion of the Israeli electorate remains undecided until entering the voting booth. So those pollsters who believe Netanyahu’s comments made all the difference have been wrong before. Either way, it should further be noted that already in the 2013 election Netanyahu also made desperate overtures on election day to supporters to go to the polls and vote Likud. Whatever Likud’s position in the polls, this is a tried and tested tactic.

Leaving aside the electoral consequences of Netanyahu’s statement, was it racist, as some have contended? Does it erode Israeli democracy, as Obama warned? Arguably these assessments are overblown and even hypocritical. While it is true that political references to race are often discomfiting, this is not always the case: in American elections, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and other racial and ethnic groups are legitimate demographic classifications. So too with the Arab vote in Israel, which this time around was watched with special interest because, as a result of a rise in the electoral threshold needed to enter the Knesset, the main Arab parties had combined into one coalition, which enthused the Arab community (the higher Arab turnout has made the Joint List alliance the third largest party in the Knesset after Likud and Labour). The notion that the Arabs were flocking to the polls thus merely confirmed what many on the Right had anticipated — and, for electoral reasons, rather feared.

Moreover, there was nothing derogatory as such in Netanyahu’s words, nor was he discouraging the Arabs from voting. Rather, he was urging greater and more tactical participation at the polls by conservatives if they wanted their voices heard. His point, he later clarified, was to emphasise the organised fashion in which foreign-funded groups were bringing voters to the polls, rather than the fact in itself that the Arabs were voting, which he insisted is entirely legitimate and welcome. Thus his reference to the Arabs, in his view, was not disparaging but simply descriptive. This, argues Dror Eydar, a leading columnist for Israel’s most popular newspaper, Israel Hayom, which backed Netanyahu, actually makes    Netanyahu’s words far less offensive than some of the epithets used by the Israeli Left against supporters of right-wing parties, whom they constantly — and very definitely pejoratively — dismiss as “the settlers”, “the religious” and “the ultra-Orthodox”. In one rally, they were disdained as “amulet-kissers, idol-worshippers and people who prostrate themselves at the graves of saints”, a statement of flagrant condescension toward the Sephardi Jews of Middle Eastern descent who, though typically poorer, consistently support right-wing parties. Indeed, inside Jewish Israel, the prejudice of the Ashkenazi elite against the Sephardis has long been considered Israel’s real race problem — and is the reason for Likud’s decades-long dominance at the polls.

But Eydar goes further, submitting that if the Left believes it sees racism in the Right, that is actually a result of the Left harbouring such sentiments itself. Take Tzipi Livni, who ran with Herzog in this election. She threatened that electing Netanyahu would lead to “Israel becoming an Arab country”, and observed that “we didn’t make aliyah [move to Israel] so that there would be an Arab country here”. Her implication is that Netanyahu’s hesitation on the question of Palestinian statehood will lead to Israel becoming majority Arab. Obama, too, defends his support for a Palestinian state on his desire to see Israel remain Jewish and democratic — in other words, so that it does not become majority Arab. Surely, Eydar maintains, fretting about Israel becoming an “Arab country” is more provocative than a reference to Arab voters.

Underlying this entire discourse across the political spectrum is ambivalence about the status of the Arabs in Israeli society, which is far more complicated than the international media and the country’s critics care to portray. For one thing, the category — about a fifth of Israel’s population — comprises Muslims, Christians, Druze and others; urban Arabs and Bedouin; religious and secular; Zionists and Islamists; and Arabs who have lived in Israel since before its inception on the one hand, and on the other hand those who live in the annexed territories of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Moreover, within those subsets there is enormous variety: some Bedouin are well integrated and serve in the military, others support Israel’s adversaries; Israeli Druze tend to be staunchly patriotic, except those in the Golan Heights, who retain an allegiance to Syria. These differences are not primarily the diversity of individual opinion in the Arab community, but the product of differing ethnic, religious, tribal and cultural loyalties and priorities.

Some Arabs have been very successful within Israeli society: one of Israel’s Supreme Court justices is Arab, and he also headed the committee that supervised the recent elections. But he also refuses to sing the national anthem. The judge who sentenced former Israeli president Moshe Katzav to prison for rape is Arab and there are numerous Arabs serving in Israel’s diplomatic corps. Israel’s Arabs are also not that different from some of its Jews: they are one of the poorest segments of Israel’s society and share this affliction with the ultra-Orthodox. But, like the ultra-Orthodox, this is partly self-inflicted: for cultural reasons, Arab women and ultra-Orthodox men are present in the workforce in depleted numbers, and both groups tend to have large families. This means, though, that the two groups are also politically aligned in certain ways, hence the Middle Eastern ultra-Orthodox Shas party attracts some Arab voters. But so, for that matter, does Netanyahu: it was reported that one Bedouin village, for example, gave the prime minister 77 per cent of its vote — a higher margin than he secured even in some Jewish nationalistic strongholds. Really, this should not be all that surprising, since there are after all Arab parliamentarians in almost every party. Not only are they present in the far-left Meretz, Labour and the Likud, but even the Yisrael Beiteinu party, which caters predominantly to the Russian population and is among the most distrustful of the Arab population, has an Arab parliamentarian. The hawkish Jewish Home too, the base of which is the settler community, had at least one Arab (a woman) run in its primaries. The circumstances of the Israeli Arabs are not, therefore, as gloomy as is often suggested — and certainly do not substantiate the harsher condemnations of “apartheid” that have been thrown at the Jewish state recently.

Yet there is no question that significant elements of the Arab community pose fundamental challenges to Israel and its Jewish identity. Many Israeli Arabs identify with their brethren in Gaza and the West Bank and are sympathetic to Israel’s foes. Yet for all the Arab antagonism towards Israel, poll after poll reveals their preference to live in Israel rather than in a future Palestinian state. Regardless, their latent animus is not academic, as Israel is already besieged on all four sides: in the west, it faces Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza; across the border in the south lies Islamic State-linked Wilayat Sinai; in the east, the sclerotic autocrats of the PLO rule the West Bank; and in the north the Iranian proxy Hezbollah and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jubhat al-Nusra vie for dominion, with Islamic State lurking not far behind. A violent Arab fifth column within Israel in addition is therefore an unwelcome prospect — but it remains a serious one. There are periodic riots in some Israeli Arab communities, for a variety of reasons, most notoriously on the annual “Land Day” on 30 March. And last summer, some Arab residents of Jerusalem took to running over their fellow Jewish Jerusalemites as they waited at tram stops.

This defiant (some might say seditious) sentiment also finds diluted expression in Israeli Arabs’ democratic preferences. Despite some support for Zionist parties, most Arabs vote for the anti-Zionist Arab parties — parties whose animosity toward their state has no parallel in the Western world. Although the main Arab political movements — the Communists (who also incorporate some Jews), the nationalists and the Islamists — disagree on what they would like to see replace the Jewish state, the aspiration to eradicate its Jewish identity, and potentially destroy it entirely, is common to them all. A nationalist parliamentarian was suspended last year for expressing thinly disguised approval for the murder of three Jewish teenagers by Hamas; another went into self-imposed exile several years ago to escape charges of aiding the enemy Hezbollah during its war with Israel in 2006. An Islamist leader, meanwhile, was recently sentenced to 11 months in prison for incitement to violence and racism. With feelings like these, it is no surprise that Arabs are not conscripted into the IDF (although a good number do volunteer).

Netanyahu’s comment about Arabs voting in droves — and the Likud party’s accompanying election day text messaging campaign warning of an increase in the Arab vote thanks to urging by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and funding from America — drew on this Israeli anxiety about Arab loyalty and the role of foreign meddling in Israeli affairs. Netanyahu’s comments — as well as warnings by the Left about the potential demographic threat posed by the Arabs — resonate with voters because they too fear the influence of the Arab minority. In the case of the Right, the fear is that the Arabs will catapult the Left into power and undermine Israel’s Jewish character; in the case of the Left, it is that the Arabs might eventually come to challenge Israel’s Jewish majority and consequently possibly its democratic character. But the attitude of Israeli Arabs toward the Jewish state is complex and multi-faceted. Netanyahu’s apology for his remarks — that he never intended to cause upset to the Arab community and is sorry for it — was issued to a small group of Israeli Arab leaders who chanted “Bibi! Bibi!” (the prime minister’s nickname) and proceeded to give him a standing ovation and embrace and kiss him. Thus attempts to reduce the Israeli Arabs’ relationship to Israel to unflinching loyalty or to unmitigated treason either understate or overstate the dangers. Platitudinous foreign calls for Israel to ensure it upholds its democracy, however, such as those the White House has recently been inclined to make, are invariably examples of the former. An Israeli intifada is possible.

Netanyahu’s reference to Arab voters was not the only statement the Obama administration found offensive. The other was Netanyahu’s remark, made in an interview on the eve of the election, that with the present instability engulfing the Middle East, there would be no Palestinian state established during his premiership, since any Israeli withdrawal would lead to violent Islamism filling the void. This statement in particular was designed to win voters of parties to Likud’s right — parties that, unlike Likud under Netanyahu, are explicitly opposed to a Palestinian state on principle. Shifting these votes to the more pragmatic Likud would presumably be, theoretically at least, good for Obama, who would like to see such a state come into existence as soon as possible. So the White House should have been sympathetic to Netanyahu’s strategy. Instead, the administration chastised the Israeli leader for allegedly reneging on previous commitments. His attempts following the election to walk back the statement were rejected by the administration, which decided — rather arbitrarily — to accept his campaign rhetoric as his stated belief but not his subsequent clarifications.

Since it is a truism of all democracies that politicians say almost anything to get elected, the criticism of Netanyahu is not a little hypocritical. One recalls a certain Democratic senator running for the White House in 2008 assuring the American Israel Public Affairs Committee at its conference that year that he supported an undivided Jerusalem, only to clarify the following day that he did not, in fact, support an undivided Jerusalem. (For that matter, one also remembers him at a fundraiser in San Francisco making derogatory references to small-town Americans who “get bitter and cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”, a comment arguably more distasteful than Netanyahu’s reference to Arab voters.) In contrast to the White House, the head of the Arab League dismissed Netanyahu’s comments as electioneering — an indication of the informal alliance between Israel and the pragmatic Arab Sunni states and the larger distrust between the Obama administration and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu for his part contended that he was not reversing himself at all. He subsequently reiterated his openness to a Palestinian Arab state on the conditions that it be demilitarised and recognise Israel as a Jewish state — conditions upon which he has consistently insisted. His comments in the pre-election interview, he argued, merely acknowledged that with the Palestinian Authority in a unity government with Hamas, and with Islamic State a few miles from Israel’s borders, the conditions hardly seem ripe for risky Israeli withdrawals. Whether or not one believes Netanyahu’s protestations of consistency, his logic is not unreasonable. With the Middle East looking as it does and the constant threat Israel faces from Hamas in Gaza likely to be replicated in the West Bank following any Israeli withdrawal, it is surely not Netanyahu’s scepticism but Obama’s optimism that demands explanation.

The reaction to Netanyahu’s election and the focus on these two utterances has been revealing: Obama’s animosity for Netanyahu is personal (and reciprocated), but he is now exasperated with the Israeli electorate too for standing by Netanyahu. And the reason for this­ — the real, unstated issue between the two leaders — is Iran. Netanyahu’s intransigence is one of the main obstacles to Obama securing an agreement with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear programme, which the president hopes will be his legacy. By giving Netanyahu their votes in remarkable numbers, Israeli electors have shown they support this intransigence.

Israelis see Obama determined to make a deal — any deal — with Iran, the European Union itching to lift sanctions on Iran and impose them on Israel instead, European Jews being slaughtered in supermarkets and synagogues as EU parliamentarians trip over one another to recognise Palestine, another bid for the Security Council to do so too with intimations from the White House that the US may this time around withhold its veto, and a Middle East in chaos, with Sunnis at war with Shia and pragmatists fighting radicals and Egypt, whose peace with Israel has historically hinged on their both being clients of the US, no longer feeling able to rely on American support. From Israel, the world is looking more and more the way Netanyahu sees it. And his steadfastness — what his detractors consider his intransigence — is precisely the bulwark Israelis believe they need.

The post The Global Politics Of Netanyahu’s Victory appeared first on Standpoint.

The Obama administration probably hoped that a dramatic change of course in America’s Middle East foreign policy, coupled with a milestone nuclear agreement that leaves Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact, could occur without a robust public debate. The administration kept crucial elements of the negotiations to itself for as long as it could. It failed to inform Israel and Gulf Arab allies about a back-channel with Iran it conducted in Oman until September 2013, when it was too late to reverse the basic contours of the interim nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA).

It kept the full text of the implementation agreement of the JPOA out of the public eye and limited the ability of Congress to review and read the document in unprecedented ways. It failed to explain why important elements of what a “good deal” would look like were allowed to fall by the wayside—Iran’s ballistic missile programme and the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme, to name the most glaring omissions—preferring instead to denounce critics as “warmongers”.

The White House also muddied the waters on the impact that a prolonged period of sanctions relief and sanctions suspension would do to Iran’s economy—and similarly dismissed those who came up with different figures from its own, even as evidence piled up about its gross underestimation of Iran’s economic windfall from the JPOA.

In short, despite grumblings and legislative threats from Congress and an increasingly apprehensive set of regional allies fearful of Iran’s rising power, President Obama believed that he could present a nuclear deal as a fait accompli, even as the agreement taking shape appears to undermine the US’s previously proclaimed strategic goals of preventing Iran from ever achieving nuclear weapons capability.

Whether Netanyahu’s speech was poorly timed, impolite or impolitic, it threw a wrench into what until then had appeared to be an unchallenged diplomatic process conducted behind the scenes. The prime minister asked probing questions on the direction of negotiations and the substance of Western concessions, the nature of the deal and its future implications. That is why Obama reacted so furiously—the much-touted breach of protocol obscured the fact that the President was being challenged on the substance of his policies and did not have a good answer to offer. He should have. Netanyahu’s words were not shrill, partisan accusations. The White House could have used the speech as a pretext to retreat from unwise concessions it already made. It could have stated forcefully its position in public. Instead, the administration chose to turn differences over a matter of vital strategic significance into a debate about etiquette.

The tactic failed, largely because by making the matter such a big deal the White House turned Netanyahu’s speech into an event of global interest and significance and his questions, to date left unanswered, resonated with reasonable people and traditional supporters of the President.

Having failed to fend off a debate over substantive policy issues, the White House found another pretext to change subject when, a few days after Netanyahu addressed Congress, Senator Tom Cotton, a freshman Senator from Arkansas, spearheaded an open letter to Iran’s leaders, which was co-signed by 46 other Republican Senators. The letter warned Iran’s leaders of negative repercussions of a deal negotiated while keeping Congress out of the loop.

Once again, the White House could have addressed substantive policy issues raised by increasingly frustrated legislators. Instead, it chose to denounce the move, rehashing the script it used against Netanyahu. Complaining about lèse-majesté may have its merits. But so did the letter.

It is politically foolish to antagonise Congress and not just because its concerns about the deal are well-justified. If the President holds any hope of implementing any deal, it will need to work with Congress to phase out and ultimately undo the elaborate sanctions architecture legislated over the years.

As with Netanyahu, though, Obama thinks time is on his side. After all, Netanyahu’s electoral gamble was not going well for the Israeli prime minister, with his party trailing behind its opponents in the polls as he came to Washington. What better way to skirt Netanyahu’s cri de coeur than to accuse him of brazen and cynical electioneering?

The President should have known better though. A left-of-centre Israeli government would no doubt have sought to mend fences. It would have been be more conciliatory on the Palestinian-Israeli track. But on Iran, it is hard to imagine anything different in strategic terms. As it turned out, Netanyahu won a fourth term of office. The gulf between Israel and the Obama administration over Iran will continue.

The same holds true for Obama’s domestic arena. Discounting Republicans today may make any diplomatic breakthrough short-lived. After all, the President himself threw into the dustbin of history the agreement that former President George W. Bush had reached with Israel’s late prime minister Ariel Sharon, over the territorial contours of a future Palestinian state.

Obama did not agree with the terms of that document and, because the deal had no Congressional authorisation, Obama did not feel bound by it. It was his predecessor’s policy, and he was entitled to discard it. His successors may feel the same about an Iran deal that contradicts not just the policy of all previous US administrations, but also Congressional legislation the President may have the power to suspend but not to reverse.

Obama may still get his way on the Iran deal. But his choice to ignore allies and neglect Congress will only work if the deal he signs off is as good as his critics demand it to be. Otherwise, the President’s “my way or the highway” approach to Iran’s nuclear programme will backfire.

The post Fait Pas Accompli appeared first on Standpoint.

The last time I debated Cage’s “Research Director”, Asim Qureshi, was on Newsnight last year. He was due to do his usual routine of objecting to a specific terror law and I was due to do my usual routine of pointing out that Mr Qureshi and his ilk are opposed to all terror laws because they do not want our side to win. After being met by the nice Newsnight runner and while being taken downstairs I remembered a stipulation I should have made earlier: words to the effect of, “Can I just say that I really don’t want to sit in the same room as that foul and disgusting apologist. Could you make sure we are in different rooms until I go on?” The slightly startled young lady agreed and showed me to make-up. It was only later that she reappeared and mentioned in passing that Asim Qureshi would be down the line from Manchester. “Who is in the green room then?” I asked. “Allister Heath from the Telegraph,” she replied, with a manner suggesting there were no depths of fratricidal acrimony one might not expect from conservatives.

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Work forces me to the US for a fortnight. I first visited San Francisco in 2000, but each time I have returned I have been increasingly disturbed by the homelessness, which seems to be getting worse. State subsidies and relaxed drug laws, along with generally clement weather across the seasons, seem to have made living on the streets a kind of lifestyle choice.

Of course there is much talk of “inequality” there as everywhere. But a morning at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles reminds me of a problem in this debate. Paul Getty built this magnificent hilltop structure—a replica Roman villa—to make his collection of antiquities available to the public. Today anybody can book and visit free of charge, as I did. At opening time on Saturday morning we all queued eagerly to get in, locals and tourists of every age and colour. Back in the 1970s someone could have said, why doesn’t this unbelievably wealthy man distribute his money differently? He could, for instance, have given a thousand dollars to every family in the LA area. Yet simple quantitative distribution would have done nothing. Would it have made any difference if every family in the area had been able to purchase a new washing-machine or car? Today, and for the foreseeable future, this “elite” idea of a villa of antiquities can be enjoyed by anybody of any class or income bracket because of the “elite” vision of one man. Inequality certainly exists. But in addressing that, we should be careful not to wage war on those elite visions of life which do so much to alleviate its mundanity.

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I am speaking in Washington and squeeze in among the 16,000 people in the Conference Center in DC when Susan Rice, US National Security Advisor, addresses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). The audience demonstrates that crowds can in fact be subtle and intelligent. At one point in her carefully crafted speech Rice says: “I know some of you would argue we should impose sanctions and just walk away. But my friends, let’s remember that sanctions unfortunately have never stopped Iran from advancing its programme.” The crowd, expecting the second sentence, applauded wildly and gave a prolonged standing ovation after the first. It was a moment of collective genius and a sort of bliss to see a politician have to accept a standing ovation for a point everyone knew she was about to rebut.

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The big event, for which the whole city seems to stop, is Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Being in DC at such moments is enormously exciting, perhaps especially for a Brit. By comparison, much that goes on in Westminster today feels so petty and hollow. Parliament votes on little matters and few members of the public can bring themselves to care.

I don’t think it’s only a Beltway thing; in America there is still a pile of political issues which truly seem to galvanise everybody. Perhaps it is because they are often arguments about first principles. But in Washington everything is also fought over so hard and so viciously because what happens there really matters. I spend a day on the Hill and at the National Democratic Club. The constant frisson you feel there is not just because it is the backdrop for House of Cards, but from the simple fact that DC remains the political powerhouse of the world.

The post Cage Fighting appeared first on Standpoint.

It is where my son Daniel has lived for the last five years, with his wife and three young children. He is a deeply religious yeshiva student and like all the men in Har Nof he goes to synagogue to pray every morning without fail. I scrambled around to find the phone, then called him. My relief at hearing his voice can be imagined. “I sent you an email already to say I’m OK,” he said, adding that the attacked synagogue, Kehilat Bnei Torah, was just two blocks away, on Agassi Street, and that he had often been there to pray. The names of the dead men had not yet been released, but he went on: “I’m sure I’ll know some of them.”

Har Nof is that sort of place: if you’ve lived there for five years there won’t be too many unfamiliar faces. Since Daniel moved there, my wife and I have got to know it well on our frequent visits to keep up with his growing family. It’s also a part of Jerusalem you will never get to see on television news programmes or read about in the British press unless there’s a tragedy like the synagogue massacre, because it doesn’t conform to the media’s prevailing image of the city, which is one of constant confrontation, division and tension between Jews and Arabs, with the Jews almost always being in the wrong. I would guess that the TV and newspaper reporters who rushed to Har Nof to cover the aftermath of the massacre were visiting it for the first time.

It’s a modern suburb on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, perched on a hill (Har means mountain in Hebrew, though that’s a bit of an exaggeration here) with stunning views overlooking the thick pines of the Jerusalem Forest and, to the north, the densely populated valley through which the motorway to Tel Aviv runs. Like most of Jerusalem, it consists mainly of apartment blocks of up to six storeys, all built of the ubiquitous butter-coloured Jerusalem stone, climbing up the steep slopes and linked by wide, winding roads like Agassi Street. The quickest way to get around on foot is by the many stairways cut into the rock. There is a small shopping centre, with a supermarket, a few other shops, a post office, a health centre, a takeaway pizza place and an ice-cream parlour, both with a couple of tables if you want to eat there. There are a few other shops scattered round the suburb, but no bars or restaurants, much less a cinema; no hotels either. There are plenty of buses connecting Har Nof to the rest of Jerusalem and for those with cars there’s plenty of free parking, a rarity in the rest of the city.

Har Nof’s main business quickly becomes clear as you walk along its streets: religion. The apartment blocks are interspersed with large buildings housing synagogues and yeshivas, and a further clue to Har Nof’s make-up comes from the inscriptions outside many of them, proclaiming the origin of their funding: Antwerp, Paris, Mexico City, and many more far-flung places. Almost everybody in Har Nof is from somewhere else: the United States, Britain, France, South Africa, Australia, South America, and many of them are quite recent immigrants. Outside one rocky building site, a large notice announces a future development by the Jewish community of Venezuela, but I have seen no activity there in the five years we have been visiting Har Nof, probably because the Jews of Venezuela, who have undergone constant vilification at the hands of the governments of the late Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Redondo, can’t get their money out of their slowly disintegrating country.

During the day, the streets are quiet: everybody of all ages is studying. At lunchtime and in the late afternoon, they fill up, above all with children returning from school. The girls wear light-blue blouses with long sleeves and long dark-blue skirts, the boys dark-blue kippot (skullcaps). The men all wear the same sombre uniform: dark suits (though the jackets are usually discarded in hot weather), white shirts and wide black hats. They are not Hassids, with their long side curls and 18th-century Polish court dress to be found in many quarters of Jerusalem, notably Meah Shearim, close to the Old City, but like them they are all bearded and equally devoted to the study of Torah; they are generally described by outsiders as Haredi (literally, “one who trembles at the word of God”). The women dress modestly, with long dresses and headscarves or sheitels (wigs). All the young women are pushing buggies: Har Nof is packed with children. Families of ten are common. The large playground at the end of Daniel’s street is packed with children, while the young women tend their babies and chat. American accents predominate: indeed, my two older grandchildren speak with a pronounced American twang, the dominant accent of their classmates. The apartment block stairwells echo with the distant sound of babies crying.

There is an air of reserve about Har Nof. People keep themselves to themselves, although occasionally a young American mother will exchange a few words as we push our kids on the swings. The place really comes alive on Shabbat. Traffic is forbidden (by municipal ordinance) and the streets throng with children playing, the older ones looking after their younger siblings. Occasionally a small boy will hurtle past on a makeshift trolley, without fear of crashing into a vehicle at the bottom of the hill, while the men walk to and from synagogue (Haredi women rarely attend). The one thing that irritates the tidy-minded outsider is the amount of litter in the streets, flowerbeds, everywhere: the Haredim seem to have no interest in the appearance of their public spaces, perhaps because they are so focused on spiritual matters (although the same can be said of most Israelis, religious or secular).

But if they don’t care about appearances, they do care about each other. Whenever anyone is ill or in trouble, has suffered a bereavement or just given birth, the neighbours rally round, even when they barely know you. Each time my daughter-in-law Ruchy came home with a new baby, people would appear at the door with cooked meals for the freezer. She does the same for them once she’s up and about again. When I last spoke to her, she was cooking for the family of one of the synagogue massacre victims, who had left ten children. A giant of a man, he was on an upper floor when the attackers burst in downstairs. Instead of saving himself, as he could easily have done, he raced downstairs to tackle them and was cut down.

By strictly Orthodox custom, the funerals took place only a few hours later. My son attended, along with thousands of others, and sent me an email a couple of days afterwards: “At the funeral the Rabbi of the synagogue, in the midst of everyone’s pain and while he himself was fighting back his tears, pleaded and demanded from all the thousands that were present that there mustn’t be any reprisals or revenge and that wanton violence is simply ‘not our way’. Amongst the many verses he quoted to make his point (of which many form part of a prayer that we say on every Shabbat to remember our many martyrs) he mentioned a verse in Deuteronomy 32:43: ‘He will avenge the blood of His servants and He will bring retribution upon His foes.’ We will try to protect and defend ourselves but revenge we leave to the Almighty. As Richard Dawkins (of all people!) pointed out, if you believe in God then you can feel secure that justice will be done and murderers will meet their retribution, if not in this world then in the next.” He contrasted this attitude with the celebrations of some of the relatives of the Palestinian attackers in East Jerusalem.

Watching the live TV news coverage of the aftermath of the synagogue attack it struck me that one of the few places where people wouldn’t be watching it was Har Nof itself, for nobody has a television. Everyone, however, has a mobile phone and younger people use computers for email and to study, with strict internet control settings. We stay in touch with Daniel and his family via Skype. Money is often tight: married yeshiva students receive a small monthly stipend, but many Haredi women run successful businesses, providing goods and services to the community, like imported clothes or wigs. Flyers abound, advertising the latest offers. Many families depend on support from wealthier relatives abroad. Some young women display a lively interest in current affairs: I have had stimulating discussions about politics around the supper table. Giving to charity is a strict obligation: people come knocking on the door every day to ask for donations and are always given a few coins.

Life is simple and old-fashioned in the best way. Haredi boys like my grandson Shlomo Zalman (named after a famous Polish rabbi) do not have their hair cut until their third birthday. To mark the event, there was a little ceremony at his school, to which we were invited, and could not have been made more welcome. Shlomo repeated a few phrases in Hebrew after the rabbi (one of the few Hassids in Har Nof), dipping his finger in a dish of honey after each one to teach him that Torah learning is sweet. Afterwards, we distributed cake and sweets to the other boys, which were gratefully wolfed down. The only girl present was Shlomo’s elder sister.

The most controversial political issue affecting the Haredim before the synagogue attack was that of compulsory military service. All other Israelis have to do three years’ national service when they leave school but until now religious Jews have been exempted. The current government is trying to change that, with little success so far, and the Haredim remain violently opposed although they get no sympathy from the majority who can’t escape conscription.
Although Har Nof might appear a little dull to the outsider, it’s easy to see its attraction to those who have chosen to come to Israel to live there. They can live a completely observant Jewish life without any hassle and without the outside world intruding — or they could, until November 18. 

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