Bibi's disturbing misadventure.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of the State of Israel.  As its elected leader, he rightly speaks for his nation.  He may speak as a Jew, but he does not speak for the Jewish people.  No one does.  Indeed, what’s different for Jews relative, for example, to Roman Catholics, is that we have no pope-like figure.  In the few places where there is a Chief Rabbi, even in Israel where he has some government authorized functions, he speaks only for his specific community, in this case some of Israel’s orthodox Jews.  Bibi, is in the final days of an election campaign.  Even if he continues as prime minister, he will remain in power only through a coalition.  Polls suggest that his party is likely to gain some seats in the Knesset, but even then only the low 20s out of 120.  That of course is the nature of parliamentary systems, especially one like Israel’s where thirteen parties currently hold seats.  Contrast that with the UK, where coalitions are rare and where two parties dominate.  So, Netanyahu, by virtue of his office speaks for Israel, but not for the Jewish people.  Certainly not for me.

Listening to Netanyahu’s speech today, was eerily like listening to members of the Bush administration in the run up to the Iraq war.  It was a war that he had both urged and supported.   Listening to his words, I could help thinking about Dick Cheney and Condi Rice’s warnings about a mushroom cloud.  The applause  of the assembled, accompanied by loud hoots on the Republican side, again brought back echoes of the weapons of mass destruction frenzy built up only to be followed by a war based upon deception and salesmanship.  Sadly, Netanyahu did the same. This is not to suggest that Iran is an innocent or that it does support some very bad actors and may have broad ambitions.  It is rather that what we witnessed today was a sales pitch by a political candidate who will undoubtedly use video of the applause he garnered to strengthen his position back home. 

Not everyone is the room was happy.  Here’s is how Nancy Pelosi reacted to his remarks, “That is why, as one who values the U.S. – Israel relationship, and loves Israel, I was near tears throughout the prime minister’s speech – saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the P5 +1 nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation.”  Remember how Bibi lectured Obama in the Oval Office, well he’s done it again, this time to the howls of a highly partisan audience.

Like the former House Speaker, and for much deeper and personal reasons, I too count myself as a firm supporter of Israel.  Bibi may not speak for the Jews or for me, but make no mistake the survival of Israel is of key, perhaps even existential, importance to the Jewish people, regardless of their political and even religious beliefs.  For that reason alone, I opposed Netanyahu’s appearance which, in my view, in addition to all other considerations was detrimental to Israel and its cause.  I can’t think of a single foreign leader who has, his protestations today notwithstanding, so overtly aligned himself one of our political parties.  Beyond all else, this was a major breach with diplomatic norms, one that in the long run can’t possibly be good for Israel.  Injecting himself into what is already our highly polarized political scene, undermines the historic bipartisan support for Israel.  A few nice words about Obama at the outset of his talk, doesn’t mask the total repudiation of the president’s diplomacy.

Israel is concerned about a nuclear Iran, and rightly so.  But it must also stand up to the fact of its own armaments and being among the very few nations who have refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.  Doesn’t that undermine the case it makes on the current negotiations?  Whether Iran, with its expressed hostility toward Israel and unquestioned aggressive role in the region, should have nuclear weapons is a legitimate question.  But the better one is whether any country including Israel and all the other nuclear powers should be so armed?  It’s a fact that nuclear weapons, by definition, make the world less safe.  The prime minister’s protestations about Iran, without even acknowledging Israel’s own stockpile, undermines his argument and, in the eyes of its critics, comes off as being a bit hypocritical.  Whether that judgment is fair is not the issue here, rather than if Bibi is asking Americans to face up to “facts”, then all facts are on the table.

Israel is a remarkable country.  It’s the only true democracy in its region — one that has orderly elections and stands by the rule of law.  Nobody is more vigilant in that regard that its own supreme court.  At the same time, Israel continues to occupy its neighbor and in so doing has alienated many of its adversaries but also its natural allies.  It is an essential Jewish state, but its policies have troubled many within the larger Jewish community and, worse, turned off many young Jews.  That isn't good for Israel nor is it for Jewish survival around the world including here in the United States.  I am old enough to remember the thrill of Israel’s birth in the aftermath of World War II.  To see its emergence was an emotional Jewish experience, in some ways solidified for us as Americans in seeing Yitzhak Rabin address a joint session of Congress in 1976.  Israeli leaders have done that eight times and in a mark of our mutual relationship more often than any other country, except the UK.  I trust that will happen again, but under very different circumstances.

Existential threat.

In rallying the support of their own citizens or allies, leaders often invoke the specter of an external existential threat to their nation.  We need only to look back at the first half of the 20^th Century to see that such threats can be real.  Consider the countries of Europe overrun and subjugated by Hitler’s Germany, those in Asia taken over by Imperial Japan and finally those forced into the Soviet orbit.   That said, for the most part even the most horrendous of these existential threats turned out to be relatively short-lived.  Ask today’s citizens of those countries.

So, making a credible case for external existential threats is increasingly difficult, if not impossible.   Despite all the hysteria surrounding 9/11, George W. Bush couldn’t convince us that Al Qaeda’s challenge was existential.  That made him and his neocon retainers so desperate that they fashioned an existential threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction out of whole cloth.  Still they couldn’t make the case, because of course there was none to be made.  This is not to suggest that existential threats can’t or won’t exist in the future, especially for smaller states.  Even so, my guess is that we and other nations may have more to fear from within than without.  This is especially true when something comes along that threatens a country’s national character or moral center.  To be threatened from outside is challenging, falling victim to a self-inflicted wound is truly tragic.

I couldn’t help but think of this in considering Israel’s upcoming March 17 election.  Immediately upon its 1948 founding, the fledgling state found itself under attack from all of its Arab neighbors.  Without question it faced an immediate and existential threat, a potential delayed stillbirth.  Despite all odds, including the vastly superior numbers of their adversaries, tiny Israel prevailed.  Since its war for independence, the country has been threatened on numerous occasions and each time triumphed, preserving its sovereignty, its existence.  Israel was born out of the Holocaust, midwifed by guilt-ridden nations, including the United States, who too long averted their eyes from what was happening to European Jewry.  It was not the first time Jews had been persecuted or faced possible extinction.   Indeed, looking at the arc of history, it is little wonder that Israel, along with Jews around the world, sometimes seem to be suffering paranoia.  Recognizing real not imagined threats has forced Israel to be both vigilant and prepared.  No nation can be expected to do less, but being on continuous high alert comes with considerable cost.

When it comes to Israel, as suggested in my December 2014 post commenting on Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land, things are complicated.  Despite its military successes, the country remains surrounded by hostile neighbors, some still vowing its destruction.  It took control of the West Bank in a war it didn’t start — quite the contrary — but finds itself the occupier of territory that the United Nations designated as Arab (Palestinian) in its 1947 Partition Plan.  Since its inception, Israel has taken in countless Jewish refugees, fully integrating them as citizens into its society.  In contrast, its Arab neighbors — many of them rich — refused to take in displaced Arab Palestinians in 1948, in effect manufacturing a “refugee problem” that remains unresolved.   Israel may occupy, but the Arab world has used these “homeless” people as pawns for its own purposes, unwilling players in a chess game that never needed to be played.

Israel’s founders had their differences but they were idealists who saw the new state in almost utopian terms.  Most of them were secular, not religious.  Yet they were deeply committed to Am Yisrael — Jewish peoplehood.  Most were exiles from, and profoundly touched by, a war-torn and hostile Europe.  For them, persecution was an immediate and personal experience, loss of home and family etched in their psyche.  The idea of a Jewish State, a permanent and secure homeland, was not an option but a necessity born directly out of that experience.  The nation they were building would be egalitarian, not sectarian — the opposite of the totalitarian countries from which they escaped.  

It was an idea and a reality rejected by the new country’s small ultra-orthodox (Haredi) population, many of whom lived in Jerusalem.  That rejection didn’t sustain.  Over time, with continued immigration and an outsized birth rate the Haredis would opportunistically and pragmatically change their stance becoming a significant political force in the body politic.  Together with the West Bank settler community (to which many of them belong) and rightist parties, they have stood in opposition to the two-state solution envisioned and embodied in UN’s 1947 partition resolution.  To them all the land that was pre-1948 Palestine is the Promised Land; all belongs solely to the Jewish people. 

Bibi Netanyahu, the aggressively vocal Israeli prime minister, likes to evoke external existential threats, most notably a nuclear Iran.  Without discounting that there are those who regularly vow the country’s destruction, I think its greatest existential challenge may come from within.  That brings us back to the upcoming election.  While not on the ballot, the issue of one state or two is certainly at stake.  Remember, I defined an existential threat from within as one that threatens a country’s national character or moral center.   For many years now, Israel has been moving steadily away from its left/liberal roots (the founders Mapai Party) toward the political right (Likud and others).  As my most recent post would demonstrate, they are not alone.  Conservatives have been ascendant in the US and rule in Germany, the UK, and may again in France at the next vote. Turkey, a once moderate Moslem state in the region, has taken its own sharp turn to the right.

Netanyahu, whose firing of two key moderate coalition partners precipitated the impending vote, is a man of the right.  In recent years he has paid lip service to two states — one Jewish and one Palestinian.  But his sanctioning of further expansion on the West Bank makes one wonder about his commitment and to the peace process in general.  Without question, more building in the “territories” has complicated negotiations with the Abbas PLO government.  This is not to suggest that Israel is the only party responsible for the failure of John Kerry’s peace initiative. In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, Dennis Ross Bill Clinton’s principal negotiator in the 1990s contends that the PLO shares equal, even greater, blame.  Nonetheless, with the increasing rise of the right, most notably but not exclusively the Haredi, talk of a single Jewish state encompassing the West Bank and, one would assume Gaza, has entered the conversation in a more serious way. 

I have Israeli relatives who feel that the election is unlikely to change anything — the government or the status quo.   I’m not sure they will bother to vote and that itself says something, including why the left is so weakened.  Not being an Israeli, I’m in no position to know that their assessment is wrong.   What does seem clear, even from this vantage point, is that a big win for the right could indeed have considerable consequence.  Among others, it might close the door on the two-state solution and transform Israel into something very different than what the founders had envisioned.  It could move the country from being an occupier into a “Jewish Homeland” where Jews hold only a small and shrinking majority.  If the West Bank and Gaza were incorporated into a single State of Israel, Arabs would immediately number 5.5 Million up from the current 1.7 Million.  That means that the Jewish population (6.1 Million) now 75% of the whole would shrink to a tenuous majority.  Demographics alone, even allowing for the high Haredi growth rate (5%), could tip that balance in relatively short order.  

The real question then is how would that single state be managed?  Would there be universal suffrage, which might one day lead to Arab rule or more likely would the non-Jewish population be relegated to some kind of second-class citizenship.  Think companies that have two classes of stock, voting and not.  Either way, over time the character of the country would be totally altered — an existential threat if there ever was one.  For any one who cares about Israel, not to mention the future of the Jewish people, the implications of this outcome are almost too painful to contemplate.  Imagine, for example, if Apartheid would reemerge, only this time in the Holy Land.  Again, an existential threat to the state and an end to the Biblical promise, “out of Zion will come the authentic teaching, the divine word out of Jerusalem.”

A radical outcome from the upcoming vote would further alienate the world community, perhaps even triggering some international action that could undermine all for which the country’s people have worked.  But that is really a very poor reason upon which Israeli citizens should decide on how to vote.  They shouldn’t allow this existential threat for themselves and for their own future not because American Jews like myself or others want that outcome.  That’s true as well for any future peace initiative.  Nobody can or should dictate Israel or the Palestinians fate.  They have to do it for themselves and for those who will come after them.