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ISRANET
DAILY BRIEFING ISRAEL @ 60 — Part III CANADA WILL CONTINUE
TO STAND BY ISRAEL, PM SAYS The Canadian government has consistently stood by Israel – even when it wasn't popular to do so – and will continue to support the Jewish community in the future, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday night at an event to commemorate Israel's 60th anniversary. Any militant groups that threaten Israel and its right to exist also threaten Canada, Harper said to a standing ovation, one of several that he received from a crowd of about 7,000 at a hockey arena in Toronto. "As the last world war showed, hate-fuelled bigotry against some is ultimately a threat to us all and must be addressed wherever it may lurk," he said during a 10-minute speech. "In this ongoing battle, Canada stands side by side with the state of Israel, our friend and ally in the democratic family of nations."… Harper did say that he and everyone hopes that Israelis and Palestinians can one day live in peace. "Let us resolve as Canadians to do whatever we can to support Israelis and their neighbours in their quest for a better future," he said. Harper has lent his support to Israel in the past and in July 2006 said the nation had a right to defend itself after military incursions into Lebanon. The Israeli military was responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah militants and the kidnapping of two of its soldiers and its actions "under the circumstances has been measured," Harper said at the time…. WORLD’S
WORST NEIGHBOURHOOD Two religiously identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of the Second World War. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan. They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pair. Pakistan’s experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal politics, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture and impressive social cohesion. But for all its achievements, the Jewish state lives under a curse that Pakistan and most other polities never face: the threat of elimination. Its remarkable progress over the decades has not liberated it from a multi-pronged peril that includes nearly every means imaginable: weapons of mass destruction, conventional military attack, terrorism, internal subversion, economic blockade, demographic assault and ideological undermining. No other contemporary state faces such an array of threats; indeed, probably none in history ever has. The enemies of Israel divide into two main camps: the left and the Muslims, with the far right a minor third element. The left includes a rabid edge (International ANSWER, Noam Chomsky) and a more polite centre (United Nations General Assembly, Canada’s Liberal party, the mainstream media, mainline churches, school textbooks). In the final analysis, however, the left serves less as a force in its own right than as an auxiliary for the primary anti-Zionist actor, which is the Muslim population. This latter, in turn, can be divided into three distinct groupings. First come the foreign states: Five armed forces invaded Israel on its independence in May, 1948, and then neighbouring armies, air forces and navies fought in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1970 and 1973. While the conventional threat has somewhat receded, Egypt’s U.S.-financed arms build-up presents one danger and the threats from weapons of mass destruction (especially from Iran, but also from Syria and, potentially, many other states) present an even greater one. Second come the external Palestinians, those living outside Israel. Sidelined by governments from 1948 until 1967, Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) got their opportunity with the defeat of three states’ armed forces in the Six-Day War. Subsequent developments, such as the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1993 Oslo Accords, confirmed the centrality of external Palestinians. Today, they drive the conflict, through violence (terrorism, missiles from Gaza) and, more importantly, by driving world opinion against Israel via a public relations effort that resonates widely among Muslims and the left. Third come the Muslim citizens of Israel, the sleepers in the equation. In 1949, they numbered merely 111,000, or 9% of Israel’s population, but by 2005 they had multiplied ten-fold to 1,141,000 and 16% of the population. They benefited from Israel’s open ways to evolve from a docile and ineffective community into an assertive one that increasingly rejects the Jewish nature of the Israeli state, with potentially profound consequences for the future identity of that state. If this long list of perils makes Israel different from all other Western countries, forcing it to protect itself on a daily basis from the ranks of its many foes, it also renders Israel oddly similar to other Middle Eastern countries, which likewise face a threat of elimination. Kuwait, conquered by Iraq, actually disappeared from the face of the Earth between August, 1990, and February, 1991; were it not for an American-led coalition, it would quite certainly never have been resurrected. Lebanon has been effectively under Syrian control since 1976 and, should developments warrant formal annexation, Damascus could at will officially incorporate it. Bahrain is occasionally claimed by Tehran to be a part of Iran, most recently in July, 2007, when an associate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, claimed that “Bahrain is part of Iran’s soil,” and insisted that “The principal demand of the Bahraini people today is to return this province to its mother, Islamic Iran.” Jordan’s existence as an independent state has always been precarious, in part because it is still seen as a colonial artifice of Winston Churchill, in part because several states (Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia) and the Palestinians see it as fair prey. That Israel finds itself in this company has several implications. It puts Israel’s existential dilemma into perspective: If the fear of elimination is a nearly routine problem within the Middle East, this would suggest that Israel’s unsettled status will not be resolved any time soon. This pattern also highlights the Middle East’s uniquely cruel, unstable and fatal political life; the region ranks, clearly, as the world’s worst neighbourhood. Israel is the child with glasses trying to succeed at school while living in a gang-infested part of town. The Middle East’s deep and wide political sickness points to the error of seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict as the motor force behind its problems. More sensible is to see Israel’s plight as the result of the region’s toxic politics. Blaming the Middle East’s autocracy, radicalism and violence on Israel is like blaming the diligent school child for the gangs. Conversely, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict means only solving that conflict, not fixing the region. If all the members of this imperiled quintet worry about extinction, Israel’s troubles are the most complex. Israel having survived countless threats to its existence over the past six decades, and having done so with its honour intact, offers a reason for its population to celebrate. But the rejoicing cannot last long, for it’s right back to the barricades to defend against the next threat. (Daniel Pipes is director
of the Middle East Forum and the Taube/Diller LAND
WITHOUT REGRET Never having been as optimistic about Israel’s future as most Israelis once were, I am not as pessimistic about it as many Israelis (let alone anti-Israelis) now are. The optimism always had in it a good deal of wishful thinking; the pessimism has in it an equal share of self-indulgent despair. It is difficult to live with uncertainty and there are those who, no longer able to believe in the certainty of success, would rather believe in the certainty of failure than have to endure not knowing how things will turn out. But we almost never know how things will turn out and Israel is an excellent example. How many people would have believed a hundred years ago, in 1908, that 40 years later, in 1948, there would be a Jewish state in Palestine? How many would have believed in 1948 that, in another two decades this state would be a military titan bestriding the Middle East, its armies triumphantly camped from the outskirts of Cairo to those of Damascus? How many would have believed in 1967 that another 40 years would pass with the titan still at war with its closest neighbours and unable to defend its population against small groups of guerrillas belonging to organizations pledged to destroy it? How many would have believed that, in 2008, it would have become trendy to talk about its demise? If you want to be pessimistic, you don’t have to look far for reasons. Israel is a tiny speck on the map, surrounded by a hostile Arab and Muslim world that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and beyond; that is growing all the time in wealth, influence, population, military power, self-confidence and religious zealotry; and that continues to be convinced that a Jewish state in its midst is a historical anomaly and a moral injustice that must one day be wiped out…. But one can argue the opposite side of it, too. Arab wealth and power will prove to be ephemeral products of an already doomed Age of Oil; so will radical Islam, which can never deliver on its political promises; in the long run, the Arab world will have to democratize, modernize and come to terms with Israel’s existence. And meanwhile, Israel itself, far from a failure, has been an extraordinary success, a country that has gone in 60 years from being the poor, bankrupt, imperilled home of less than a million Jews to a militarily powerful, economically thriving, financially independent state of five-and-a-half million Jews who are among the world’s richest and most technologically advanced peoples. Already at peace with some of their Arab neighbours, they can hold out against the others until accepted by them as well…. And yet as an Israeli—or, more precisely, as an American Jew who decided 38 years ago to make his life in Israel— there is a sense in which none of this matters to me. I don’t wish to be misunderstood: The future of Israel is of enormous importance to me. The thought of Israel’s death is as saddening to me as the thought of my own. But the thought of my death is not sufficient reason to make me wish I had never lived. On the contrary, it makes my life meaningful in a way it would not be had I been guaranteed immortality. I feel the same about Israel. I did not choose to live in it because I was convinced it could not perish. I have always lived in it with the consciousness that it could. This is what makes it so precious to me. I’ll go further. Were I prophetically to know that Israel would perish within the next 20 or 30 or 50 years, as many of its bon ton critics are now prognosticating, it would not make the slightest difference to me in terms of my own decisions. I would still feel happy that I chose to live here; would go on living here; would want my children to live here; would want them to raise my grandchildren here—until the last possible moment. Isn’t that the way we want to live our own personal lives, too: Until the last possible moment? Happy—and proud. Because for all its shortcomings and mistakes, Israel is and will always be one of the most glorious historical adventures in the history of mankind. A 3,000-year-old people, the victim of the greatest act of mass murder ever committed on this planet, has the indomitable will to reconstitute itself in its ancient homeland, to revive its ancient language, to assert its right to live, to create new life, to nourish it and maintain it in defiance of all odds—there’s never been anything else like it before and never will be again. I’m grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to be part of it. I would have felt envious had I been anywhere else. Sixty years isn’t much. I hope Israel has many times that amount still ahead of it. Realistically speaking, the chances seem to me pretty good. But I would have no regrets even if they weren’t. Life doesn’t have to go on forever for it to have been forever worth living. ISRAEL
IS NOW AMERICA’S CLOSEST ALLY President George W. Bush will soon make his second visit to Israel in less than six months, this time to celebrate the country’s 60th anniversary. The candidates for the presidency, Republican and Democratic alike, have all traveled to Israel and affirmed their commitment to its security.… Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the American flag is rarely (if ever) burned in protest—indeed, some Israelis fly that flag on their own independence day. And avenues in major American cities are named for Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir. Arguably, there is no alliance in the world today more durable and multifaceted than that between the United States and Israel. Yet the bonds between the two countries were not always so strong. For much of Israel’s history, America was a distant and not always friendly power. Consider the period before Israel’s founding in 1948, during the British Mandate over Palestine. Though many Americans, Christians as well as Jews, were committed to building the Jewish national home, their government’s policy was strictly hands-off. Palestine, in Washington’s view, was exclusively Britain’s concern, and the Arab-Jewish conflict was a British headache. Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration raised no objection to Britain’s 1939 decision to end Jewish immigration into Palestine, sealing off European Jewry’s last escape route from Nazism. The U.S. indifference to Zionism deepened during World War II, when America feared alienating its British allies and angering the Arabs, whose oil had become vital to the war effort. Deferring to British and Arab demands, America confined hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors in displaced-persons camps in Europe rather than let them emigrate to Palestine. America’s ambivalence toward Zionism persisted after the war, as the battle against Nazism gave way to the anticommunist struggle. While a sizeable majority of Americans welcomed Israel’s creation in May 1948, policy makers in Washington feared that such support would trigger an Arab oil boycott of the West and the Soviet take-over of Europe. Secretary of State George Marshall even warned the president, Harry Truman, that he would not back him for re-election if he recognized the newborn state. An ardent Baptist whose best friend was a Jew, Truman ignored these warnings and made the U.S. the first nation to accord de facto recognition to Israel. But buckling to State and Defense Department pressures, Truman also imposed an arms embargo on Israel during its desperate war of independence. Later, he arm-twisted Israeli leaders to relinquish land to the Arabs and to readmit Palestinian refugees. Pressure for territorial concessions escalated under Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also vetoed weapons sales to Israel. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, dismissed Israel as “the millstone around our necks,” and threatened it with sanctions during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Israel is home to the Middle East’s largest memorial to John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy similarly refused to sell tanks and planes to Israel… Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president to invite an Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington—16 years after Israel’s birth—but he then balked at Eshkol’s request for American help against the Arab armies assembling for war in June 1967…. The Six-Day War nevertheless inaugurated a dramatic change in America’s attitude toward Israel. Israel’s astonishing victory in that conflict instantly transformed the “millstone” into an American asset…. Nixon regarded Israel as “the best Soviet stopper in the Mideast,” and furnished the weaponry Israel needed to prevail in the 1973 Yom Kippur War…. By the end of the 1970s, an inchoate U.S.-Israeli alliance had emerged… But the relationship was hardly friction-free. Israel’s reluctance to forfeit territories captured in 1967, and its efforts to settle them, became a perennial source of tension…. Israel’s security policies also jolted the alliance—Ronald Reagan condemned Israel’s bombardment of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 as well as its siege of Beirut the following year. Americans, in turn, irritated the Israelis with their transfer of sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia and their opposition to Israeli arms sales to China. Such rifts have grown increasingly infrequent, however, and today there are few visible fissures in the U.S.-Israeli front. Yet America has never recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital… Powerful interest groups lobby against Israel in Washington while much of American academia and influential segments of the media are staunchly opposed to any association with Israel. How does the alliance surmount these challenges? One reason, certainly, is values—the respect for civic rights and the rule of law that is shared by the world’s most powerful republic and the Middle East’s only stable democracy. There is also Israel’s determination to fight terror, and its willingness to share its antiterror expertise. Most fundamentally, though, is the amity between the two countries’ peoples. The admiration which the U.S. inspires among Israelis is overwhelmingly reciprocated by Americans, more than 70% of whom, according to recent polls, favor robust ties with the Jewish state. No doubt further upheavals await the alliance in the future—as Iran approaches nuclear capability, for example. Israel may act more muscularly than some American leaders might warrant. The impending change of U.S. administration will also have an effect. But such vicissitudes are unlikely to cause a major schism in what has proven to be one of history’s most resilient, ardent and atypical partnerships. (Michael Oren is a senior
fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. CIJR's daily "ISRANET BRIEFING"
is available by fax and e-mail. The daily ISRANET BRIEFING is a service of CIJR. We hope that you find it useful and that you will support it and our pro-Israel educational work by forwarding a minimum $36.00 tax-deductible contribution [please send a cheque or VISA/Mastercard information to CIJR (see cover page for address)]. All donations include a membership-subscription to our respected quarterly ISRAFAX print magazine, which will be mailed to your home. CIJR's Briefing series attempts to convey a wide variety of opinions on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world for its readers' educational and research purposes. Reprinted articles and documents express the opinion of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the Institute.
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