The State of the Jews

This is worth following. Could an affluent, Western Palestinian Diaspora be part of the solution?

Here’s an attempt to create some kind of ‘Palestinian Agency’:

The state of Palestine does not exist; the courts are still not working, local government has numerous problems, not to mention health care, education and infrastructure. Representatives of Palestinian communities abroad have come to Bethlehem to kick off the independent “Palestine Network.”

“Welcome to your second home,” announces Ramzi Khoury, executive director of the Palestine Network. “You are representatives from 23 countries who have chosen to be engaged in building this Palestinian state and not just talking about it. This is a do tank, rather than a talk tank. This is not a political club.”

…

“If you want to build a democratic state, you need to tackle all the sectors of that state,” Khoury says. “So doctors need to come down here and revamp our health system, engineers need to come here and help us build, lawyers and judges need to come and help us create an independent judiciary and a state of law, and we need educators.”

The Palestine Network is not just another charity or source of funding. The Palestinians have many economic backers. In 2008, global financial aid to the Palestinian Authority exceeded $2 billion, including about $526 million from Arab countries, $651m. from the European Union, $300m. from the US and about $238m. from the World Bank, according to the Arab League’s 2009 economic report.

The founding conference, sponsored by the governments of Germany and Belgium, was held in the opulent Convention Center on the outskirts of Bethlehem, hub of Palestinian culture and tourism.

The network’s goal is to use expertise from Palestine’s diaspora communities to develop the local economy, judiciary, education and health infrastructures in what will be the future state.

Only if you’re willing to get caught:

The spread of technology of the kind that uncovered the Dubai operation has permanently altered the rules, wrote Yossi Melman, Haaretz’s intelligence correspondent. “The conclusion could be that the era of heroic operations in the style of James Bond movies is close to its end.”

Inspired by Dubai’s success, neighboring Abu Dhabi announced Wednesday that it would spend more than $120 million to blanket the city with surveillance cameras.

Today, said Gad Shimron, a field operative for the Mossad in the 1970s and 1980s, agents risk leaving electronic footprints everywhere: credit card charges, passport information in airport computers and easily traced cell phone calls. As Dubai demonstrated, they must also plan for the possibility that law enforcement will be able to put the pieces together.

Ultimately,the laws of war are an Israeli strategic asset.

That’s my take-away from a beautiful and heartbreaking description of war’s moral complexity published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. Well worth the read:

Five years ago, a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.

This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.

…

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

The question is important and well-portrayed, but I don’t think it’s entirely relevant to Israel’s situation. For one thing, the IDF has succeeded in repeatedly defeating its nonconventional enemies without great civilian casualties on either side. (30,000 of some of the best-trained infantrymen on Earth were fighting in densely-populated Gaza for a whole month, and even Hamas says that fully a third of the Palestinian dead were its fighters, who were operating at the time from within populated neighborhoods. If civilians were the target, as Goldstone and Hamas claim, then the IDF is rather frighteningly incompetent.)

But there’s another reason to obey the laws of war, besides the simple demonstration that you can still win while obeying them: for Israel’s adversaries, civilian dead are a weapon of great strategic significance. In fact, Hamas has no other strategic lever over Israel than forcing it into killing Palestinian civilians by targeting Israel’s own civilians. Neither act is tolerable for Israel politically and internationally, so creating this catch-22 – utterly ignored by Goldstone, incidentally – is the essence of Hamas’ strategy.

You can only de-incentivize Hamas’ particularly vicious brand of warfare by exacting a price for aggression without “giving” them Israeli or Palestinian civilian deaths.

With this thinking, a scrupulous adherence to the laws of war is not just morally important, but strategically advantageous.

Maybe that’s why the IDF, for all the criticism it faces abroad, has actually done better in avoiding civilian deaths than similar armies fighting in places like Helmand or Fallujah.

As many have noted following Binyamin Netanyahu’s June speech at Bar Ilan University, it’s not a crazy demand on the part of the Israelis that the new state of Palestine be disarmed. Besides the traumatic experience of the Gaza withdrawal, where land vacated by Israel quickly became the launching pad for incessant attacks on Sderot, there is actual precedent for disarmament in the international arena – both Costa Rica and Iceland have no militaries, and it has served them well.

Now, Costa Rica’s president Oscar Arias, a Nobel peace laureate and supporter of Palestinian independence, agrees.

In an interview with the Israeli news website YNet over the weekend (The English article is here, but the Hebrew one has the full quote I translated below), he says:

“In my conversations with the Palestinians, I’m trying to suggest a crazy idea – get rid of your army. In practical terms, this isn’t really a crazy idea, because we did it 61 years ago, and we have only benefited from it. In my opinion, a small state, a poor state like Palestine doesn’t need an army. Clearly not everyone will agree with me, but it takes a bit of courage to make such a decision and I hope the Palestinian Authority will have the courage to take this step.”

YNet’s Netanel Shlomovich adds:

The Costa Rican president’s position [on disarmament] will likely make the Netanyahu government happy, but not on all issues. During Arias’ term, Costa Rica established diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority and even recognized a Palestinian state. Yet President Arias doesn’t understand why these actions constitute a controversial decision.

“Over a hundred nations have recognized a Palestinian state. This was the vision of the United Nations from the partition agreement of 1947 that called for the establishment of two states. Very few people will disagree with the idea of two states,” [Arias said].

Looks like a fun party.

Anti-Ahmadinejad protest in Rio de Janeiro last week, where demonstrators carried Brazilian, Israeli and gay pride flags.

Hat tip: Tom Gross.

Am I the only pessimist left standing on this business of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood?

The Atlantic Wire, the blog section of the Atlantic magazine, juxtaposes my view on this with three other commentators extolling the idea. For the record, I wrote that unilateral statehood would give the Palestinians nothing while freeing Israel’s right-wing government from its standing obligations.

The other commentators, on the other hand, didn’t even try to deal with the question in strategic terms.

Yossi Sarid, as is his wont, is hopeful and optimistic to the point of irrelevance: “When he declares independence, Abbas should call upon the Jews living in the state of Palestine to preserve the peace and to do their part in building up the new country as full and equal citizens, enjoying fair representation in all of its institutions.”

Juan Cole is inexplicably paranoid: “Since the Netanyahu government is about the least likely government to negotiate a Palestinian state within 1967 borders you could imagine, the Palestinians are giving up any hopes that talks will lead anywhere. Moreover, since Netanyahu has secret plans to thousands of further Israeli houses on Palestinian land in the next few years, time is short.”

This is just plain weird. First of all, Netanyahu doesn’t need “secret plans.” There are perfectly non-secret construction plans available for public viewing in the Housing and Construction Ministry. Second, the non-negotiable Palestinian demands aren’t just about borders, but also about refugees, Jerusalem and other issues. Third, on Cole’s doubts about Netanyahu’s intentions, he would do well to remember that both Sinai and Gaza – two withdrawals that included dismantling settlements and resettling thousands of Jews – were carried out by right-wing governments.

Finally, Chris Hedges seals the debate by comparing Palestine to all sorts of non-comparable places: “It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine.”

But it didn’t work in Chechnya or Kurdistan, and worked only partially in Scotland and the Basque country – because these are all completely different situations.

Consider: Unlike in Kosovo, Israelis have been willing to withdraw from Palestine for over a decade (according to Tel Aviv University’s annual Peace Index). Unlike in either Georgia or Kosovo, Palestine has Hamas waiting in the wings to take over. Unlike in either Georgia or Kosovo, Israel is neither Russian nor Serbian in its intentions or in its political capacity for brutality.

Besides, supporting unilateral independence implies a trust in the current Palestinian leadership to get it right – to build institutions, to construct a national economy. Does Hedges trust them to do this?

The occupation is bad, undemocratic and temporary – even according to Israel’s own laws. But should the PA, which has suffered for almost two decades mainly from its own corrupt and incompetent leadership, unceremoniously jettison the entire Oslo process in the hope that more UN pressure will give them independence and prosperity? Will the need to negotiate over Jerusalem, refugees and borders disappear because Cuba, Sweden and Russia recognize Ramallah and Nablus as a “state” rather than an autonomous “authority?”