The State of the Jews

It’s no secret Ha’aretz represents the left-wing fringe in Israeli politics, with columnists who openly question Jewish statehood and a reflexive assumption of Israeli responsibility for anything that goes wrong in the region.

Still, even for Ha’aretz, this is crazy. In an editorial titled: “Netanyahu, the US has given you a second chance. Use it.” the paper tries to argue that (a) the Americans are offering a “second chance” that, presumably, may not return, (b) “the US had demanded that Netanyahu … agree to deliberations on all the core issues,” and (c) that “Netanyahu will commit a grave error if he is tempted to continue the damaging clash with Obama, and if he uses the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to enlist the president’s political enemies to advance the positions of the Israeli right wing.”

The degree of disinformation contained in this piece is staggering, and begs the question: Are Ha’aretz’s savvy editors so disconnected from reality, or are they knowingly lying to advance their politics?

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.

UPDATE: Dan Ben-David rejects the Ha’aretz headline, which he says was a misinterpretation that stretched his original words to places he did not intend. If anything, he notes, folks such as the immigrant volunteer soldiers from Western lands are keeping Israel afloat despite its deep structural problems.

Regardless of the mistakes in this article or the debate raging at JPost about aliya, I urge you to delve into Ben-David’s research and advocacy, a good sample of which was published this Friday in Ha’aretz.

I leave the post up only because I’m loathe to change (too much) the original record. But Ben-David says he emphatically does not mean to discourage aliya, and that his words were misunderstood and taken out of context.

ORIGINAL: First, the JPost claimed aliya from America won’t come. Now Ha’aretz is reporting that even if it does, Israel is doomed.

Here, Ha’aretz reports on a lecture by Prof. Dan Ben-David about how Anglo aliya won’t reverse the destructive social trends that everyone seems to be ignoring.

The boost in Anglo immigration in 2009 will not help ensure Israel’s survival as a Western and Jewish democracy over the next two decades, a leading economist told an astonished crowd of lone immigrant soldiers on Wednesday. “It feels strange to say this to people who chose Israel, but our current trend means fewer people will come here and more will leave as our position deteriorates.”

He told the crowd that Israeli society’s situation is “unsustainable” because of a “growing group which does not work, does not study and does not produce.”

This group, of course, are large swaths of the Arab and Ultra-Orthodox minorities.

If you don’t know Ben-David’s research, you’re seriously behind the curve. Forget the peace process – this stuff is what will make or break Israel’s future.

How do you know you’re losing touch with Israeli society? For one thing, you forget that it exists.

The latest “MAKOM Hot Topic” on Ha’aretz’s website:

If the Freakonomics guys liked it, then there really must be something behind the fascinating book Start-Up Nation. In the book, Senor and Singer explore reasons why Israel has more companies on NASDAQ than any country other than the US, and the highest number of start-ups per capita than anywhere else in the world.

To the liberal mind, the success of the book and its subject matter, ought to give cause for concern. First, it would seem to be an attempt to draw attention away from Israel’s political failings – in its very apolitical-ness, it is political. Second, it hints that business and hi-tech success is the pinnacle of Jewish endeavor. Third, it would seem to credit the Israeli army with much of this success. Fourth, and most importantly, the book draws attention to an Israeli and – dare we say it – Jewish exceptionalism.

This would then beg the question: Can we express pride about anything? Is any Israeli collective achievement – so long as it isn’t peace with the Palestinians – to be frowned upon?

Are these guys for real? The book “ought to give cause for concern” because, possibly, “any Israeli collective achievement” is bad if it doesn’t concern the Palestinians? So, for example, democracy? Or the rescue of the Muslim world’s expelled Jews or Europe’s tattered refugees? Or how about cures for some cancers? Or Yehudah Amichai’s poetry? Or simply surviving the 20th century, an achievement in no way guaranteed at the century’s start? Or being the only country in the Middle East that has more Christians, not less, than 60 years ago?

How about this question for a hot topic: What kind of obsessive advocacy leads someone to suggest that an entire society is nothing more than a single political process? Is MAKOM dangling dangerously off the edge of the Israeli discourse, about to fall off?

I have written about the automatic credibility gap that Israeli leaders face in the international arena, where the world questions the Israeli commitment to peace even when it is demonstrable – and often fails to take the Palestinians to task when they flatly work against accommodation and reconciliation.

But what more can Netanyahu do to overcome this distrust?

Isn't the surging Palestinian economy proof that Bibi wants peace? Pictured: A Palestinian man sells sandwiches in Gaza City during Eid al-Adha festivities. (Photo accompanying WSJ article quoted below)

Unlike Rabin [in 1995], Netanyahu now accepts the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state. Unlike Rabin, he is issuing orders prohibiting construction throughout the Jewish West Bank. Netanyahu has crossed the Rubicon, on both ideological and practical levels, and reinvented himself as a centrist.

All this just to bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table, which they still refuse to do.

In a must-read in today’s Wall Street Journal, British analyst Tom Gross explains the results of Netanyahu’s pro-peace policies, especially the recent dismantling of hundreds of roadblocks and other measures to jump-start the Palestinian economy.

(True, Keith Olbermann once called Tom “the worst person in the world” for basically supporting military action against Iran’s nuclear program – for what it’s worth, Olbermann misquoted him – but Tom is also a passionate supporter of Palestinian independence and democracy.)

The piece is worth reading in full. Here are some choice parts:

Wandering around downtown Nablus the shops and restaurants I saw were full. There were plenty of expensive cars on the streets…

And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has removed them all since the Israeli security services (with the encouragement and support of President George W. Bush) were allowed, over recent years, to crush the intifada, restore security to the West Bank and set up the conditions for the economic boom that is now occurring…

The shops and restaurants were also full when I visited Hebron recently…

Life is even better in Ramallah, where it is difficult to get a table in a good restaurant. New apartment buildings, banks, brokerage firms, luxury car dealerships and health clubs are to be seen. In Qalqilya, another West Bank city that was previously a hotbed of terrorists and bomb-makers, the first ever strawberry crop is being harvested in time to cash in on the lucrative Christmas markets in Europe…

Palestinian economic growth so far this year—in a year dominated by economic crisis elsewhere—has been an impressive 7% according to the IMF, though Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad, himself a former World Bank and IMF employee, says it is in fact 11%, partly helped along by strong economic performances in neighboring Israel…

The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don’t clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one.