Why Israel Must Now Move from Concessions-Based Diplomacy to Rights-Based Diplomacy. Part II

 

2^nd part of 3

 

Neglecting to Reassert Israel's Rights in Gaza before Disengagement

 

That Israel was ill-equipped to defend its own legal rights became abundantly clear during its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. At that time, Israel evacuated both its military and civilian presence from the area without first establishing a moral symmetry of claims opposite the Palestinians. Jewish residents had lived in Gaza for centuries, and their legal right to do so under modern international law had been established for four generations. Israel could have asserted its territorial rights under the League of Nations Mandate, a legally binding treaty that even the International Court of Justice has acknowledged constitutes a legal and continuing sacred trust.30 Moreover, the foundational document of the Arab-Israeli peace process for the past forty years - UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967 - reinforces Israel's right to continue to hold disputed territories pending a satisfactory agreement ensuring Israel's secure borders. Even Egypt, whose nineteen-year military occupation of Gaza came to an end in 1967, agreed to peace with Israel in 1978 without any assertion of Egyptian claims or any limitations on Israel's rights to Gaza. Moreover, the 1993 Oslo accords with the PLO did not prejudice Israel's legal rights to settlement in Gaza, notwithstanding any future political compromise.

True, Sharon did receive a presidential-letter commitment from President George W. Bush on April 14, 2004, affirming Israel's rights to defensible borders in the West Bank as a quid pro quo for leaving Gaza.³¹ However, even Bush's written commitment to Sharon did not compensate for Israel's failure to emphasize to the international community that Israel was leaving territories over which it had legal claims.³²

The resulting European reaction could have been foreseen. Israel's concession of Gaza has been minimized internationally as organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International continue to refer to the post-withdrawal Gaza Strip as "occupied territory."³³ At the same time, Israel's unilateral pullout has been commonly viewed in international circles as demonstrating the need for yet further Israeli concessions. EU foreign policy chief and then-Spanish Foreign Minister Javier Solana warned in 2004 that the European Union would not support the Gaza disengagement if it did not lead to a full Israeli pullout from the West Bank. Solana called that scenario "nightmarish."³⁴

 

Europe's expectation of future Israeli withdrawals reflects the degree to which Israel's unconditional unilateral pullout in Gaza would undermine its territorial rights in the West Bank. This was the central reason that Israel's former Deputy Chief of Staff and National Security Council Head Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan had publicly opposed full withdrawal from Gaza. He noted on June 4, 2007, that Gaza established an "immoral and dangerous diplomatic precedent for the West Bank."³⁵

 

Oslo's Shift Away from Rights-Based Diplomacy

Much of Israel's current diplomatic posture was established with the 1993 Oslo accords. The Oslo process represented a diplomatic paradigm shift for Israel away from "rights-based" diplomacy to "concession-driven" diplomacy.³⁶ The White House signing ceremony in September 1993 was illustrative. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deemphasized Israel's territorial rights and instead focused on its desire to end its violent conflict with the Palestinians, declaring, "Enough of blood and tears. We have come to try and put an end to the hostilities, so that our children, our children's children, will no longer experience the painful cost of war, violence and terror."³⁷ His words were poetic and well-meaning, but they lacked any reference to Israel's historical rights and claims.

True, at the 1995 Knesset vote to approve the Oslo II agreement, Rabin did insist on Israel's territorial rights in vital areas for its future survival including the Jordan Valley, other strategic parts of the West Bank, and a united Jerusalem.³⁸ But for most of the period from 1993 to 2000, Israel's overall diplomatic strategy focused on helping the Palestinians achieve their demands for what Arafat and Palestinian spokesmen had always termed their "legitimate rights," hoping this would result in peace and security for Israelis. Though well-intentioned, this approach undercut Israel's longstanding diplomatic policy of asserting both Jewish historical rights to Israel and unconditional demands for security.

 

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, had as a rule infused major public addresses with historical references. He asserted to the 1937 British Peel Commission, "I say on behalf of the Jews that the Bible is our mandate, the Bible that was written by us, in our language, in Hebrew, in this very country."³⁹ He reminded the Knesset in 1949: "Our ties today with Jerusalem are no less deep than those which existed in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Titus Flavius...our fighting youth knew how to sacrifice itself for our holy capital no less than did our forefathers in the days of the First and Second Temples."⁴⁰ A year later Abba Eban would emphasize this theme at the UN Trusteeship Council: "A devotion to the Holy City has been a constant theme of our people for three thousand years."⁴¹

At the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told the opening session attended by nearly all the region's Arab leaders, "We are the only people who have lived in the Land of Israel without interruption for nearly 4,000 years; we are the only people, except for a short Crusader kingdom, who have had an independent sovereignty in this land; we are the only people for whom Jerusalem has been a capital; we are the only people whose sacred places are only in the Land of Israel."⁴²

But Israeli diplomats at Oslo advanced a different notion: that Israeli territorial concessions to the newly formed Palestinian Authority obviated the need to promote Israel's rights and explain its diplomatic positions.⁴³ Foreign Minister Shimon Peres declared at the time that good policy was good public diplomacy.⁴⁴ Once Israel dropped its past reliance on rights-based diplomacy and adopted a new concessions-based diplomacy instead, its spokesmen essentially acquiesced to the Palestinian historical narrative. The Israelis offered no alternative perspective. Thus Palestinian officials would repeatedly charge Israel with being a "foreign occupier" and, rather than contest that claim, some Israeli diplomats would counter by saying that Israel wanted to "end the occupation" but lacked a reliable peace partner. Even former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan echoed the Palestinian charge publicly on a number of occasions including in his last major UN address in February 2007.⁴⁵

 

 

Reasserting Israel's Legitimacy and Rights to Sovereignty

Israel has always expressed its readiness for territorial compromise and this principle will continue to play a role in future diplomatic processes. However, in view of the fundamental doubts expressed regarding Israel's legitimacy in many international circles, Israeli government leaders and diplomats would be well advised to reiterate to their foreign counterparts the following historical and legal principles of Israel's rights-based diplomacy.

 

 

Historical Context

The modern State of Israel is not a child of European colonialism. Rather, it is the result of Ottoman decolonialization and one of the first fruits of the international community's commitment to self-determination in the post-World War I era. The State of Israel also is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish nation and the third Jewish commonwealth to arise in the Land of Israel over the past three thousand years. In fact, the Jewish people is the only nation that has ever established an independent homeland in the Land of Israel with Jerusalem as its capital.

Since the destruction of Jerusalem's First Jewish Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Second Jewish Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, the Jewish people maintained an unbroken bond with the Land of Israel. A Jewish rebellion in 132 CE became the first to destroy a Roman legion, the high Jewish court (Sanhedrin) remained a preeminent authority in Israel for centuries, and the Jews of the Land of Israel continued to make such important contributions to Jewish life as the composition of the Sabbath-evening prayer services in the sixteenth century. Jewish communities, though limited in size, remained in ancient Israel even after the Roman invaders renamed the land Palestina, as preeminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis has noted, so as to obliterate the memory of Jewish nationhood.⁴⁶ At the same time, according to Lewis, "from the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity."⁴⁷

Despite Jerusalem's destruction, Jewish religious scholars and political leaders from across the globe still came to Israel and established and maintained vibrant communities in other Jewish holy cities such as Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed.

For the vast majority of exiled Jews over the past two thousand years until the reestablishment of the third Jewish nation-state in 1948, the Jewish yearning and historical commitment to return to its ancient homeland and capital in Jerusalem played a central role in Jewish life throughout the world. It was expressed in thrice-daily Jewish prayer and blessings, and at Jewish holidays - particularly the end of the Passover Seder and the Yom Kippur service. The centrality of Zion and Jerusalem has also played a key role in Jewish lifecycle events such as weddings and funerals.

 

 

The Modern Legal Context of Israel's Rights to Sovereignty

 

It was the sui generis Jewish historical bond with Jerusalem and Israel that led the League of Nations and then the United Nations during the last century to recognize the Jewish people's legal right to "reconstitute its national home in that country."⁴⁸ In other words, the international community formally recognized a preexisting right to Jewish sovereignty in Western-mandated Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It was Winston Churchill who noted in 1922 that "the Jews are in Palestine by right, not sufferance."⁴⁹ The High Commissioner for Palestine reiterated in his first report to the British government in 1925 the basis of international guarantees for a Jewish state. He noted:

The Balfour Declaration was endorsed at the time by several of the Allied Governments. It was reaffirmed by the conference of the Principal Allied powers at San Remo in 1920. It was subsequently endorsed by unanimous resolutions by both houses of the Congress of the United States; it was embodied in the Mandate for Palestine approved by the League of Nations in 1922; it was declared in a formal statement of policy issued by the Colonial Secretary in the same year, "not to be susceptible of change"; and it has been the guiding principle in their direction of the affairs of Palestine of four successive British Governments. The policy was fixed and internationally guaranteed.⁵⁰

Although the League of Nations was terminated in the wake of World War II in 1946, the mandate was not, and could not legally be abridged. Article 80 of the UN founding charter acknowledged the continuing legal rights of mandate beneficiaries. Moreover, the International Court of Justice ruled in a series of cases concerning South Africa's mandate over South West Africa (now Namibia) that articles of mandate are binding legal treaties that continue to grant rights to their beneficiaries.⁵¹ Although Israel's neighbors continue to dispute the proper location of its borders, the Jewish state's fundamental legal rights to a sovereign independent Jewish state in former Western- mandated Palestine cannot be and have never been abrogated or revised by any overriding source of legal authority.

Nothing prevents Israel from conceding its potential claims to sovereignty within the context of a peace process that brings Israel to agreed-upon secure borders. Preemptive concession of such claims, however, is unnecessary and has proved diplomatically counterproductive.

The adoption of a rights-based paradigm for Israeli diplomacy will not likely trigger an immediate improvement in the UN General Assembly's voting patterns regarding Israel. It also is unlikely that diplomats from Muslim countries will be persuaded by Israel's rightful claims. However, the international community's position toward Israel is in greater flux in the wake of the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007. Israel might now begin to enjoy greater understanding in some European and Asian circles. Therefore, rights-based diplomacy can make a difference for those who might express greater sympathy for Israel's position but would first seek a firm basis in international law before offering diplomatic support.

Israel, therefore, by refusing to stand up for its rights and instead relying on the power of concessions to gain international support, undermines its own interests. That is why the failed paradigm of concessions-based diplomacy must now be replaced.

 

Dan Diker is Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs (ICA) and foreign policy analyst of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He also serves as guest Middle East affairs analyst for the Israel Broadcasting Authority's English News. The author thanks

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Prof. Avraham Bell, Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University, for his assistance.

../…

Why Israel Must Now Move from Concessions-Based Diplomacy to Rights-Based Diplomacy. Part III

 

3^rd part of 3

Notes

¹ http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/865408.html.

² This recommendation was made in 2003 by former UN ambassador Dore Gold following international calls for the dissolution of Israel as an independent state and its replacement by a one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis. See Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich, "An Answer to the New Anti-Zionists: The Rights of the Jewish People to a Sovereign State in Their Historic Homeland," Jerusalem Viewpoints, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (www.jcpa.org), November 16, 2003.

³ Herb Keinon, "PM: Helping the PA is ‘Risky, but Necessary'," Jerusalem Post, online edition, June 23, 2007 (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1182409630511&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull).

⁴ Aluf Benn, "Minster Confirms Gov't Sent Message to Syria via ‘Secret Channel,'" Ha'aretz, June 9, 2007. See also Associated Press, "PM Willing to Return Golan for Peace with Syria," Jerusalem Post, June 8, 2007; Aluf Benn, "PM Mulls, via 3rd Party, Resuming Syria Talks," Ha'aretz, May 31, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/865421.html.

⁵ Benn, "PM Mulls."

⁶ Israeli withdrawal and subsequent full Palestinian control has transformed Gaza into a center for radical Islamic terror activity against Israel. In 2006 alone, 891 Gaza-based rocket assaults were carried out against Israel compared to a total of 716 for the previous five years. See http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/Hebrew/heb_n/pdf/terrorism_2006h.pdf.

⁷ Address by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the Fourth Herzliya Conference, Israel, Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, December 18, 2003, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Speeches+by+Israeli+leaders/2003/Address+by+PM+Ariel+Sharon+at+the+Fourth
+Herzliya.htm.

^8. Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon, "The Second Lebanon War: From Territory to Ideology" in:

Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007), p. 15.

⁹ September 29, 2005, marked five years since the outbreak of the violent confrontation. In its course 26,159 terrorist attacks had been perpetrated against Israeli targets, leaving 1,060 Israelis dead and 6,089 wounded, http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/html/final/eng/eng_n/pro_13_10_e.htm.

¹⁰ Dore Gold, "Europe's Consistent Anti-Israel Bias at the United Nations," in Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed., Israel and Europe: An Expanding Abyss? (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2005), p. 54.

¹¹ See Amnesty International 2007 Report, http://thereport.amnesty.org/document/15.

¹² Ha'aretz News Service, "Israel Condemns U.K. Academic Boycott Bid as ‘Scandalous'," Ha'aretz, May 31, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/865462.htm.. This latest British boycott followed the one in early 2007 by Britain's National Union of Journalists and two earlier embargoes that were overturned in 2005 and 2006.

¹³ Cnaan Lipshitz, "South Africa's Largest Trade Union Seeks to Boycott Israel," Ha'aretz, May 31, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/865408.html.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ "Battle for Britain," Editorial, Ha'aretz, May 27, 2007.

¹⁶ CBS News interview with Harry Smith, November 28, 2006, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/28/earlyshow/leisure/books/main2212124.shtml.

¹⁷ Former legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry Allan Baker noted that the establishment at Oslo of the official nomenclature "Palestinian Authority" and not "Palestine" was a major point of negotiation before the signing of the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Baker noted in 2003 that premature references to "Palestine" are a de facto delegitimization of Israel's rights and contravene the carefully crafted language both of the Oslo accords and UN Security Council Resolution 242. Interview with Alan Baker, legal adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry, January 17, 2003, as cited in Dan Diker, "Does the International Media Overlook Israel's Legal Rights in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?" Jerusalem Issue Brief, No. 495, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, April 1, 2003, http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp495.htm.

¹⁸ Robin Shepard, "In Europe an Unhealthy  Fixation on Israel," Washington Post, January 30, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46382-2005Jan29.html.

¹⁹ Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671.

²⁰ Allan Cowell, "Mayor Accuses Israel of ‘Ethnic Cleansing,'" New York Times, March 5, 2005, http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/04/news/london.php.

²¹ Shepard, "In Europe."

²² Irwin Cotler, "Durban's Troubling Legacy One Year Later: Twisting the Cause of International Human Rights against the Jewish People," Jerusalem Issue Brief, Vol. 2, No. 5, August 20, 2002.

²³ Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," American Jewish Committee, December 2006, p. 8, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=846637&ct=3283863.

²⁴ "Battle for Britain." Despite the fact that Hamas does not recognize pre-1967 Israel and continues to launch rocket terror assaults against southern Israeli cities in pre-1967 Israel from Palestinian-controlled Gaza, one of the initiators of Britain's academic boycott against Israel emphasized that, "Justice in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is entirely on one side" - meaning, of course, the Palestinian side.

²⁵ Tzipi Livni, "The Peace Alternative," English version of the article by Foreign Minister Livni published in Arabic in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), June 18, 2007. See: http://www.israel.org/MFA/Government/Speeches+by+Israeli+leaders/2007/
The+Peace+Alternative+18-Jun-2006.htm.

²⁶ Ehud Olmert, "1967: Israel Cannot Make Peace Alone," The Guardian, June 6, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2096527,00.html.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ismail Haniyeh, "1967: Our Rights Have to Be Recognised," The Guardian, June 6, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2096394,00.html.

²⁹ See Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2007), pp. 276-277.

³⁰ See the following legal precedents of the International Court of Justice: International status of South-West Africa, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Rep. 1950, p. 128; South-West Africa - Voting Procedure, Advisory Opinion of June 7th, 1955: I.C.J. Rep. 1955, p. 67; South West Africa Cases (Ethiopia v. South Africa; Liberia v. South Africa), Preliminary Objections, Judgment of 21 December 1962: I.C.J. Rep. 1962, p. 319; Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970), Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Rep. 1971, p. 16.

³¹ Dore Gold, "The U.S. and Defensible Borders" in: Defensible Borders for a Lasting Peace (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2005), p.59

³² Israel's legal and historical claims in the former Palestine Mandate include what are today the West Bank and Gaza. The League of Nations Mandate was the last and still-binding legal instrument to assign rights to the residents of the former British Mandate of Palestine. As early as 1922, the Council of the League of Nations noted Israel's right to "reconstitute its national Homeland" in the Land of Israel. In other words, the League of Nations recognized Israel's preexisting rights to settle in what had been Western Mandatory Palestine. See Gold and Helmreich, "An Answer to the New Ant-Zionists."

^33. See, e.g., Report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, John Dugard, A/HRC/4/17, 29 January 2007 (esp. paragraphs 1, 6 and 22 referring to Gaza as part of the "Occupied Palestinian Territory" and applying the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding "occupied" territory).

³⁴ Herb Keinon and Associated Press, "Solana Says EU Won't Support a  ‘Nightmare' Gaza-Only Pullout," Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2004.

³⁵ Speech by Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan at the conference on "40 Years of UNSC Resolution 242," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Jerusalem, June 4, 2007.

³⁶ Dan Diker, "Why Are Israel's Public Relations So Poor?" Jerusalem Viewpoints, No. 487, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, November 2002, p. 7.

³⁷ See: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Archive/Peace+Process/1993/Remarks+by+PM+Yitzhak+Rabin+at+Signing+ of+DOP+-+13.htm.

³⁸ Speech of Yitzhak Rabin at the Knesset vote to approve Oslo II, September 28, 1995. Rabin's territorial claims had strong legal and diplomatic grounding. Israel's legal right to secure and recognized boundaries was affirmed in the British and American-drafted UN Security Council Resolution 242, which the Security Council unanimously approved on November 22, 1967, and was subsequently accepted by both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a basis for peaceful resolution. Indeed, UNSC 242 would be the cornerstone of all Arab-Israeli diplomacy since Israel's defensive war of 1967. Its major principles are:

                1. Israel's withdrawal from territories to secure and recognized boundaries, which would be different from the indefensible prewar armistice lines that became known in international diplomatic parlance as the Green Line or, in other words, the ceasefire lines of 1949. Israel's former UN ambassador Dore Gold recently noted that George Brown, the British foreign secretary in 1967, clarified the resolution's phraseology at the time saying, "Israel will not withdraw from all the territories." Dore Gold, "Forgotten Legal Rights," New York Sun, June 8, 2007.

                2. UNSC 242 was predicated on the fact that any Israeli withdrawal would take place only with the institution of full peace and recognition from its Arab neighbors, who were branded as the war's aggressors, before Israel would be required to withdraw from any captured territory. This point was recently emphasized by international human rights attorney Prof. Alan Dershowitz, who was on the U.S. drafting team of UNSC 242 under former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg. See Dershowitz's speech at the conference on "40 Years of UNSC Resolution 242," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Jerusalem, June 4, 2007.

                3. The legal context of Rabin's postwar claims for a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty also stemmed from preexisting Israeli claims under the Palestine Mandate, which were unaffected by  Jordan's illegal occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1948 and its role as an aggressor in 1967. This position was also supported by leading international legal authorities at the time. For example, Stephen Shwebel, former U.S. State Department legal adviser who would become president of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, wrote in 1970, "When the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state that subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense, has against that prior holder, better title." Shwebel would add, "Israel has the better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem, [emphasis added] than do Jordan and Egypt." See Prof. Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, "What Weight to Conquest?" in Justice in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).  

³⁹ Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World (New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 14-15. 

⁴⁰ Address by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to the Israeli Knesset, December 5, 1949, in Meron Medzini, ed., Israel's Foreign Relations: Selected Documents 1947-1974 (Jerusalem: Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 1976), pp. 223-224.

⁴¹ Address by Ambassador Abba Eban to the UN Trusteeship Council, February 20, 1950, in ibid., pp. 227-236.

⁴² Address by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at the Madrid Peace Conference, October 31, 1991. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/
1988-1992/24320Address%20by%20Prime%20Minister%20Shamir%20at%20the%20. Shamir asserted at the opening session:

We are the only people who have lived in the Land of Israel without interruption for nearly 4,000 years; we are the only people, except for a short Crusader kingdom, who have had an independent sovereignty in this land; we are the only people for whom Jerusalem has been a capital; we are the only people whose sacred places are only in the Land of Israel. No nation has expressed its bond with its land with as much intensity and consistency as we have. For millennia our people repeated at every occasion the cry of the psalmist: "If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." For millennia we have encouraged each other with the greeting "Next year in Jerusalem." For millennia, our prayers, literature and folklore have expressed powerful longing to return to our land. Only Eretz-Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is our true homeland. Any other country, no matter how hospitable, is still a diaspora, a temporary station on the way home.

Former Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General Eytan Bentsur, one of the Madrid conference's primary architects, told the author in a conversation on June 9, 2007, that Madrid's conceptual backbone was that both Israel and Arab countries were guaranteed the freedom to advance their respective claims in their opening statements without preconditions. Bentsur also noted that Madrid's approach contrasts with the concessions-based approach taken by Israeli policymakers and diplomats today that the "price of peace talks with Syria or the Palestinians is known from the outset." For example, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh said on June 4, 2007, that there is no way to achieve a peace agreement with the Palestinians unless Israel agrees to a near-complete withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, lines and offers the Palestinians additional land swaps to make up for any lands Israel retains east of those lines. See speech by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh at the conference on "40 Years of UNSC Resolution 242," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Jerusalem, June 4, 2007.

⁴³ Diker, "Why Are Israel's Public Relations So Poor?" p. 7.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Kofi Annan, "Last Speech on the Middle East to the Security Council," New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19877. On other occasions Annan labeled Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza an "illegal occupation" of Palestinian lands, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2002/sgsm8160.doc.htm.

⁴⁶ Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO: A Historical Approach," Commentary, January 1975, pp. 32-48. See also Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 164.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ See Dore Gold, Jerusalem in International Diplomacy (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2001), p. 23. See also Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations, p. 408.

⁴⁹ Netanyahu, ibid., p. 22.

⁵⁰ Eli Hertz, "Mandate for Palestine": The Legal Aspects of Jewish Rights (New York: Myths and Facts, Inc., 2007), p. 13.

⁵¹.International status of South-West Africa, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Rep. 1950, p. 128; South-West Africa Voting Procedure, Advisory Opinion of June 7th, 1955: I.C.J. Rep. 1955, p. 67; South West Africa Cases (Ethiopia v. South Africa; Liberia v. South Africa), Preliminary Objections, Judgment of 21 December 1962: I.C.J. Rep. 1962, p. 319; Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970), Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Rep. 1971, p. 16.

 

Dan Diker is Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs (ICA) and foreign policy analyst of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He also serves as guest Middle East affairs analyst for the Israel Broadcasting Authority's English News. The author thanks

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Prof. Avraham Bell, Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University, for his assistance.

…/…

A low and dishonest decade.

 

by Caroline Glick  

Upon returning from Cairo on Tuesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu proclaimed, "It's time to move the peace process forward."

The most sympathetic interpretation of Netanyahu's proclamation is that he was engaging in political theater. It was a low and dishonest statement uttered at the end of what has been, in the immortal words of W.H. Auden, "a low and dishonest decade."

Everyone with eyes in their heads knows that there is no chance of making peace with the Palestinians. First of all, the most Israel is willing to give is less than what the Palestinians are willing to accept.

But beyond that, Gaza is controlled by Hamas, and Hamas is controlled by Iran.

For its part, Fatah is not in a position to make peace even if its leaders wished to. Mahmoud Abbas and his deputies know that just as Hamas won the 2006 elections in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Hamas would win elections today. To maintain even a smudge of domestic legitimacy, Fatah's leaders have no choice but to adopt Hamas's rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.

Clearly, now is not the time "to move the peace process forward."

No less than what it tells us about Netanyahu, his statement is notable for what it tells us about Israel. Our continued willingness to ensnare ourselves in the rhetoric of peace processes demonstrates how little we have progressed in the past decade.

In 1999, Netanyahu was ejected from office by an electorate convinced that he was squandering an historic opportunity for peace between Israel and its neighbors. A majority of Israelis believed that Netanyahu's signature policies of demanding that the Palestinians abide by their commitments to Israel, and maintaining the IDF's security zone in south Lebanon were dooming all hope for peace.

His successor, Ehud Barak, promised to remove IDF troops from Lebanon and forge a final peace with the Palestinians and with Syria within a year. After winning the election, Barak famously promised a swooning crowd at Rabin Square that the "dawn of a new day has arrived."

Barak lost no time fulfilling his campaign promises. He withdrew the IDF from south Lebanon in May 2000.

He launched talks with Syria in December 1999. For four months he begged Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to accept the Golan Heights, stopping only after Assad harshly rebuffed him in March 2000.

And in July 2000 at Camp David, Barak offered Yasser Arafat Gaza, 90 percent of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem in exchange for peace. After Arafat rejected his offer, Barak sweetened it at Taba in September 2000, adding another 5% of Judea and Samaria, the Temple Mount, and extra lands in the Negev, only to be rejected, again.

Barak made these offers as the wisdom of appeasement exploded before his eyes. Hizbullah seized the withdrawal from Lebanon as a strategic victory. Far from disappearing as Barak and his deputy Yossi Beilin had promised it would, Hizbullah took over south Lebanon and used the area as a springboard for its eventual takeover of the Lebanese government. So, too, with its forces perched on the border, Hizbullah built up its Iranian-commanded forces, preparing for the next round of war.

Similarly, Barak's desperate entreaties to Assad enhanced the dictator's standing in the Arab world, to the detriment of Egypt and Jordan.

To the extent he required encouragement, the ascendance of Hizbullah, Syria and Iran made it politically advantageous for Arafat to reject peace. Buoyed by their rise, Arafat diverted billions of dollars in Western aid from development projects to the swelling ranks of his terror armies. Instead of preparing his people for peace, he trained them for war.

Arafat responded to Barak's beggary at Camp David and Taba by launching the largest terror offensive Israel experienced since the 1950s. The Palestinians' orgiastic celebration of the mass murder of Israelis was the final nail in Barak's premiership, and it seemed at the time, the death-knell of his policies of appeasement.

A year and a half after he took office, the public threw Barak from power. Likud leader Ariel Sharon - who just a decade earlier had been taken for dead - was swept into power with an electoral landslide. To the extent the public vote was for Sharon, rather than against Barak, the expectation was that Sharon would end Barak's appeasement policies and defeat Arafat and the terror state he had built in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

But this was not to be.

Rather than abandon Barak's policies, Sharon embraced them. He formed a unity government with Labor and refused to fight. He didn't fight after 22 teenagers were massacred outside the Dolphinarium nightclub in June 2001. He did not fight after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the Palestinian celebrations of the slaughter in New York and Washington.

Sharon did not order the IDF to fight until the carnage of March 2002 that culminated in the Seder massacre at Netanya's Park Hotel forced his hand. Had he not ordered the IDF to dismantle the Palestinian terror infrastructures in Judea and Samaria at that time, he faced the sure prospect of being routed in the Likud leadership race scheduled for November of that year.

Operation Defensive Shield was a textbook example of what you get when you mix weak politicians with a strong society. On the one hand, during Defensive Shield, the IDF took control of all the major towns and cities in Judea and Samaria and so enabled Israel to dismantle Palestinian terror networks by remaining in place in the years that followed.

On the other hand, Sharon refused to allow the IDF to launch a parallel operation in Gaza, despite repeated entreaties by the army and residents of the South. Most important, Sharon barred the IDF from toppling the PA or even acknowledging that it was an enemy government. And he maintained that the Palestinian jihad began and ended with Arafat, thus absolving all of Arafat's deputies - who were then and today remain deeply involved in the terror machine - of all responsibility.

In acting as he did, Sharon's signaled that he was not abandoning appeasement. Indeed, he made clear that his aim was to re-embrace appeasement as his national strategy as soon as it was politically feasible.

Most Israelis explained away Sharon's behavior in his first term as the price he was forced to pay for his coalition government with Labor. So when in 2003 Sharon, Likud and the political Right won an overwhelming mandate from the public to lead the country without the Left, the expectation was that he would finally let loose. He would finally fight for victory.

Instead, Sharon spat on his party, his coalition partners and his voters and adopted as his own the policies of the Left that he had condemned in his campaign.

To implement those policies, Sharon dismantled his government and his party and formed a coalition with the same Left the nation had just overwhelmingly rejected.

The past decade's major policies: the withdrawal from Gaza, the construction of the security fence, the acceptance of the road map peace plan, the Annapolis Conference, Operation Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead all shared one central feature. They were all predicated on ignoring the lessons of the failure of appeasement in 2000.

Whereas Defensive Shield's strategic success was owed to Israel's decision to maintain control over the territory the IDF seized in the fighting, in launching the wars with Hizbullah and Hamas, Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, ignored that success and chose instead to emulate the operation's failures.

To further his government's appeasement policies, Olmert refused to order the IDF to seize south Lebanon or Gaza. By the same token, like Sharon in Defensive Shield, Olmert announced at the outset that he had no interest in defeating Israel's enemies. He limited the goals of the campaigns to "teaching them a lesson." And of course by not seeking victory for Israel, Olmert enabled both Hizbullah and Hamas to claim victory for themselves.

By opting not to defeat Hizbullah or Hamas, Olmert communicated the message that like Sharon before him, his ultimate strategic aim was to maintain the political viability of appeasement as a national strategy. He was fighting to protect appeasement, not Israel.

As we move into the second decade of this century, we need to understand how the last decade was so squandered. How is it possible that in 2010 Israel continues to embrace policies that have failed it - violently and continuously for so many years? Why, in 2010 are we still ignoring the lessons of 2000 and all that we have learned since then?

There are two main causes for this failure: The local media and Sharon. Throughout the 1990s, the Israeli media - print, radio and television - were the chief propagandists for appeasement. When appeasement failed in 2000, Israel's media elites circled the wagons. They refused to admit they had been wrong.

Misleading phrases like "cycle of violence" were introduced into our newspeak. The absence of a security fence - rather than the presence of an enemy society on the outskirts of Israel's population centers - was blamed for the terror that claimed the lives of over a thousand Israelis. Palestinian propagandists and terrorists such as Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti were treated like legitimate politicians. Palestinian ties to Iran, Syria, Iraq and the nexus of global jihad went unmentioned or uncommented upon.

At the same time, opponents of appeasement - those who had warned of the dangers of the Oslo process and had spoken out against the withdrawal from Lebanon and a potential withdrawal from the Golan Height and Gaza - were not congratulated for their wisdom. They remained marginalized and demonized.

This situation prevails still today. The same media that brought us these catastrophes now derides Likud ministers and Knesset members who speak out against delusion-based policies, while suddenly embracing Netanyahu who - with Barak at his side - has belatedly embraced their pipe dreams of appeasement-based peace.

Then there is Sharon. The man who built the settlements, who removed the PLO from Lebanon, who opposed Oslo, Camp David and the withdrawal from Lebanon; the man who opposed the security fence and pledged to remain forever in Gush Katif. As Israel's leader for most of the past decade, more than anyone else Sharon is responsible for Israel's continued adherence to the dishonest, discredited and dishonorable dictates of appeasement.

Whether due to his alleged corruption, his physical enfeeblement, his fear of the State Department, or his long-held and ardent desire to be accepted by the Left, Sharon betrayed his voters and his party and he undermined Israel's ability to move beyond failure.

Auden's "low and dishonest decade" was the 1930s. It was the West's obsession then with appeasement that set the world on course for the cataclysm of World War II.

As Israel enters the new decade, we must redouble our efforts to forestall a repeat of the cataclysm of the 1940s. Disturbingly, Netanyahu's call for a fraudulent peace process shows that we are off to an ignoble, untruthful start.

 

Caroline Glick  

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother.

 

by Cathal Kelly

 

While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

 

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

 

"It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

 

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."

 

That, in a nutshell is "Israelification" - a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

 

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

 

"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.

 

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

 

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

 

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

 

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"

 

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

 

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

 

"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.

 

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

 

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

 

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

 

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

 

"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'

 

"Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let's say I'm (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let's say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, 'Two days.'"

 

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

 

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

 

Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

 

"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.

 

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

 

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

 

"First, it's fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

 

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

 

This doesn't begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

 

"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."

 

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport's behavioural profilers.

 

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

 

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

 

"We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."

 

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.

 

"Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

 

"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."

 

 

Cathal Kelly

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.