The End of the "Guilty Israeli" - Yossi Klein Halevi
We Israelis who once wanted nothing more than to leave Gaza forever now realize that we may have no choice but to return, at least until relative quiet is restored to our border. In the early 1990s, while serving as a reservist soldier in Gaza, I became a guilty Israeli. My unit patrolled the refugee camps where sewage flowed in rivulets and old men stared with hatred and children with despair. We found ourselves enforcing an occupation whose threat to Israel's Jewish and democratic values had become unbearable. The first intifada created a substantial bloc of guilt-ridden Israelis ready to take almost any risk for peace. As the Oslo peace process came into being, the guilty Israeli became the most potent source of Palestinian empowerment.
    Israelis felt so desperate to end the occupation that they withdrew their army and uprooted their settlements from Gaza in 2006. Gazans elected a government led by Hamas, whose theology calls for the destruction of Israel and war against Jews around the world, and whose terror attacks are small pre-enactments of its genocidal ambitions. Palestinian rocket attacks that had previously been aimed at settlements were simply redirected toward towns and villages within Israel. The result is that today the guilty Israeli has become nearly extinct. Gaza was a test case for Israeli withdrawal, and the experiment was a disaster. How, Israelis wonder, can we evacuate the West Bank and risk rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?
    So we move toward the next terrible round of conflict. This time, though, for all our anguish, we will feel a lot less remorse. Because even guilty Israelis realize that, until our neighbors care more about building their state than undermining ours, the misery of Gaza will persist. The writer is a senior fellow in the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. (Los Angeles Times)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 29, 2008]

Memo to my left-wing friends: Hold the gloating

By Yossi Klein Halevi, Jerusalem Post, Jun. 19, 2003

With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon endorsing a Palestinian state and even conceding the moral burden of occupation, it's not surprising that some on the Left are now feeling vindicated. After all, it hasn't been an easy three years for those who believed that the Oslo process would bring peace and prosperity. While most Israelis would surely acknowledge that Oslo's architects acted in good faith, most too would probably agree that Oslo was among the most terrible miscalculations in Israel's history.

One well-known journalist and former man of the Left put it to me this way: "With Oslo, we swallowed a snake."

Who, then, can blame Oslo's battered true believers for seizing on Sharon's seeming transformation into Shimon Peres? "So Oslo isn't dead after all," one left-wing friend said to me, gloating.

True, he conceded, leftists had misread Yasser Arafat's "personality" and intentions. And they should have been more attentive to the violations of "both sides." But those were honest mistakes. As for the process itself, Sharon's turnabout proves that it wasn't just necessary but inevitable.

Yet there was nothing inevitable about Oslo. And the tragedy of Oslo wasn't merely tactical, but inherent in its very conception.

Oslo was based on a fundamental misreading of the Arab world's, and especially the Palestinians', readiness to live with a Jewish state. That wishful thinking led to the empowerment of an unchanged PLO, negating the decades-old Israeli policy of not negotiating with terrorists. And Oslo rehabilitated the PLO at precisely the moment it was about to self-destruct, having become bankrupt and discredited, even in the Arab world, for supporting Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.

Oslo apologists counter that if Israel hadn't made a deal with the PLO, we would have been left to deal with Hamas. No one knows what might have happened had we allowed the PLO to die a natural death; whether Hamas would have emerged uncontested or whether a more realistic local Palestinian leadership might have tried to make a deal. But we do know that Oslo bequeathed to Israel the worst of all possible outcomes: a terrorist state-in-the-making with international legitimacy.

Rather than allow the PLO to collapse, Oslo mortgaged the peace process to Arafat and the leadership of the Palestinian diaspora. By imposing the Palestinians of 1948 on the Palestinians of 1967, Oslo became hostage to those least capable of compromising on the "right of return."

Oslo's greatest irony is that it entrusted the education of a generation of Palestinians to Arafat, thereby ensuring that the Palestinian people would be far less prepared for reconciliation than it was before the process began. Young Palestinians in the Oslo era were educated to see Israel as illegitimate, Jews as demonic, and genocidal terrorism as a choice career option. To call that "incitement" is to understate the crime.

Just recently Arafat told a group of Palestinian youth who'd cone to see him on "Children's Day" that martyrdom was their highest national and religious calling. Only in Palestine does the nation's leader celebrate Children's Day by telling children to kill themselves.

Arguably Oslo's worst offense was that it taught Israelis to lie to themselves, to censor data that contradicted its premise. Oslo was a big lie built of many little lies. I know: As a supporter of the Oslo process in its first months, I participated in the journalistic self-deception, underplaying the extent of Arafat's duplicity.

FOR ISRAEL, the consequences of Oslo are incalculable. The disaster isn't just measured in the 1,000-plus deaths, the thousands of wounded, the tens of thousands of mourners, the hundreds of thousands of traumatized. Thanks to Oslo, Israel is now surrounded by terrorist entities - in the West Bank, in Gaza and, as a result of Ehud Barak's impetuous withdrawal from Lebanon, on our northern border too.

If Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan deserved blame for the Yom Kippur War, and Sharon for Lebanon, what are we to say about the Labor leaders who brought us Oslo?

True, the blame doesn't belong to Labor alone. Likud leaders encouraged the Left's recklessness - by rejecting the "Jordanian option" and the Peres-Hussein London Agreement in 1987, and by lingering in Lebanon instead of quickly exiting after the PLO's expulsion from Beirut in 1982. I'll leave to historians the task of measuring the relative culpability of our two ideological blocs.

But the question of Oslo's follies isn't merely of historical interest. As we enter yet another round of negotiations with the Palestinians, it's essential that we learn the consequences of our naivete and not deceive ourselves again.

That means, for example, not downplaying Mahmoud Abbas's commitment to the "right of return." And recognizing that the most we can hope for, as Sharon insists, is an interim rather than a comprehensive agreement.

Since the terrorist war began in September 2000, I've been collecting newspaper articles of "confessions" by left-wingers. There is an interview with Yankeleh Rotblit, composer of the anthem "Song to Peace," admitting that the Left lied to itself and to Israel. There's an interview with veteran Mapam leader Chaim Shur, one of the first Israelis to meet with PLO leaders, who now realizes that his PLO "friends" lied to him for decades.

Those confessions are essential testimonies of courage - proof that truth can overcome ideology and wishful thinking.

By contrast, the true believers who refuse to concede the historic failure of the peace camp and continue to blame Israel, even partly, for the current war have done enormous damage not only to their own credibility but to Israel's. By accepting the Palestinian argument that Barak's offer at Camp David wasn't really serious, Israel's left-wing ideologues have reinforced Palestinian rejectionism and allowed Israel's previously inconceivable concessions to be treated as irrelevant by the international community.

But what about Sharon? Hasn't he validated Oslo?

The other week I covered the Likud's central committee meeting in Jerusalem, where outraged Likudniks heckled the prime minister while others sang, "Arik, King of Israel." I watched Sharon as he read his prepared speech reiterating the need for "painful concessions," oblivious to the jeers and cheers that have accompanied his entire career.

What, I wondered, was he thinking?

Perhaps something like this: For the past 50 years I've been trying to bail out the people of Israel. Sometimes I got carried away, and you never forgave me for my excesses. But whenever you got into really serious trouble - whether overwhelmed by terrorism in the 1950s or by invading armies in 1973 - I'm the one you called on to save you. Now, in my old age, you've turned to me to rescue you from the worst mess you've ever gotten yourselves into, a disaster I warned you for decades to avoid.

I'm trying my best, but this time you've really done it. There's only so much room you've left me to maneuver in. And no one in my place would do any better.

And so, one last tragedy of Oslo: that even Ariel Sharon can't save us from its curse.

The writer is Israel correspondent of The New Republic and author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.

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By the way, "The Idea that the parties were on the verge of a deal at Taba is fantasy."

See also: Israel's Security: The Hard-Learned Lessons, by Yaakov Amidror, Winter 2004, The Middle East Quarterly:

All observers were stunned by the rapid collapse of the security arrangements that were at the heart of the Oslo concept. How could the negotiators of the various Oslo-era accords create a situation that permitted the Palestinians to prepare for terror-based war while limiting and even restricting Israel's options to respond? How could a generation of experienced, professional, security specialists—many of them battle-hardened veterans—fail to take into account the possibility that Oslo could be exploited by the Palestinians as a platform for war, not a basis for peace?

Answering this question is not merely an interesting historical exercise. Many well-meaning and peace-loving people—such as those involved in the Geneva track-two effort to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian permanent status agreement—base their future peacemaking assumptions on the tentative security arrangement allegedly agreed upon in the summer of 2000, prior to the outbreak of war.  Read the rest here.

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The meaning of 'painful concessions'

Yossi Klein Halevi, Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2003

Like most journalists, I routinely use the words "West Bank" - or preferably, the more neutral "territories" - to refer to Judea and Samaria. And "settlements" to refer to its Jewish villages and towns. And "land for peace" to refer to the formula that suggests that mass Jewish dislocation can somehow heal this conflict.

I use that language, in part, to shield myself from the traumatic implications of an eventual withdrawal, which I, like most centrist Israelis, reluctantly support. The reasons for that support seem to me self-evident - the demographic threat to a Jewish state, the moral consequences of endless occupation, the need to separate from the Palestinians and define a defensible border, the need to extricate ourselves from an increasingly pathological relationship with the international community.

Most Israelis have decided that withdrawal is both necessary and inevitable. And the man who built the settlements, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, now agrees with them.

Still, as we approach our moment of decision, the language of euphemism with which we speak about withdrawal feels increasingly untenable. As a people, we need to courageously confront the consequences of uprooting - what Sharon calls, with rare understatement, "painful concessions." We need an advance account of the enormity of that pain, not in order to dissuade ourselves from accepting the brutal decree of history, but to do so without illusions. The failure of the Oslo process hasn't released us from the necessity of withdrawal, but it does demand an end to self-deception. And a key element of that self-deception has been our unwillingness to concede the human, social, and historical consequences of withdrawal.

The deception begins with the sterile phrase, "land for peace." "Land" implies a pristine landscape, devoid of human presence. In fact, the formulation means a destruction of worlds - neighborhoods and homes, schools and synagogues, hangouts and hitchhiking stations. It isn't "land" and it probably won't be "peace" - at least not a peace that means recognition of our right to exist and respect for the inviolability of our borders.

The human toll that will result from the destruction of organic communities is incalculable. After the Sinai town of Yamit was destroyed in 1982, many never recovered; for some, the result was depression and divorce. At its peak, Yamit contained perhaps 5,000 residents. Increase Yamit by tens of thousands and you can begin to imagine the implications for Israeli society that will result from a similar uprooting - the real word is "transfer" - in Judea and Samaria.

And Yamit was barely a decade old when it was destroyed. By contrast, some communities in Judea and Samaria are well into their third decade. Unlike Yamit, a native generation has grown up in Judea and Samaria for whom Israel lies across the green line. And a third generation is now being formed there. Think of that next time you read a newspaper account that refers to children killed or wounded in a terrorist attack in Judea and Samaria as "settlers." Beyond the personal is the national trauma. The towns and villages of Judea and Samaria are the legacy and symbol of this generation of religious Zionists. The destruction of dozens of communities that form the emotional core of religious Zionism will be a blow from which it may not fully recover.

The implications for the state are profound. The religious Zionists, after all, aren't a marginal community but the last collective repository of idealistic Zionism. For a state under siege, their invigorating presence has been essential.

Young religious Zionists have replaced secular kibbutzniks as the army's elite, increasingly filling combat units and the officers' corps. Go to any settlement on a Shabbat morning and you'll see dozens of young men gathered outside the synagogue, soldiers on leave from elite units exchanging army stories while their younger brothers eavesdrop with envy and silently plan their own military careers.

Will religious Zionism continue to provide the army with its most passionate soldiers, after its most beloved communities are destroyed and its young people feel betrayed by the state? In religious terms, the uprooting will inevitably be referred to as a "hurban." That Hebrew word for destruction refers to the two ancient exiles from this land. True, withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will only be a partial hurban; one assumes the Jewish state will survive the blow. But in one sense the exile from Judea and Samaria could be more devastating than its two predecessors, because this time, the hurban will be self-imposed.

When one part of the nation accuses another part of being responsible for its hurban, the most minimal sense of collective identity will be threatened, perhaps for generations to come.

One of the great mistakes of the Israeli Left has been to minimize Israel's claim to Judea and Samaria. The impulse was understandable: The Left downplayed the historic and emotional attachments to the land to resist the annexationist appeal. Yet it confused the need for physical withdrawal with an unnecessary emotional withdrawal.

The Left's denial of our historic claim - and its downplaying of the price we will pay for uprooting - has allowed the international community to see an Israeli withdrawal not as a concession at all but as the self-evident restoration of occupied land, the thief returning his booty.

By contrast, the Palestinians never fail to remind the world that they are being forced to abandon their claim to pre-1967 Israel.

The logic of partition is based on the fact that two peoples claim the same territory. But if one people stakes its emotional claim to the entire land, as the Palestinians continue to do, while the rival people confines its claim to only part of the contested land, then the moral basis for partition is compromised.

Precisely those who support partition should be vigorously reminding the world of the Jewish claim to Judea and Samaria and the trauma we will be imposing on ourselves by forfeiting that claim. Otherwise, we risk a repetition of what happened after the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, when much of the international community dismissed Israel's willingness to withdraw as inconsequential.

If political and demographic conditions make withdrawal necessary, that doesn't lessen the legitimacy of our connection to Hebron and Bethlehem, just as the Palestinians never forget their links to Jaffa and Haifa. The settlers were right to stake our claim - just as the peace camp was right to insist on justice and reconciliation as the highest national priorities. Both the settlement movement and the peace movement were legitimate, indeed essential, expressions of Jewish history. The fact that neither could fulfill its vision doesn't detract from the nobility of the effort.

In voluntarily severing ourselves from our historic heartland, we will be doing what no nation has ever done to itself.

That hurban gives us the right to demand of the Palestinians and the Arab world an equivalent hurban of their deepest claims and grievances, especially the "right of return" to pre-1967 Israel.

Failure to convey the full extent of the price we will pay for withdrawal will result in the world continuing to indulge Palestinian intransigence, while taking for granted our self-inflicted mutilation.

The writer is the Israel correspondent for the New Republic and author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.

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Israel rightly builds fence to save its citizens' lives

By Aron U. Raskas, The Baltimore Sun, November 11, 2003

LIFE IN the suburbs can be difficult. Nice neighborhoods often find themselves abutting busy expressways. Noise pollution and gas fumes disturb day-to-day life. Serene communities become prey to criminal intruders.

Fortunately, society finds solutions to these problems. Governments appropriate land to build walls alongside highways to shield nearby homes. Communities put themselves behind gates to stave off criminal elements. In the American Southwest, the government has erected hundreds of miles of fence, patrolled regularly by federal agents, in an effort to prevent infiltrators from committing unlawful acts in this country.

Nobody challenges their right to do these things.

The need for such walls and barriers is readily understood, accepted and sanctioned by governments and citizens alike, wherever they are built. Everywhere, it seems, except when a fence is built in Israel to protect Israeli citizens.

For Israelis, pollution, stolen bicycles and broken car windows are the least of their worries. Their real and ever-present fears are that terrorists will burst into their bedrooms and spray their children with machine-gun fire, that a suicide bomber will set off explosives in a restaurant they are patronizing, or that a sniper will line them up in his scope as they drive to work and pick them off from a nearby Arab town. That is why Israelis build fences.

Since September 2000, about 6,000 Israelis have been brutally maimed or injured in terrorist attacks. Nearly 900 Israelis have been killed by Palestinian snipers and suicide bombers. This means that more than one in every 10,000 Israeli civilians has been killed in a terrorist act. Small wonder, then, that in a recent poll, 75 percent of Israelis stated a belief that they or a family member would become a victim of terrorism.

Clearly no nation would tolerate such atrocities in its midst. It is therefore obscene for any nation to complain when Israel - after exhausting every other rational solution - constructs a fence alongside its highways and communities to shield its citizens from the terror and mayhem that have caused more bloodshed, tragedy and grief than any other society would care to imagine.

Americans, safely ensconced on two fronts by the world's largest oceans and bordered on the other two sides by friendly democracies, find it necessary and acceptable to take extraordinary military measures to fight terrorist regimes half a world away. For Israelis, those regimes are on the other side of the road.

About 70 percent of Israel's population and 80 percent of its industrial base are situated in the coastal plain that abuts the West Bank. Time and again, Palestinians have slipped across this expanse to wreak mayhem in Israeli towns. Too many times, Israelis driving home or to work have been shot by snipers standing in Palestinian villages. None of this is difficult to understand: Those towns are often just hundreds of feet from Israeli roads and population centers.

Imagine driving down the Jones Falls Expressway and the Pepsi sign has been replaced by one for Hamas. Or living in Towson with the Taliban on the other side of Interstate 695. That's precisely what Israelis face each and every day.

Israel's fence creates a barrier that will prevent murderous infiltrators from reaching Israel to inflict death and destruction. Indeed, there is precedent for this. Since Israel erected a similar fence in Gaza in 1994, no terrorist has succeeded in penetrating Israel from the Gaza Strip to execute a terror attack.

For a limited stretch, the fence turns into a wall. It parallels Israel's newest highway, a modern toll road running through the heart of the Jewish state. As I drove down that road last week, I could readily read the signs and see the flags in the neighboring Palestinian villages. It is fearful to imagine just how readily the terrorist snipers had been able to view their victims before the wall created a barrier of life.

The fence has been constructed in the disputed territories to protect Israelis who live there as well. The fence is not a political border; that will be set through negotiations. Until then, the fence will protect Jewish lives.

The Israeli government complied with its legal obligations in appropriating the land necessary for the fence, just as any local municipality would do in exercising its powers of eminent domain. It offered compensation to Palestinians whose land has been affected by the fence and has taken all steps possible to minimize disruption to Palestinian life.

No democracy has a perfect solution to terrorism. Yet Israel's fence is a measured, restrained and appropriate defensive response to this unremitting scourge. It is to be admired, not condemned.

Aron U. Raskas, a Baltimore attorney, is a member of the Public Policy Committee of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

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Who's building the fence?

Jerusalem Post Editorial, June 30, 2003

The surprise Israeli-US controversy during National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's visit to the region was over the security fence.

President George W. Bush's close adviser asked us to stop building it, because even if it is not meant to be a political border, it looks like one.

Rice's admonition came after she received an earful on this issue from the Palestinian side. Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas reportedly claimed that the fence was a way to create "facts on the ground" and that it undermined his authority by breaking up Palestinian areas and disturbing daily life.

Abbas is not the only one who is steamed. In the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, analysts from the Rand Corporation were asked to rate the top ten underattended international problems in the world today. Topping the list was Israel's security fence, which "will profoundly change the geographical and political landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." This alone may sound alarming, but the thinkers at Rand were just getting started.

"The wall could also deepen Palestinian rage and enmity, of course, prompting escalated mortar and ground-to-ground missile attacks against targets inside Israel," they counseled. "The wall could also prompt further attacks on Israelis overseas, like the suicide bombing last November of a Mombasa hotel filled with Israeli tourists and the accompanying attempt to shoot down an Israeli chartered plane."

Let's get this straight. For the last thousand days, Israel is pummeled by a panoply of terrorist groups competing over who can kill the most Jews. After much delay, and much too slowly according to most of the public, Israel finally starts building a fence to protect its entirely open non-border with the West Bank. Now we are told that fence itself will provoke more attacks.

Is this really the logic to which Bush wishes to subscribe? Is he really telling us, like the analysts at Rand, that if we build a fence we have no one but ourselves to blame for all the missiles that will be shot over it and the bombs that will blow up around it? We would be the last to argue that the fence is a panacea. The fence, in fact, is arguably a dangerous concession to the idea that terror must be lived with, rather than wiped out. The United States understands that, for all the billions it is investing in homeland security its own fence the only real security lies in crushing terrorism, not redesigning your country around it.

But whether the fence is a good idea or not for Israel's security should be our decision, not a subject for scolding from the United States.

There is no law that any problem the Palestinians complain about should be dutifully dropped by visiting mediators on our doorstep. Rice, normally a straight-talking and straight-thinking interlocutor, should have told the Palestinians what any fair-minded observer would have automatically responded: You don't like the fence? Produce security for Israel and there will be no need for a fence.

Israel is not building the fence, the Palestinians are. It took thousands of attacks and dozens of dead before Israel began to contemplate building it, and even now it is being built reluctantly. Those who believe that a full peace is possible don't like it, and neither do those who abhor any concession to terrorism. But the voices from the security community who say it will make their job easier have won the day.

The US should not echo this Palestinian complaint for two other reasons.

First, it is not possible to claim to support Israel's right to self defense while opposing targeted killings and the fence. What are Israelis supposed to do, if they cannot actively or passively defend themselves?

Second, when the Palestinian Authority is concerned that the fence might have territorial implications, what they really are saying is that they should not have to pay a territorial price for their terror war. Is this the lesson the US wants to teach? The current diplomatic process is an elaborate attempt to find a workable alternative to the type of decisive victories won over Germany and Japan and, more recently, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is one thing to avoid the unmistakable defeat of an enemy, as is being attempted now.

It is quite another to avoid imposing even a cost for years of one of the more unprovoked, illegal, and barbaric spasms of aggression that the world has seen. If the fence happens to impose a political-diplomatic cost on the Palestinians for the jihad they chose to launch, the US should be explaining to the Palestinians that this is the consequence of their actions, not a problem for Israel to solve.

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