Democracy: The Political Right's Alarming Lack of Alarm

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Right-wingers who tamper with democracies should be careful what they wish for. They might hold positions of power today, but as they undermine the checks and balances that stabilize and restrain, they hand formidable tools to their opponents who might take over tomorrow.

This is poorly understood in both Israel and the United States, two democracies now imperiled by extreme agendas that would weaken longstanding mechanisms designed to protect minority rights and moderate governmental authority.

The political right ought to take note: If Israel’s religio-nationalist government dismantles the separation of powers by emasculating the judiciary, what’s to prevent some centrist or more liberal government from driving unencumbered through the same gaping holes? After all, the right-wing governing coalition has only a four-seat majority in a 120-member parliament.

In the US, similarly, if Republican “conservatives” regain the White House and disempower independent agencies by transferring power to the president, as Trump’s team plans—and if they continue dismantling the non-partisan machinery of elections in swing states they control—what’s to prevent Democrats from doing the same where they hold or gain majorities? When you destroy the careful balances in a pluralistic system, the new structure is available to everyone, not just to you.

A case in point is Donald Trump’s anti-constitutional argument that Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, could have rejected slates of electors from some states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. But if Pence had that power, so would every vice president: Vice President Al Gore could have thrown out Florida’s Bush electors in 2000, where the popular vote was razor close and justifiably contested. And Vice President Kamala Harris could do it in 2024 if she doesn’t like certain states’ results.

Why don’t reporters interviewing avid Trump supporters ever point this out and ask for reactions?

It could be that Trump and his spellbound flock don’t grasp the universality of the powers they seek to acquire. Perhaps they think that only they will benefit by eroding the professional integrity of vote-counting, for example, not imagining that their opponents might use the same tactic. Perhaps they don’t see how a Democratic president could use the immense authority they seek for Trump should he be re-elected. In a society still largely subject to the rule of law, which carries with it a respect for precedent, consistency, and equal protection, systemic changes are just that: systemic. They flow through the entire system, no matter which faction is in charge, now or in the future.

It could also be that Republicans—privately—don’t really think Democrats are nefarious. Maybe right-wing politicians don’t believe what they say about liberals and progressives. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, Republicans recognize that the “radical left” is not so devoid of civic and moral virtue that it would threaten democracy with the tools the Republicans are forging for themselves.

Indeed, that’s the flaw in this doomsday scenario: The Democrats are not the same, at least not now. Gore didn’t throw out Florida’s electors, and neither will Harris. Democratic state legislatures are not rushing to curtail voting rights or politicize vote-counting. There is no moral equivalency between Republicans and Democrats.

But will that be forever? Power is an aphrodisiac. The judicial system is growing more sharply partisan on both sides. Gerrymandering is a time-honored tradition by both parties. Imperious moves to stifle speech come from the left as well as the right. The danger of concentrating authority in too few hands, without sufficient checks, remains as acute today as when James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention: “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”

So it also is in Israel, which has no constitution but a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to set the standards for governmental action. Without a constitutional text, the Supreme Court has overturned some statutes and practices as “unreasonable,” a squishy concept that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has just outlawed. (The Court itself will hear a case requesting that it overturn that new ban on its authority, setting up what Israelis loosely call a “constitutional crisis.”)

In addition, Netanyahu has proposed giving government officials a majority on the commission that appoints judges, and granting the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to overturn any Supreme Court ruling with a simple majority vote. The specter of emasculating the courts—the only check on executive/legislative power—has ignited vast street demonstrations, disinvestment, protests by respected former intelligence and military officers, and refusals to serve by numerous military reservists. At least the center and left are alarmed, even if the right is not.

Ironically, Israel’s Supreme Court has moved somewhat to the right as new justices have been appointed during years of conservative government. So, if the judiciary is weakened and the rightist coalition loses its narrow majority in the future, a more centrist or left-tilting government could presumably overturn conservative Supreme Court decisions.

These might include rulings limiting the rights of Arab citizens, for example, or allowing more Jewish West Bank settlements on Palestinians’ land, or permitting gender discrimination by Haridim, the ultra-religious Jews who increasingly demand the separation of men and women in public transportation and elsewhere.

In fact, for many Israelis on both sides of the conflict over the judiciary, the very nature of the country is at stake—whether it remains a secular and pluralistic state or becomes increasingly theocratic, run by extensively by religious law. A centrist or slightly liberal government, empowered to overrule the Supreme Court, could conceivably sweep away judgments that uphold an expanded religious authority in domestic life, open the door to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and other policies favored by the hard right. That is the risk that Netanyahu and his extremist partners run by changing the rules of the game.

Ultimately, citizens in both Israel and the United States will decide the momentous question, which is much larger than the personalities or slogans or temporal policies of the candidates. All democracies contain the built-in mechanism of their own destruction: the popular vote, which can elect those who will slice away the protections, usually little by little, until the citizens wake up one morning to find that their precious freedoms to choose how they are governed have disappeared. In a well-informed citizenry, the alarm sounds long before, across the entire political spectrum.

The Mixed Human Rights Record of Israel's Judiciary

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The right-wing Israeli government’s plan to eviscerate the powers of the country’s courts has generated massive demonstrations in the streets, worries by foreign investors, and boycotts of military service by hundreds of reservists in elite special forces and air force units. But the “independent judiciary” the protesters are defending does not have a sterling record on civil rights, especially those of Palestinian Arabs.

                The Supreme Court has refused to rule against the government’s inflammatory strategy of settling Jews in the occupied West Bank, a practice barred by the Fourth Geneva Convention. It has generally permitted the army to demolish the family homes of Arabs accused of terrorism, a form of collective punishment that the Geneva Convention also forbids. (Demolition is never used against Jews charged with terrorism against Arabs.) Inside Israel, the court has upheld a form of segregation by allowing rural villages and kibbutzim to reject would-be residents for “incompatibility with the social-cultural fabric of the town.”

The justices have only tinkered around the edges of the government’s tough practices. They have occasionally ordered a small Jewish settlement dismantled for taking Palestinian land. For similar reasons, they have required minor changes in the route of Israel’s security wall built on the border of the West Bank. They have ruled against demolishing a house where the accused did not actually live, and where a family tried to prevent the terrorist act. But the justices have typically avoided sweeping judgments on major policies affecting Palestinians’ rights, deferring to security concerns and gradually reducing the influence of international law.

                “Over the years,” says B’Tselem, an Israeli civil liberties organization, “the Supreme Court has permitted nearly every kind of human rights violation that Israel has committed in the Occupied Territories.”

Why, then, is the extreme political right so intent on emasculating the judiciary? First, the Supreme Court has gone the other way in a few important areas. It struck down a law exempting the state from liability for damaging civilian property during security operations in the West Bank. It limited the length of time that “infiltrators,” namely illegal immigrants from Africa, could be held in a desert prison camp that was designed as a deterrent to further arrivals.

And, most politically charged, the court overturned, as discriminatory, the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from the military service that all other Israeli men and women must perform. (Although, with ultra-Orthodox parties giving governing coalitions their parliamentary majorities, governments have repeatedly obtained the court’s permission to extend the exemption.)

                Second, if Israel annexes the West Bank as many on the political right desire, the military’s authority there would presumably end, along with the military courts that have tried Palestinians on both security and criminal charges since the territory was captured in the 1967 war. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would grant Palestinian residents access to the same rights in the same criminal justice system as Israelis. That would not be welcomed by the virulent anti-Arab members of the current government.

                Last but certainly not least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to stay out of prison if his endless trial on corruption charges, which began in May 2020, ever ends with a conviction. An independent judicial system is such an inconvenience to authoritarian-minded leaders, as former president Donald Trump might soon discover.   

Nevertheless, Israel’s Supreme Court seems less of a threat to some of the right-wing agenda than the protests in its favor might suggest. It has grown more restrained and more conservative in recent decades, especially since the retirement in 2006 of its president, Aharon Barak, a jurist revered both in Israel and abroad for his capacity to apply human rights to the exigencies of security interests.

In 2011, for example, the court essentially reversed a 1983 judgment by Barak against ten Israeli-owned quarries that were extracting building materials from the occupied West Bank. Citing the Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, Barak’s court had ruled, “An area held under belligerent occupation is not an open field for economic exploitation.” He reaffirmed the judgment in 2004. But in 2011, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch found that the long period of occupation “requires the laws be conformed to meet reality on the ground,” which she said included “the right to utilize natural resources in a reasonable manner.”

  In retirement, former Justice Barak recently called the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan “a string of poison pills” that would be “the beginning of the end of the Third House,” meaning the third historical period of Jewish sovereignty after the eras of the ancient First and Second Temples.

Barak’s warning was airily dismissed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who declared that the former Supreme Court president “does not understand the essence of democracy,” endangered, in Levin’s view, because “all power rests with the judges, and they decide what’s proportionate and reasonable. That’s not democratic.”

But it is the Justice Minister who does not understand the essence of democracy, which relies on the separation of powers, a cardinal principle recognized by the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets. Israel’s Supreme Court is the only institution standing in the way of unfettered political diktat. With a parliamentary system whose majority always controls the executive branch, no other check or balance exists.

The country has no constitution; a failed constitutional assembly after Israel’s creation in 1948 led to the enactment by the Knesset, the parliament, of what’s called Basic Law, a dozen principles on “human dignity and liberty” derived from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Basic Law figures in the Supreme Court’s rulings on the “constitutionality” of statutes passed by the Knesset. Yet the court has been cautious, overturning only 22 laws since the power of judicial review was established in 1992, an annual rate lower than the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

It appears that even as the authority to annul laws has been rarely used, its existence has restrained the executive and legislative branches in the past. Not so much today, as the government has shifted to the right, and “elected officials have become less likely to accept legal advice to amend or withdraw bills that are constitutionally problematic,” according to Yuval Shany and Guy Lurie of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Ironically, given all the protests, the Supreme Court has suffered a decline in public trust, from 80 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2010 to 41 percent in 2021. “While the words ‘there are judges in Jerusalem’ used to put an end to public debate, today they provoke it,” wrote Yedidia Z. Stern, former dean of the law faculty at Bar-Ilan University, back in 2010. Dissatisfaction reigns on both the right and the left of the political and religious spectrums.

Yet for the sake of democracy, large numbers of Israelis seem to realize, the center has to hold. If Netanyahu and his justice minister looked around the world or into history, they would see how every dictatorship subverts and expropriates its judiciary. In the Soviet Union, pro-democracy dissidents used to speak of “telephone justice,” delivered by judges who first called Communist Party officials for instructions. In today’s Russia, supine courts mostly do the Kremlin’s bidding. Hungary’s semi-autocrat Victor Orban has emasculated the courts, which are also lapdogs of the regimes in Iran, China, and other authoritarian systems.

                Netanyahu and his extremist, anti-Arab cabinet are ramming through legislation that would require an 80 percent majority on the Supreme Court to invalidate a law, and would empower the Knesset to annul that ruling or any other with just a one-vote majority of legislators. Justices would be appointed mainly by governing politicians in a restructured Judicial Selection Committee, instead of the one currently dominated by nonpartisan judges and lawyers.

                That would set the stage for a kind of elected autocracy, placed in office by the voters but unchecked by the rule of law—or of any law other than the one enacted at the whim of the legislature, the executive, and their hand-picked judges, all three branches flowing into a single stream of authority.

                The sad question is whether Palestinians would notice much difference. Maybe not, since they haven’t had much success anyway, through Israel’s independent courts, fighting discriminatory laws and regulations.

Israel's Failed Strategies

 To watch the PBS documentary, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, click here: https://vimeo.com/550030784 Free of charge.

By David K. Shipler 

                For many decades, Israel has calculated that neighboring Arab counties would think twice before attacking, knowing that a punishing Israeli military reaction would follow. The practice has sometimes worked against nation states. But it has rarely been effective against the non-state actors arising as significant players in the Middle East—among them, as is now obvious, Hamas in Gaza.

                Israel persists nonetheless. “You can either conquer them,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told foreign ambassadors Wednesday, “and that’s always an open possibility, or you can deter them. We are engaged right now in forceful deterrence.”

An early demonstration of the strategy came in 1953 after a band of Arab terrorists stole into Israel from Jordan to attack Israelis. The retribution was conducted by a young Israeli colonel, Ariel Sharon, whose Unit 101, known for ruthlessness, crossed into Jordan and ravaged the border town of Qibya, blowing up 45 houses and killing 69 Arab villagers.

Later, during the War of Attrition in 1969, Israel responded massively to repeated Egyptian attacks on Israeli positions in Sinai by bombarding Egyptian villages along the Suez Canal. Some 55,000 homes were destroyed, 750,000 civilians were forced to flee, and numerous Egyptians were killed and wounded.

 Along certain frontiers, Israel’s strategy of defense by retaliation—even against civilians—brought peace without peace treaties. Decades before its 1994 treaty with Israel, Jordan worked hard to deny Palestinian terrorists the use of its territory. Jordanian troops patrolled their side of the border as assiduously as Israeli monitored its own.

Syria, despite its refusal to make a formal peace, has kept its border with Israel on the Golan Heights mostly quiet and has been slapped hard for infractions. Egypt’s frontier with the occupying Israeli military in Sinai calmed down in the years between the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the two countries’ historic peace treaty in 1979.    

But failed states can’t be leveraged into compliance. Lebanon’s long civil war weakened the reach of the central government, opening a vacuum in its southern territory that was later filled by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO, within artillery range of Israel, had no stake in Lebanon’s stability or security, so no threat of retaliation deterred occasional shelling and terrorist attacks on Israel’s north. The solution—the temporary solution—was an Israeli invasion in 1982, which expelled the PLO, only to see an equally hostile replacement eventually take its place: Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which recently fired several rockets into northern Israel. Israel responded with shelling.

If it seems that the kaleidoscope is just being given another shake, and then another, that’s a fair analysis. Take Gaza, that strip of arid land teeming with impoverished Palestinians. In 2005, after thirty-eight years of military occupation that began with Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, it was Sharon, ironically, who as prime minister decided to withdraw unilaterally with no formal agreement or international guarantees. Because Sharon thought like a soldier, not an ideologue, he assessed the Gaza occupation, in conventional military terms, as more of a burden than an asset. Furthermore, an associate of his once told me that Sharon had begun considering that his historic legacy should include some gesture of peace. History has not been kind to him, however, as it rarely is to anyone in that part of the world.

Under Sharon as Defense Minister, Israel itself contributed to the rise of Hamas. As I recalled in a recent letter to the editor of The New York Times, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, told me in 1981 that he had been given a budget to help fund the Muslim Brotherhood, a precursor of Hamas, as a counterweight to Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements. Odds are that Hamas would have evolved without Israel’s financial contributions. But the funding was consistent with Israel’s strategic blunders in trying to manipulate internal Arab politics in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.

The list of self-inflicted wounds by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders runs too long for less than a book-length piece of writing. To summarize: Each side has radicalized the other. Each side has a marksman’s eye for striking the other’s nerves of fear and indignation. Each side has eroded its own middle ground of reasoned compromise. Each side has empowered the most extreme, violent elements of the other.

Palestinians, deprived of ethical, visionary leadership, have missed opportunities for peacemaking with Israel. They have protested with uprisings and terrorism rather than non-violent passive resistance, by which they probably could have impeded Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank in the 1970s and 80s, when Israel still nurtured moral objections to the occupation. They launch rockets from Gaza indiscriminately to feed the political fortunes of Hamas rulers. And Netanyahu replies with an onslaught to cling to his prime ministerial sanctuary as he is put on trial for corruption. A word more deadly than “cynical” is needed.

Aside from “forceful deterrence,” Israel’s other strategy has focused on converting areas from Arab to Jewish by settling Jews in place of Palestinians. It is happening in East Jerusalem, whose Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was the point of friction that lit the latest conflagration. There, near the supposed tomb of Simon the Just, a Jewish priest in the Second Temple, right-wing Jews have for years been hectoring Palestinians to move out, sometimes combining intimidation with lucrative offers to buy their property. Israel’s Supreme Court is due to rule on a set of evictions based on a claim that Jews actually purchased the land in the nineteenth century.

But the symbolism is as potent as the law, and more compelling than actual census data. The Arab population of the Jerusalem District continues to rise--from 277,000 in 2008 to nearly 372,000 in 2019. Yet for Palestinians, the evictions resonate with the longstanding injuries of displacement—during Israel’s 1948 war of independence, during the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from the attacking Jordanian army, and since then as Jewish communities have mushroomed among the Arab villages of the West Bank.

Sharon used to call those settlements “facts on the ground.” Much of that ground was seized without due process as Israel exploited the absence or vagueness of land titles from Ottoman times. Still, the modern use by Palestinians was clear enough: vineyards, olive groves, and villages’ common pastureland.

What Israel chooses not to notice is this: Every bulldozed grape vine and olive tree is added to the arsenal of memory. Every vigilante act by Jewish settlers against Palestinians is written on a kind of  cultural balance sheet for the sake of future retribution. That is Israel’s second strategic failure.

The third is based on the assumption over decades that Israel proper can be walled off from the surrounding indignities experienced by Arabs in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Yet while many Arab citizens of Israel—now 20 percent of the total population—yearn for belonging and participation in Israeli society, they are not fully embraced and are not insulated from grievance.

Israeli governments—especially Netanyahu’s—have increased aid to Arab villages. Economic conditions have improved, along with more access to higher education. Before the recent outbreak of warfare, an Arab party was poised to enter a coalition government for the first time. Yet also for the first time since the 1948 war, the country has been rocked by communal violence between Arabs and Jews, often thugs who project their violence onto a big screen of religious and historic righteousness.

The intoxication with righteousness drives the strategies, which continue to fail, again and again and again.

Also published by The Washington Monthly.

Will Israel Slam the Door?

By David K. Shipler

                In the 52 years since Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan during the Six-Day War, the prospect of attaining peace by granting some form of self-government to the area’s Palestinian Arabs has hovered over the conflict like an apparition of hope or dread, depending on your political view. Now, that approach to solving the conflict might be closed off by Israel’s tight election results, since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is positioned to form a right-wing coalition.

In the first two decades after the 1967 war, the notion of an independent Palestinian state was so anathema to most Israeli Jews that it was supported only on the far left, mainly by Communists in the tiny Hadash party. Even liberal Peace Now leaders, who opposed Jewish settlements that were being built in the West Bank, avoided advocating Palestinian statehood for fear that their movement would lose credibility in Israel’s mainstream.

Indeed, Israel’s 1978 Camp David accord with Egypt, which led to a peace treaty in 1979, stopped short of calling for a Palestinian state, providing instead for “autonomy,” which was ill-defined and never implemented. Once statehood gained traction in Israeli politics following the 1993 Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, support among Israelis usually oscillated just above and below 50 percent, with occasional spikes during peaceful stretches.

That support itself carried so many caveats that it would have been impossible to convert into statehood without broad changes of attitude among both Israelis and Palestinians. Spates of terrorism by Palestinians knocked off some percentage points, as would be expected, but even in relatively calm periods, Israeli Jews expressed serious doubts about statehood defined as Palestinians might accept, and Palestinians had their own reservations about the compromises they would have to make.

A joint Israeli-Palestinian poll in December 2013, for example, found an abstract two-state solution supported by 63 percent of Israelis and 53 percent of Palestinians. But the numbers declined as details were specified. Israeli withdrawal from all but 3 percent of the West Bank—all Jewish settlements except those in several large blocks—was favored by only 44 percent of Israelis. A Palestine with no army and only a strong police and multinational force appealed to 60 percent of Israelis but just 28 percent of Palestinians. Dividing Jerusalem was accepted by merely 37 and 32 percent of Israelis and Palestinians respectively—each side wanted the city all for itself. And in December 2012, a refugee solution providing for compensation to Palestinian refugees, their right of return to the new Palestinian state, and an undefined number admitted to Israel, won only minority support on both sides—39 percent of Israelis and 49 percent of Palestinians.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

By David K. Shipler

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

Psalm 137:5

            The city of Jerusalem, whose sandstone facades glow ethereally in the slanting light of dawns and dusks, stands on a spine of hills along the lands of milk and of honey. To the east, the land plunging down into the Judean Desert has been traditionally hospitable to milk-producing goat herds. To the west, the fertile coastal plain along the Mediterranean has been sweet with orchards.

            That is the basic biblical geography. At this intersection of semi-nomadic peoples and settled farmers, Jerusalem has been enriched and burdened by ancient affinities and faiths. Its map today is enhanced and scarred by the overlays of history, religion, and nationalism, a treacherous landscape into which President Trump has now stumbled clumsily.

What forces he has unwittingly set loose we do not yet know; predictions in that part of the world are for prophets or fools. But his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State alone, without also recognizing the Palestinians’ yearning for Jerusalem as the capital of their aspirational state, surely diminishes America’s maneuverability.

It’s hard to see what the United States gains from Trump’s move. For the limited profit of catering to his big donors and his narrow base, Trump has tossed away the American coin of neutrality—as tarnished as it was by years of tilting toward Israel’s interests. Not many Palestinians thought of Washington as truly unbiased, since no previous administration did more than use strong words against Israel’s confiscation of territories for Jewish settlement in the mostly Palestinian West Bank and the eastern districts of Jerusalem. No penalty was exacted: no withholding of aid, no reduction of military support. And now Trump has asked nothing from Israel in exchange for his endorsement.

The Miscalculations of Shimon Peres

By David K. Shipler

            Shimon Peres has been lionized since his death this week, but the praise has obscured at least two of his grave errors, which damaged Israel’s options for peace with the Palestinians. One was his early support for Jewish settlements in territories captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war. The other was his unwillingness to call snap elections after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. These two miscalculations, which went unreported in The New York Times obituary, have had lasting effect, and not to the good.

Peres, the last of Israel’s founding fathers, had a long list of accomplishments to his name. He was instrumental in obtaining weapons for Israel before the United States became its chief benefactor, and in getting the materials necessary for the country to develop nuclear weapons. He served in multiple posts, including defense minister, foreign minister, prime minister, and finally president. He philosophized eloquently.

Most important, his aides secretly negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization a loose agreement known as the Oslo accords, which led to the PLO’s and Israel’s mutual recognition and opened a way to peaceful coexistence. Peres, Rabin, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded too hastily as it turned out. Ultimately, the Oslo process was violently derailed by extremists on both sides. Ironically, Peres’s mistakes were partly responsible.

Decades before, by facilitating Jewish settlement in occupied lands, he had inadvertently helped give a foothold to a movement that became a zealous force of religio-nationalism, one that today brooks no compromise with the Palestinians. The movement, whose adherents now occupy cabinet positions in the government, reveres the ancient biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria—known to the rest of the world as the West Bank of the Jordan River—captured from Jordan in 1967 and the logical place for a Palestinian state, were it ever to be created. Jews have a historical right to be there, the religio-nationalists argue. And they are there, with some among them committing daily vandalism and vigilantism against Palestinians.

Cheapening the Holocaust

By David K. Shipler

            As if the Palestinians hadn’t done enough to Israelis, Prime Minister Netanyahu now blames them for the Holocaust by fabricating a tale that Hitler had not planned to exterminate the Jews of Europe until the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, suggested it in 1941. Netanyahu thus lends his office to the sordid practice of manipulating and distorting the Holocaust, a timeworn occupation in the Middle East.

            When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, posters appeared in Jerusalem depicting the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, wearing a tie covered with swastikas, doctored from the backwards swastika pattern on the tie he inexplicably wore when he addressed Israel’s parliament in 1977. Begin was shown as the obsequious Jew with a yellow Star of David on his lapel, the label the Nazis had required. Pedestrians walked past the posters unfazed, accustomed as they were to such smears.

            If Begin ever saw those caricatures, he must have been stung. He himself had survived the Holocaust by fleeing Warsaw for Lithuania, where he was arrested by the Russians, spent a year in Soviet prisons, and was released to join the Polish army. In 1982, I happened to interview him in his office soon after he had been called by President Ronald Reagan, who had likened the carnage during Israeli’s bombardment of West Beirut during the war in Lebanon to “a holocaust.”

            “He hurt me very deeply,” Begin told me, “and I said to him, ‘Mr. President, I know what is a holocaust.’”

The Iran Deal: Israel Wins Twice

By David K. Shipler

The Senate’s failure to block the agreement with Iran may look like a defeat for Israel, whose government lobbied so intensely against it, but in reality Israel is likely to benefit in two ways if the deal is implemented. First, Iran will be impeded in pursuing nuclear weapons. Second, Israel will get more security aid from the United States.

The first point has been ferociously debated, of course. The second, however, is indisputable. The Obama administration was reportedly eager to start talks with Israel about enhanced assistance as the Iran deal was completed. Democratic supporters of the agreement, pressed by AIPAC, the pro-Israel organization, are ready to improve their political standing by by compensating Israel with new weaponry.

An example is Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who declared when he endorsed the Iran deal, “The U.S. should provide Israel with access to the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) to help deter Iranian cheating.” That’s the bunker-busting bomb, which might be able to reach buried, fortified nuclear facilities. It would presumably enable Israel to start a war that the United States would have to finish.

Israel and Iran: The Enemy of My Enemy

By David K. Shipler

            History is a fickle thing, and given Israel’s intransigence toward Iran today, and toward the nuclear deal just negotiated, it’s worth remembering how differently the two countries’ interests lined up thirty-five years ago, even after Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979.

In the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, Israel’s then Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, invited me down to his ranch for a chat. He had a specific purpose, which emerged during our long conversation on a range of subjects. The point he pressed most urgently was the need for the United States to repair its relations with Iran. The country was a major player in the region, he argued, not to be ignored by Washington in the aftermath of the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He believed the Americans should be reaching out to Tehran, cultivating a restoration of ties.

            His view was self-serving, in that Iran was the chief counterweight to Iraq, Israel’s archenemy at the time. Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel, Jordan had a weak military. Syria and Israel were technically still at war but were observing a de facto peace along their common border on the Golan Heights.

But Iraq was a formidable military power in the region, and a threat. It had never endorsed the Arab-Israeli armistice of 1948, was helping finance the Palestine Liberation Organization, and had tried to go nuclear—an effort halted by Israel’s bombing in June 1981 of its nuclear reactor.

So Israeli officials quietly celebrated the grinding Iran-Iraq war as it went on year after year, reasoning that Iran would handicap and preoccupy Iraq and, in the longer term, serve as a balance against aggressive impulses in Baghdad. The enemy of Iraq was, well, if not a friend, at least a convenience. Indeed, Sharon publicly accused the US of arming Iraq with heavy weapons during the war.

The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian State

By David K. Shipler  

No matter who forms the next Israeli government, whether Benjamin Netanyahu or Isaac Herzog, a bet on statehood for the Palestinians is about as good as money in a Ukrainian bond. Netanyahu has said, not on his watch, and Herzog has not said. Palestinian leaders, especially in Hamas, have done nothing to make Israelis feel secure enough to take the gamble. Conditions can always change, of course, but for the foreseeable future, a two-state solution looks dead.

The idea didn’t last long. Thirty years ago, hardly any Israeli Jews supported the creation of a Palestinian state. The only Jewish-led political party to do so was the tiny Communist Party, which garnered only a handful of seats in the Knesset and never joined a governing coalition. Even liberal leaders of Peace Now, the movement that campaigned against Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, would not come out for a Palestinian state back then, for fear that they would be discredited among the rest of the Jewish population.

A sea change in Israelis’ attitudes accompanied the 1993 Oslo Accords, which won the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist and allowed Yasser Arafat and other PLO leaders to come in from exile to set up an interim administration in a patchwork of areas in the West Bank and Gaza. Serious negotiations were launched with the ultimate goal of two states living peacefully side by side.

Public opinion polls showed a sudden jump in the percentage of Israeli Jews supporting Palestinian statehood: to 46.9 percent in 1994, fifteen months after the accords were signed.

Should We Talk to Hamas?

By David K. Shipler

            It’s nice for Egypt’s new government, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, that the United States has handcuffed itself by refusing to deal directly with Hamas. And perhaps it’s just as well, since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has more influence with Hamas than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would. Plus, he gets to play a pivotal role in the eternally exasperating Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lucky him.

            But it’s not so great for American interests that the “terrorist” label, which the U.S. government has imposed on Hamas, carries such a broad set of taboos as to restrict Washington’s flexibility in a crisis.

Hamas employs terrorism, obviously—witness today’s bus bombing in Tel Aviv, the random rocketing of Israeli civilians—but it was also elected to govern Gaza, which Israel voluntarily left to the Palestinian residents in 2005. Denying Hamas the symbol of legitimacy it would gain through contact with American officials may be morally satisfying, but it has about as much impact on reality as the U.S. embargo of Cuba.