Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Narrows



Ben-Gurion repeatedly faced down crises by fearlessly rejecting retreat and useless compromise. Obama would do well to follow his model.

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Q&A: Edward Luttwak

The military strategist talks about Israeli security, Henry Kissinger, the Arab Spring, and the death of Osama Bin Laden

Uncivil

As Israel fought for independence, David Ben-Gurion turned the military’s guns on Jews. In his new biography, Shimon Peres recalls his mentor’s greatest test.
Now an international airport and a university, as well as any number of boulevards in Israeli cities and towns, David Ben-Gurion—the man—was born in Płońsk, the Russian-ruled part of Poland in 1886. When he read Israel’s declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, thereby inaugurating the first government of the first Jewish state in two millennia, he was already 62. In the years since, some 150 new states have been established. Most of these were the gift of colonial powers that handed them over to their new rulers as complete packages with everything ready from internationally recognized borders to a ministry of finance and a prison service. That was true of the post-Soviet states as well, except for the democratic bits, which their rulers mostly ignore anyway.
It was entirely different for Ben-Gurion. The state he led from its birth until 1963, with a fateful gap in 1954 and 1955, had to be created from the ground up, and he had to do much of the creating. The British left abruptly without any organized handover, evacuating their camps and abandoning their offices after taking away all removable equipment. To find clerks and office furniture was nowhere near as hard as finding weapons for an army, air force, and navy—and double-quick because Arab armies were already advancing. Stringent British and U.S. embargoes in the name of peace (with the already equipped Arab armies, including the British-officered Arab Legion left unmentioned) were meant to ensure the expected outcome. But even that near-insurmountable challenge was overcome under Ben-Gurion’s leadership by a variegated cast of unlikely characters that briefly included Josef Stalin (to hurt the British), the irrepressible Hank Greenspun of Las Vegas, the frighteningly smart secret agent Ehud Avriel, a British gentile RAF pilot who could fly any transport any distance, and others worthy of full-scale biographies.
Yet the greatest obstacle to the creation of the Jewish state were the Jews, or rather the Zionist leaders themselves. For all their talents, many were so conditioned by deeply rooted mental habits of dependence that they simply did not understand the absolute imperative of possessing state power. Some, including the religious, could not bring themselves to accept its inevitable military aspect. Guns were for Cossacks, not Jews—an attitude, or mere pose, that long lingered and indeed lingers still in benighted recesses, such as the editorial office of theNew York Review of Books.
As late as the Zionist Congress of 1946, held in Basel in the immediate aftermath of the most terrible demonstration of the ultimate survival risk of statelessness, Ben-Gurion met strong resistance when he pressed for a maximum effort to secure an independent state in Palestine. He was the leading Labor party politician, head of the World Zionist Organization, and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which actually built settlements and funded most Jewish institutions, including the Haganah militia. But in Basel, where everything had to be done democratically, the immensely prestigious Chaim Weizmann, who valued his easy access to the halls of the mighty in Britain as elsewhere, preferred continued British control, even as the British continued to block Jewish immigration into Palestine (nobody was impeding the many Arab migrants). As for the very strong Marxist contingent, newly reinforced by the reflected glory of the victorious Red Army, with its powerful kibbutz movement, and the coolest youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, ennobled by leading the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it wanted an indefinite U.N. mandate over the whole of Palestine to pursue the binationalism that some still long for. Then there were the non-socialist Zionists, many of whom much preferred caution to action. Outside the Congress, Menachem Begin’s Revisionists were very eager for a state, but only over the whole of Palestine, a non-starter.
Shimon Peres’ new Nextbook Press biography of Ben-Gurion earns its price in its very first pages by describing what happened next in Basel. Though there are much fuller accounts, Peres was actually there as head of the Labor party’s youth wing and as Ben-Gurion’s aide, and he saw it all at closest range. For Ben-Gurion, there was but one way of reconciling his utter certainty that the Jews needed a state with the widespread opposition he was encountering at the Congress.
Peres recounts that Ben-Gurion’s formidable wife Paula suddenly rushed down into the basement where the Labor caucus was meeting to tell a startled delegate that her husband had gone mad (“meshugge gevoren”). Instead of settling for a weasel-worded resolution, Ben-Gurion announced he was packing his bags and leaving Basel to start forming a new Zionist organization that would pursue independent statehood unhesitatingly. Faced with that, his many opponents among the Basel delegates dropped their objections and started working to make it happen.
***
For a true leader in a great crisis, the whole world is but a very narrow bridge, and the only important thing is not to be afraid, to reject ignominious retreat and useless face-saving compromises alike. When Ben-Gurion came to the narrow bridge at Basel, it was only his supremely courageous resolve to abandon the Congress and start all over again that won the day.
Ronald Reagan came to his narrow bridge at the very outset of his presidency. European leaders, his own secretary of State, academia, and the quality press were all telling him that in the nuclear age there was no alternative to coexistence with the USSR, hence it was imperative to resume talks leading to a summit meeting with Brezhnev. Having campaigned against détente, Reagan was being told to resume it—and quickly. Ignoring the establishment, Reagan flatly refused, embarking instead on a tenacious campaign to delegitimize the Soviet Union. His “evil empire” speech that must now be judged prophetic was universally ridiculed at the time.
Bill Clinton was famously deft at avoiding narrow bridges, but when he could not he showed the mettle of true leadership, notably by out-staring House Speaker Newt Gingrich and accepting a federal government shutdown in December 1995 rather than unwanted budget cuts. That was the very clear precedent that President Barack Obama chose not to follow this year. He had weighty justification in our time of global fiscal insecurity. But by allowing the Republicans to dictate the outcome of the budget fight, Obama crippled his own leadership, and even a string of foreign policy successes may not repair the damage.
The newly inaugurated Clinton was also forced to choose between the youthful activists on the left of the Democratic party—many backed by lavishly funded environmentalist lobbies, both of which had done much to elect him—and the dour voices on the right of the party. After 12 years of Republicans in the White House, they wanted more of the same: fiscal prudence and regulatory restraint. Clinton chose the right, broke the tender hearts of the more innocent of his supporters, and paved the way for eight years of economic growth and high employment.
Obama once again did not follow Clinton. Having been elected with enthusiastic Wall Street support and funding from top financiers, he could not bring himself to break their tender hearts, or rather their wallets, when their firms were bailed out. With a tough Secretary of the Treasury—the opposite of his ever-emollient Timothy Geithner, who whines when he attempts to upbraid the Chinese—Obama would not have needed any new laws to force Wall Street firms out of dangerous practices and to stop them from paying spectacularly outrageous bonuses to their failed executives, which rankle still. Instead, at a time when most firms were on federal life support, Geithner feebly said that there was nothing he could do, and Obama allowed himself to be rolled with him.
***
It was just as well that Ben-Gurion had more than his share of courage because he had to face more than his share of narrow bridges. In June 1948 the first Arab onslaught was being precariously held, with Egyptian tanks some 25 miles from Tel Aviv, when a brief U.N. ceasefire came into effect. It was then that the Altalena, a ship outfitted by Menachem Begin’s Etzel militia, arrived with desperately needed weapons and some 800 volunteers. Ben-Gurion was concerned by the violation of the U.N. cease-fire, but very much more by the challenge to the new state’s monopoly of force. He wanted the Etzel dissolved into the newly established Israel Defense Forces, not reinforced with weapons and volunteers that threatened to make Israel into another Lebanon of rival militias. When urgent talks failed, it came to force at Ben-Gurion’s orders, with the 26-year-old Yitzhak Rabin already a brigade commander in charge of the firing that burned the Altalena directly in front of the Tel Aviv beach, a mere 100 meters offshore in full view of the horrified population.
It was outrageous cruelty to fire on Jewish volunteers, but once again Ben-Gurion persuaded all around him that there was no valid alternative to the hardest option, as indeed there was not. Peres was there as an aide, not a soldier, but he had to get hold of a rifle in case the Etzel would attack Ben-Gurion himself. (Begin did not lack courage either: He boarded the ship and was almost the last to jump off with the ammunition already exploding. Then he went on to his radio station to denounce Ben-Gurion, but also to accept the Etzel’s dissolution to avoid civil war.)
Ben-Gurion was active in foreign affairs for decades in one capacity or another (he dealt with Ottoman officials before 1914), but it was only in 1956 that he came to two narrow bridges in a row in foreign policy. The first was the secret negotiation with the British and the French over their concerted 1956 attack on Egypt that preceded Israel’s Sinai campaign. Its swift success in conquering the peninsula eventually led to the second: President Dwight Eisenhower’s ultimatum, demanding Israel’s total withdrawal, but with irreversible gains. Ben-Gurion had met Eisenhower in 1945 when as head of the Jewish Agency he visited Germany’s displaced persons’ camps, and preceding revisionist historians by decades, he saw great wisdom in the man. Once again in the room when it happened, Peres gives a uniquely intimate account of what ensued in both cases. Of the first bridge, suffice it to say that when Ben-Gurion was asked to open the negotiations, as if he were the one asking for help, he asked only one question of French Prime Minister Guy Mollet: “When did the French stop writing in Latin to switch to French?” (To find out how that made all the difference, one really must read the book.)
Given Obama’s more than adequate record in the hard business of fighting terrorists, and his sound preference for doing less rather than too much in refractory Muslim lands after the huge error of the Afghan troop surge, it is in economic policy that he must stop backing out from narrow bridges. As Israel’s prime minister during the heroic first years of the Israeli economy, when some 800,000 inhabitants fed, housed, and assimilated more than a million destitute immigrants with little outside help, Ben-Gurion would have failed totally had he failed economically. His successful calls for austerity—there was very strict food rationing—and solidarity from all, showed classic leadership.
But there was also Ben-Gurion’s willingness to reject conventional wisdom and embrace whatever worked. Instead of expensively educated Geithners who fit their government passages into their personal career plans, he had the likes of Pinchas Sapir, a minister of industry who created out of nothing many of the industries he supervised, and who died almost penniless in a modest apartment in a then very modest Kfar Saba after years of courting the wealthy to invest in Israel, because he was greedy only for the honor of public service. It was by every innovative expedient under the sun, through many a wrong turn, that Sapir, and Israel more broadly, succeeded economically. With many millions of Americans in acute economic distress, Obama should not leave the search for innovative expedients to his Republican opponents, nor should he allow himself to be held back by his advisers who confuse the entire economic system with a handful of the very largest firms that offer the best positions to former U.S. government officials.
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Monday, October 17, 2011

Israel Matzav: Concern in Israel over #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) anti-Semitism

Israel Matzav: Concern in Israel over #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) anti-Semitism

Concern in Israel over #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) anti-Semitism

There's increasing concern in Israel over the anti-Semitismat Occupy Wall Street (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper called the anti-Semitic outbursts "hard to watch," and an Israeli commenter said, "It's just like pre-World War II Nazi Germany. You think blood libels can't happen in America?"

It has been pointed out by many media commentators that the openly anti-Semitic remain but a small portion of those participating in the Occupy Wall St. movement. However, others have noted that Nazi anti-Semitism started out as a fringe phenomenon in Germany before eventually defining that nation's domestic agenda in the 1940s.

More than the few Occupy Wall St. anti-Semites themselves, it is the lack of a clear and firm repudiation of their hateful rhetoric by the mainstream American media and political leaders that has a growing number of Israelis and Jews on edge.
Every time I report on this story, I get some nasty anti-Semitic tweets back. Ironically, some of them come from Arabs whose silence on Bashar Assad's Syria is deafening.

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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Israel does not stand alone



By MICHAEL OREN
Posted: 6:48 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 16, 2011
The claim of Israel's isolation, echoed by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, is gaining status as fact.
"Israel finds itself increasingly isolated, beleaguered, and besieged," John Heilemann wrote in New York magazine. The Economist reported that "Israel's isolation has been underlined by the deterioration of its relations with Turkey and Egypt." New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of "isolating his country," while Thomas Friedman described Israel as "adrift at sea alone."
But is Israel really more isolated now than in the past?
Isolation, of course, is not automatically symptomatic of bad policies. Britain was isolated fighting the Nazis at the start of World War II. Union forces were isolated early in the Civil War, as was the Continental Army at Valley Forge. "It is better to be alone than in bad company," wrote the young George Washington. That maxim is especially apt for the Middle East today, where one of the least-isolated states, backed by both Iran and Iraq and effectively immune to United Nations sanctions, is Syria.
Israel, in fact, is much less isolated than at many times in its history. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel faced a belligerent Egypt and Jordan and a hostile Soviet bloc, Greece, India and China - all without strategic ties with the U.S. Today, Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan; excellent relations with the nations of Eastern Europe as well as Greece, India and China; and an unbreakable alliance with America. Many democracies, including Canada, Italy and the Czech Republic, stand with us. Egypt and Germany mediated the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.
Israel is not responsible for the upheavals in the Arab world or for the lack of freedom that triggered them. Israelis did not elect Turkey's Islamic-minded government or urge Syria's army to fire on its citizens. Conversely, no change in Israeli policies can alter the historic processes transforming the region. Still, some commentators claim that, by refusing to freeze settlement construction on the West Bank and insisting on defensible borders and security guarantees, Israel isolates itself.
The settlements are not the core of the conflict. Arabs attacked Israel for 50 years before the first settlements were built. Mr. Netanyahu froze new construction in the settlements for an unprecedented 10 months, and still the Palestinians refused to negotiate. Settlements are not the reason that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity pact with Hamas in May, or why, in his address to the U.N. General Assembly last month, Mr. Abbas denied the Jews' 4,000-year connection to our homeland.
As for borders and security, Israel's position reflects the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. After uprooting all our settlements, we received not peace but thousands of Hamas rockets fired at our civilians. In Lebanon, a U.N. peace force watched while Hezbollah amassed an arsenal of 50,000 missiles. Israel's need for defensible borders and for a long-term Israeli army presence to prevent arms smuggling into any Palestinian state is, for us, a life-and-death issue.
Moreover, in a rapidly changing Middle East, we need assurances of our ability to defend ourselves if the Palestinians who support peace are overthrown by those who oppose it.
Despite repeated Palestinian efforts to isolate us, Israel is not alone. And we have a great many friends, especially in the United States, who we know would not want to imply that Israel stands alone in a dangerous region. Prime Minister Netanyahu remains committed to resuming peace talks with the Palestinians anywhere, any time, without preconditions, while insisting on the security arrangements vital to Israel's survival. Meanwhile, we will continue to stretch out our hand for peace to all Middle Eastern peoples. To paraphrase one of George Washington's contemporaries - if that be isolation, make the most of it.
Michael Oren is Israel's ambassador to the United States. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel