by Mitchell Plitnick

The saga of the three kidnapped Israeli youths in the West Bank took a tragic, if expected, turn today, when their bodies were discovered near Hebron. None but the most starry-eyed optimist thought the young men would be found alive after all this time. But the story is [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Mitchell Plitnick

The saga of the three kidnapped Israeli youths in the West Bank took a tragic, if expected, turn today, when their bodies were discovered near Hebron. None but the most starry-eyed optimist thought the young men would be found alive after all this time. But the story is far from over.

Even before the announcement was made that the bodies were found, clashes were reported between Israeli forces and Palestinians in the town of Halhul, where the grisly discovery was made. A massive Israel Defense Forces (IDF) presence was reported, roads were closed and the area was generally closed down. The Israeli security cabinet is meeting at this writing to decide on further measures.

The only thing that seems certain right now about the Israeli response is that it will be unjust and have nothing to do with addressing the terrible crime that has just been confirmed. For the moment, at least, it appears that the perpetrators, Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha, are beyond the reach of Israel. Since Israel cannot punish those who so profoundly deserve punishment, they will punish those that they can. This, sadly, is the calculus of occupation. There is already violence reported by residents of Hebron. Some might see justice in that, but ask yourself how you would feel if your son, brother or father – or just a neighbor— was a murderer and you were the one who had to pay for their crime.

There is still no evidence that the two killers, who were apparently members of Hamas, did not act alone. Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that he will hold Hamas responsible and has repeatedly called on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to sever the unity government that he only recently forged with Hamas. Now, Netanyahu has declared, in a meeting of Israel’s security cabinet that “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay.”

What might that mean? Well, earlier, some members of Netanyahu’s Likud party described the response they wanted to see.

Danny Danon, the Deputy Defense Minister said “This tragic ending must also be the ending of Hamas! The nation is strong and ready to absorb [attacks] for the sake of a mortal blow against Hamas. … [W]e have to destroy the homes of Hamas activists, wipe out their arsenals everywhere, and stop the flow of money that directly or indirectly keeps terror alive… make the entire Palestinian leadership pay a heavy price.”

For Danon, it is not even enough that Hamas pay for this, but the Palestinian Authority as well. Yet there remains no evidence Hamas, as an organization had anything to do with this. The Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence service, issued a very telling statement about the murders: “Following intensive operational intelligence work by the Shin Bet, less than 24 hours after the kidnapping it became evident that two Hamas activists, Marwan Qawasmeh and Amar Abu Aisha, are those behind the kidnapping of the three teens.” No mention made of Hamas’ involvement; merely that the two men were members. If Bibi really has anything connecting Hamas to this crime, he’s keeping it inexplicably secret.

No matter to the outspoken Tzipi Hotovely of Likud, who said, “The despicable kidnapping and murder of the students cannot go by in silence, and those responsible in Gaza must pay the price. The government of Israel must declare a war to the death on Hamas, which is responsible for the murders, and return to the policy of [targeted] assassination.” Like Danon, Hotovely expresses no concern about the Israeli lives this will put at risk, much less those of innocent Palestinians. Nor do they care about the consequences of such actions.

One might think that these Likud members might have some interest in actually tracking down the murderers. But no, they’d prefer to cynically use this despicable crime to further a political agenda of the worst kind—one that legitimizes intense violence that will mean a far greater loss of innocent life. In this, they are joined by their fellow travelers of the American right wing. The extreme pro-occupation forces took to Twitter even before Netanyahu made his announcement to politicize and distort these events.

Whatever the two killers were thinking, their monstrous crime will yield no positive results for anyone. The PA is crippled, quite likely permanently, by its response to the initial kidnapping. Hamas has been devastated in the West Bank by the Israeli response, leaving it unable to take advantage of any political opening that might be created. The people of the West Bank will see a major crackdown, and Israel will surely follow the call of Housing Minister Uri Ariel for more settlements to be built in response. Gaza will be hit by more missiles. The only victors might be the most radical elements in the Occupied Territories, the ones Hamas has been in conflict with in Gaza and who have generally laid very low in the West Bank.

There seems to be little interest in capturing the perpetrators of the crime, and a great eagerness to make Hamas in particular and the Palestinians in general suffer for this outrage. And I’m sure that is just what will happen. The question will then become how Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even the PA will respond.

Will they attempt to hit Israel back with more attacks on civilians? If they do, we may well have witnessed the beginning of a third intifada. Will they make a mere show of firing a few rockets that land harmlessly as most do? If they do that, there may be a backlash of rage that strengthen the more radical groups in the Territories. There are ISIS- and al-Qaeda-like groups there, which have seen little support among the Palestinian people, but this could change if the existing groups are seen as doing nothing in the face of Israeli aggression.

Whatever the outcome, the episode demonstrates yet again the futility of acts of violence. No one will gain from any of this, even if they think they will. And lost in it all, the murder of three young men, a heinous crime which everyone condemns, while everyone who gets hurt on both sides will have had nothing to do with it.

This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission.  Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook

by Mitchell Plitnick

They were dueling op-eds, one in the New York Times and the other in the Jewish communal magazine, Tablet. The question being bandied between them was whether Israel is becoming a theocracy. Not surprisingly, both pieces missed the mark. It’s not theocracy but unbridled nationalism that is the threat [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Mitchell Plitnick

They were dueling op-eds, one in the New York Times and the other in the Jewish communal magazine, Tablet. The question being bandied between them was whether Israel is becoming a theocracy. Not surprisingly, both pieces missed the mark. It’s not theocracy but unbridled nationalism that is the threat in Israel.

The Times piece was authored by Abbas Milani, who heads the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University and Israel Waismel-Manor, a lecturer at Haifa University and visiting associate professor of political science at Stanford. Their thesis is that Iran and Israel are moving in opposite directions on a democratic-theocratic scale, and that they might at some point in the future pass each other. Milani and Waismel-Manor are certainly correct about the strengthening forces of secularism and democracy in Iran, along with a good dose of disillusionment and frustration with the revolutionary, Islamic government that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ushered in thirty-five years ago. But on Israel, they miss the mark by a pretty wide margin.

Waismel-Manor and Milani posit that the thirty seats currently held in Israel’s Knesset by religious parties shows growing religious influence on Israeli policies. But, as Yair Rosenberg at Tablet correctly points out, not all the religious parties have the same attitude about separation of religion and the state. Where Rosenberg, unsurprisingly, goes way off course is his complete eliding of the fact that the threat is not Israel’s tilt toward religion, but it’s increasingly radical shift toward right-wing policies, which are often severely discriminatory and militant.

Waismel-Manor and Milani collapse the religious and right-wing ideologies at play in the Israeli government. Rosenberg is right to counter this. There are currently three parties in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) which define themselves as religious parties: HaBayit HaYehudi (The Jewish Home), Shas, and United Torah Judaism (UTJ). Shas is the most explicitly dedicated, in ideology and practice, to a religious Jewish state. But it is currently in the opposition and has not seen much rise in its share of the electorate in quite a while. It is worth noting, as well, that Shas has generally been the most welcoming of all religious parties to a two-state solution, although its stance on an undivided Jerusalem is notoriously problematic.

UTJ is made up of two religious parties, which don’t always agree and sometimes split for a while and reunite later. But UTJ generally supports the status quo of religion in the state, and HaBayit Hayehudi, while ostensibly supporting a religious state, is much more focused on its radical nationalism. This is why Bennett, after some early difficulties, has found a way to work with secular parties like Yesh Atid and, most importantly, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel, Our Home). Neither of those two parties, both major partners in the current coalition, could find common ground with UTJ or Shas.

That is very telling, because it illustrates where both the Times and Tablet op-eds go wrong. Rosenberg, who is also the editor of the Israel State Archives blog, is zealous in his determination to be a heroic “Defender of Israel” and in so doing he comes off as both snide and dishonest in his takedown of Waismel-Manor and Milani, despite the merits of his case. Surely so keen an observer of Israeli politics as Rosenberg claims to be could not have missed the thread that the two scholars detected but mis-identified in their piece. It is not theocracy that Israel is sliding toward, it is the passionate and often brutal oppression that extreme nationalism so often leads to. At the end of that road is fascism. And while Israel, despite some bombastic rhetoric of its fiercest critics, remains a long distance away from being fascist, the distance is not as great as it once was.

Rosenberg had the opportunity to issue an important corrective to the Times op-ed and grasp a teaching moment. Instead, he waved the Israeli flag and completely ignored the very real threat Israel’s increasingly right-wing body politic poses to the structures of democracy in Israel.

That threat is manifest in the ideologies and proposals of both Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu and Naftali Bennett of HaBayit HaYehudi. I’ve explored in some detail the kind of future Bennett envisions; he is a leading champion of annexation of much of the West Bank. Lieberman, who is busily pushing stronger ties with Russia to increase Israel’s freedom of action, has repeatedly proposed such ideas as loyalty oaths for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the forced transfer of Arab areas of Israel to the Palestinian Authority. These, coupled with his general style and heavy-handed methods, have brought many people to describe him as a fascist.

But the threat doesn’t stop there, nor is it limited to the Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. Various bills have been proposed to limit Israeli NGOs that work to support human rights, international law, and peace, many of which are staffed and supported by Israeli Jews. The bills have been directly targeting NGOs in these fields, not the right-wing ones which do not disclose their funding sources and operate in various shady ways.

And the effect is not limited to Lieberman’s and Bennett’s parties. The Likud, which has always been conservative and right-wing, has also seen a tilt in this same direction. Gone from the ranks of Likud are such party stalwarts as Dan Meridor and Benny Begin who, despite supporting settlement expansion and various hawkish positions, also stood firm by Israel’s democratic processes. They opposed the rightward march and now they’re gone.

Politicians like Meridor and Begin were able to stabilize Likud leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu in the face of rightward pressure, but those days have also passed. It is a mark of where Likud has gone that, not only did it form an electoral bloc with Lieberman in the last election, but an outspoken opponent of the creation of a Palestinian state, the son of Israel’s first Likud Prime Minister, Menachem Begin (who was, himself, once considered a terrorist by the British), Benny was considered too moderate for the Likud leadership.

Instead of right-wing leaders like Meridor and Begin, Likud features explicit opponents of democracy like Ze’ev Elkin, annexationists like Tzipi Hotovely and outright racists like Miri Regev. Here we find the common cause that Bennett and Lieberman find with Likud. Not religion, but the worst kind of nationalistic bigotry, one that leads to ongoing occupation outside the Green Line and increased institutionalized racism, whether you call it apartheid, segregation or whatever, inside.

Rosenberg merely wanted to demonstrate that the Times ran an op-ed that offered an inaccurate picture of Israel, hoping to strengthen the right-wing’s and center-right’s phony contention that the Times and other mainstream media treat Israel unfairly. He was right about Milani and Waismel-Manor mischaracterizing Israel. But rather than correct them with reality, he did it with pointless sarcasm and thereby perpetrated a lie by omission that is much more harmful to Israel.

The pull of Bennett and Lieberman has made Likud even more radically right-wing. It has made a party like Yesh Atid “centrist,” even though its leader kicked off his campaign in a settlement, claims to support a two-state solution while backing every second of Netanyahu’s obstructionism in peace talks, and proclaims repeatedly that Israel should not even discuss Palestinian refugees or dividing Jerusalem. That’s the new center in Israel.

And why wouldn’t it be, when the right-wing has pulled things so far from any kind of true moderation? That is the danger of where Israel is heading. It’s not theocratic, but it is repressive and a recipe for continued and escalated conflict. Milani and Waismel-Manor may have mid-identified the threat, but at least they acknowledge there is one. And it’s getting worse.