What Do Israelis Think of Obama?

PRES OBAMA: SAVE ISRAEL FROM ITSELF.” So proclaimed a sign at a demonstration in late March in Sheik Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem where activists gather every Friday to protest the eviction of Palestinian residents from their homes. Among the demonstrators was the Israeli novelist David Grossman, with whom I struck up a conversation about Barack Obama, who is not generally regarded as a popular figure in Israel these days, not least because of his public call for a halt to Israeli settlement activity. Some news sources have put his approval rating among Israelis as low as 4 percent.

Grossman, of course, first sounded the call about the folly of the settlements decades ago, in his searing book The Yellow Wind. (More recently, he is among the dozens of prominent Israelis that have signed an open letter to Elie Weiseldeploring the evictions in Sheik Jarrah.) Not surprisingly, he voiced support for Obama, hedged only by concern that his administration might back off from its strong stand. “I just hope he continues in the same direction,” he said. When I asked why so few people seemed to share this view, he told me something a bit more surprising: Israeli public opinion is much more on Obama’s side than generally thought.

According to a March 19 poll in the left-leaning daily Haaretz to which Grossman referred me, this is true, with a startling 69 percent of Israelis viewing Obama’s policies toward Israel as “fair and friendly.” Conducted in the wake of the controversy surrounding Israel’s announcement during Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit that 1,600 new housing units will be built in East Jerusalem, the poll sought to determine whether the diplomatic skirmish had led Israelis to see Netanyahu “as a victim of overly strict treatment by the Obama administration.” To the contrary, “more people said Netanyahu’s behavior was irresponsible than said he acted responsibly,” the paper reported. Meanwhile, “a sweeping majority of Israelis think [Obama’s] treatment of this country is friendly and fair.”

But some critics greeted these findings with skepticism. As a breakdown of the poll in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz showed, 18 percent of respondents saw Obama as “friendly” toward Israel. Another 51 percent deemed him “inyani,” a Hebrew word for “matter-of-fact” or “businesslike” that Haaretz interpreted as “fair” (the word it used in its English edition). In an article titled “Haaretz Fiddled with Obama Poll,” the conservative daily Jerusalem Post suggested that this translation served to distort the poll results: those who called Obama “businesslike” might just as easily have been grouped with those who called him “hostile,” yielding a very different outcome. My own sense is that those who described Obama as “inyani” likely hold more ambivalent views than either newspaper suggested; they may represent the large number of Israelis who have lost hope in the peace process (and perhaps feel a certain nostalgia for the Bush era, when the White House’s backing was unqualified), but would still tend to support a USpresident who was serious about pushing for negotiations.

But if Haaretz overstated its case, it was not the first time the media has oversimplified how Israelis feel about Obama. Consider the assertion by FoxNews.com that “only four percent of Israelis… think President Obama is a friend of Israel”; or that Obama’s “approval rating in Israel is 4 percent,” as stated in a November 2009 editorial in The New York Times, which lamented that peace negotiations “may be father off than ever” because of Obama’s dismal standing among Israelis. In a speech before the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. last fall, Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, described the lack of trust for Obama among Israelis as “one of the greatest obstacles” to peacemaking.

Yet the poll on which these conclusions are based is considerably more ambiguous than it appears. The 4 percent figure derives from a 2009 Smith Research poll taken on behalf of the Jerusalem Post. What the poll actually found was that 4 percent of Israelis viewed Obama’s policies as more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Another 35 percent saw them as neutral; 10 percent expressed no opinion. So what do Israelis really think of Obama?

It’s true that a disturbingly large number of Israelis see him in crudely sinister terms: in the Haaretz poll, 27 percent of respondents said they believe Obama is “anti-Semitic.” I’ve heard more Israelis than I care to recall suggest that he has a special affinity for Muslims, citing his middle name or the fact that he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. But antipathy toward the US President is not as widespread as some of the Netanyahu government’s spokesmen and supporters would like people to think. According to a survey of 1,000 Israelis conducted by Gerstein | Agne on behalf of the New America Foundation last year, a full 55 percent of Israelis regard Obama as honest and trustworthy, higher than the number who say this about Netanyahu. Moreover, a majority of Israelis described Obama’s election as good for addressing the world’s problems, and 41 percent held a favorable view of him, compared to 37 percent who held an unfavorable view. (Full disclosure: I am a fellow at New America, but was not in any way involved with this poll.)

These numbers are admittedly modest next to those of some of Obama’s predecessors like Bill Clinton, who Israelis adored even as he brokered a peace agreement many opposed. Yet Clinton entered office during the Oslo years, andIsrael has changed in ways that would make it difficult for any American leader to speak frankly about issues like East Jerusalem and settlements without being dismissed in some quarters as an enemy. “The threshold of acceptance for criticism is getting higher and higher,” Akiva Eldar, a columnist at Haaretz and the coauthor of Lords of the Land, told me. “Now, in order to be titled ‘friend of Israel’ you need to agree with everything we are doing, or at least to shut up. Since Obama doesn’t shut up, he is not a ‘friend of Israel.’” It doesn’t help matters, Eldar added, that the last ‘friend of Israel’ in the White House set a standard Obama was bound to disappoint. “The message from Bush for eight years was that Israel can have it both ways: you can build settlements, fake a peace process and expect that business as usual will continue with the United States.”

On the other hand, while alienating the Israeli right, it is unclear whether Obama has made much progress in gaining the trust of Palestinians. Though much touted by the US, the “indirect” peace talks, which began last week, have been greeted by lack of enthusiasm and skepticism on both sides, in part because Obama’s break with the “business as usual” approach has struck some analysts as merely cosmetic. “We expect that the American administration would say to Israel: enough is enough,” complained Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti in a recent interview with Foreign Policy.

Even as he tries to restart the peace process, Obama has conspicuously avoided saying much of anything directly to Israelis: no speeches, no exclusive interviews with Israeli journalists, no visits. While such gestures would not endear him any further to the Israeli right, they could certainly influence the large number of Israelis who believe their country cannot afford to alienate the United States and know that it can’t possibly retain its Jewish and democratic character while continuing to annex more and more Palestinian land. This is true not only of the hundreds who’ve been turning out at demonstrations in Sheik Jarrah but also, one suspects, of a great many who told Haaretz that Obama’s approach toward their country has been “businesslike.”

May 11, 2010 11:50 a.m.

Cry, the Beloved Country: A Torah portion chronicling a tragedy foretold

Cry, the Beloved Country

A Torah portion chronicling a tragedy foretold

By Liel Leibovitz | 7:00 am July 31, 2009 Print This Post

An Israeli settler girl walks up to the illegal outpost of Givat Tzuria

CREDIT: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images

Summers are the hardest.

Any other time of year seems tailored for exile. Autumns, for example, are much better in New York than they are in Tel Aviv, the city in which I was born and which I left, not without considerable pain, in 1999. Back there, on the coast of the Mediterranean, all of autumn’s tenderness is crushed by the long reach of summer’s clammy hand. Leaves changing colors? That earthy smell singeing the nostrils with the first gusts of brisk air? Forget about it: in Tel Aviv, you can still lounge on the beach in December.

Similarly, winters are largely absent as well, and springs are like short and furious arms races, with each month rushing the next into the escalation of summer’s inevitable heat. Come June, however, there’s no better place to be than Tel Aviv. As humid as the city is, as humming with the discontent of sweating, heated souls, the first Hebrew town in modern history was really for summer born.

Growing up, my friends and I would start our summer mornings running around on the beach, playing matkot —a popular beach game played with two paddles and a rubber ball that makes a frightful thwacking sound—and eating lemon popsicles before lying down for a nap. A few hours later, our skins roasted and our heads dazed with sun, we’d amble over to one of three or four nearby cinemas to catch a silly action film, then rush to the local burger joint to soothe our gurgling stomachs. Greasy, sunburnt, and wildly happy, we’d return home late in the evening. I’m many years and thousands of miles removed from those glorious summer days, and yet I still miss them terribly.

It was with much interest, then, that I read recently about some Israeli children spending their summers not in similar pleasurable pursuits but by building settlements on the rocky hills of the West Bank. As I reported earlier this week, “Youth for the Land of Israel,” a new non-profit organization, is offering Israeli youth a summer stint on the hills of Judea and Samaria where they can learn about the importance of our ancestral land and partake in its settling, government strictures and international condemnations be damned.

Reading the committed campers’ accounts, I was stirred by feelings of admiration. Unlike myself at their age, these ideologically driven youth could return home at the end of a sizzling summer afternoon and say that they had done something to further their beliefs. They sacrificed their idle days—a teenager’s most precious resource—for the greater good. Their voices pealed with conviction, with the kind of clarity that is ours in abundance when we’re young—and that grows ever dimmer as we age.

Shlomit Amitai, 16 years old, a counselor in the settlement camp, was quoted as telling her young charges that the Zohar, the sacred book of Kabbalah, teaches us that the land of Israel is like our collective mother. “Just like you would dress your mother’s wounds,” she said, “empty land is a wound we need to dress by settlement.”

It is probably useless to tell Ms. Amitai that the Zohar, so mighty in its mystical force, was traditionally available only to scholars 40 and older who’d reached a level of mastery in Judaism’s earthly foundations before being allowed to travel to its more ethereal realms. I’m not so far removed from my own youthful years to remember that there’s nothing teenagers like less than being preached to by didactic dunderheads; but if I could, I would suggest to her and her friends a better book to read this summer: Deuteronomy.

They wouldn’t even have to read the whole thing. This week’s parasha is enough. It’s short, and it’s as heartbreaking as anything in literature. It’s Moses’s farewell speech. Weary and elegiac, the dying leader, done retelling the past, speaks to his people about the future.

Me, says Moses, I won’t make it to the Promised Land. But you will. And, once there, you will mess things up.

“When you beget children and children’s children,” he prophesies, “and you will be long established in the land, and you become corrupt and make a graven image, the likeness of anything, and do evil in the eyes of the Lord your God, to provoke Him to anger, I call as witness against you this very day the heaven and the earth, that you will speedily and utterly perish from the land to which you cross the Jordan, to possess; you will not prolong your days upon it, but will be utterly destroyed. And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will remain few in number among the nations to where the Lord will lead you.”

But things, he continues, aren’t all grim: this terrible exile, Moses concludes, will reawaken Israel’s appetite for righteousness, the people will once again keep the laws of the Torah and worship the Lord, and He, in turn, will redeem them and return them to their ancestral home. The saga of Israel will have a happy ending after all.

This story is often taken by biblical scholars to be a bit of a retroactive rewrite, the work of post-exilic scribes wishing to fortify the faith by peppering the story with premonitions, supposedly authentic, of the doom that is to come. But as is so often the case with scripture, reality’s concrete details are eclipsed by a grander, eternal meaning: Moses’s story is not some sliver of Jewish history, but a warning that is, has always been, and will always be timely.

To those who revere the land above all, seeing it as a wounded mother (somewhat of a graven image there, some might say, the bleeding and martyred woman), Moses’ story couldn’t be more relevant. Jews, it reminds us, have had Hebron and Jericho and Shechem once before. They were long established in the land. And, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord their God, they speedily and utterly perished from it. They returned again, once again transgressed, once again perished, once again returned. It’s not for lack of territorial sovereignty that Jews had suffered terribly, not for forfeiting a holy hill or a sacred wadi. The answer to our suffering lies not in the soil but in the soul. This summer, may we all listen to Moses, and believe him when he tells us our true, eternal, and only strength lies in justice, in compassion, in love. By now, we know all too well what happens when we ignore him.

Remembering Amos ElonThe historian who explained Israel to itself.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, June 1, 2009, at 10:59 AM ET

In a week of apocalyptic news from the Korean peninsula and from Pakistan, those two notorious examples of the horrible failure of partition, I still felt very affected by the death of Amos Elon, whose life and work so deftly tracked the fault lines of another partition—in Palestine.

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Amos was one of those people whose life stories are uncomfortably close to the 20^th century. He was born in Vienna in 1926 to a family that exemplified the success of Jews in Mitteleuropa. But the fragility of their historic achievement was demonstrated seven years later, when his parents decided to remove themselves from Europe and start again in Palestine. (To have made this decision as soon as Nazism took power in Germany, and not to have waited as even Sigmund Freud did until after the Austrian Anschluss, argues that they had a good dose of that premonitory or seismic intuition that some Jews are held to possess.)

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Adam Shatz parsed the furor over a Holocaust historian's controversial thesis, for which Amos Elon provided context. In 1997, Frank Foer took theWeekly Standard to task for taking Elon to task for his critique of Zionism. Christopher Hitchens celebrated Israel's 60^th birthday by considering its future. Hillel Halkin and Tom Segev discussed some of the new works on Elon's subject matter.

Still, as Amos was himself later wryly to concede, if the Jews had been all that smart and all that keen on self-preservation, they might have thought two or three times before moving to a hotly contested British colony where Arab nationalism was on the rise. As he never failed to put it—he the biographer of Theodor Herzl and historian of the early Zionist founding fathers—the key and indispensable insight was to appreciate that non-Jews cared about this land just as much Jews did.  

For many years Amos was the best-known writer about his country, both inside and outside it. As an ironic and lucid and mordant essayist for the daily paper Haaretz, he wrote about Israel "proper," about the territories it had seized after 1967, about the Germany where he lived for many years, and about the United States, with which he also had a kind of love-hate understanding. Herewith, some vignettes.

Many Israelis didn't like Amos' book about the federal republic, because he wrote about Germany and Germans as if the thing could be done without hyperbole or hysteria. I once watched him pass a very exacting test of this attitude. It was in early 1992 in Berlin, where over dinner he mentioned to Ian Buruma and me that he had received an invitation to "preview" the new museum at the Wannsee villa. This was the lakeside house where the barons of the Nazi empire had met half a century earlier in January 1942, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, to discuss the details of the Endlossung, or "Final Solution." We could, he said, accompany him if we liked.

Not an easy afternoon to forget: We had the place to ourselves and saw the house much as those attending the murder-summit must have seen it. I remember saying to Ian, look, this is where their chauffeurs must have parked the staff cars while they had a smoke. Inside, amazingly courteous and helpful young Germans helped us to find our way about. Then we noticed that Amos had done a slight fade. He returned to view after an interval. He had been consulting the brand-new computer database of names of victims, looking for kin. And had he found any? "I think one or two, yes. Maybe three." I didn't ask how close they had been: His manner of understatement was unsurpassable.

His lifetime as an Israeli journalistic insider gave him the most extraordinary sources. One day in Washington several years ago, as it became obvious that things in Baghdad were becoming hellish for the American-led coalition in the Iraq war, he told me the following story. In the run-up to the intervention in Iraq, the United States had approached the Israelis and asked how many citizens they had who spoke "Iraqi Arabic"—i.e., who had lived in Iraq before they had left or been expelled and who understood the local idioms and vernacular. The answer was that there were still quite a few. A group of these was put aboard an AWACS plane that flew high over Iraqi airspace and asked to listen in to radio traffic between Iraqi officers as the date of the Bush ultimatum to Saddam drew nearer.

When debriefed, all the former Iraqi Jews were of one opinion: Saddam's army would not fight, and many of its soldiers had already decided to melt away when the attack began. I thought this was a mildly interesting anecdote and indeed told him so, on the Watergate balcony where we happened to be standing. He was exasperated with me. "Don't you see?" he said. "This means that all the 'shock and awe,' all the damage to Baghdad, all of that, was completely needless? We could have brought down Saddam without smashing Iraq." I have been brooding on this ever since.

But it was his lifetime as an Israeli political outsider that came to define him. He was one of the first to denounce the occupation of the post-1967 territories and to predict moral and military disaster if the settlement and colonization persisted. He became more outraged and disgusted as time went on, even telling his old newspaper Haaretz in late 2004 that Israel was pulling out of Gaza mainly to escape responsibility for the social explosion among the 1.3 million refugees that its policies had made inevitable. In the same interview, he used the term quasi-fascist to describe the religious fanatics in Israel who "are dictating our fate without any democratic process." At our last meeting, however, in New York, he was hardly less cutting about those who thought of Hamas and Hezbollah as a reincarnation of the Algerian revolution against France.

In the result, he actually did become a true outsider, abandoning his home in Israel and moving back to Europe to rejoin the Diaspora—in which, he concluded, Jews had just as good a chance of surviving and prospering as they did as settlers in Palestine. He didn't actually go back to his ancestral lands, the ones he described in his book The Pity of It All, which described the amazing success of German Jewry between 1743 and 1933. Instead he lived in Tuscany, which caused him to be laughed at but which is hard to blame a man in his 80s for deciding to do. There was nothing risible about Amos. For him, there was a vitally necessary thread that bound the Jewish people to internationalism and to the Enlightenment, and his life and work both witnessed amply to the connection.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.

Can Israel's Electoral System Be Fixed?

Can Israel's Electoral System Be Fixed?

Try as he might, David Ben-Gurion could not reform Israel’s electoral system, which gives extraordinary power to small parties. Today, a new generation of reformers takes on the challenge.

By Jeremy Gillick

There was a reason that Israel’s wild-haired, hardheaded founding father and first prime minister named himself Ben-Gurion, Hebrew for son of a young lion. Born David Grun, the charismatic Polish-born leader with a forceful personality and a streak of realpolitik was accustomed to confronting difficult problems—and having his way with them. One of the greatest challenges he faced was transforming the fledgling country’s political system.

The electoral process aroused in Ben-Gurion more anger and annoyance than any other institution he took part in creating. “In our electoral system,” he said in 1954, “the citizen has no right to choose his representatives. The candidates are selected not by the voter but by a central party committee. Our ballot system is a farce and worse, it is an abuse of democracy.” Four years later, in a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, he contended that the country employed a “bad democratic system” whose electoral procedures were “rotten and destructive.” 

His words were prophetic. Israel has undergone immense change since its creation in 1948. Its population has grown ten-fold, its borders have shifted, its kibbutz movement and socialist orientation have faded and have been replaced by religious settlements and an ardor for high-tech, and it has made more enemies and fewer friends than it wished for. But almost 40 years after Ben-Gurion left politics, the Jewish state’s electoral system—perhaps the only thing that Israel’s first generation might have expected to change—remains largely untouched. 

Alongside the electoral systems of Italy and Weimar Germany—the latter of which helped smooth the way for the Nazis’ ascendance—Israel’s purely proportionate system will likely go down in history as one of the world’s worst. Unlike the United States or European countries, which are divided into voting districts, all of Israel is treated as a single district with 120 representatives. In contrast to Germany or Turkey, where a political party can gain a seat in parliament if it garners five and 10 percent of the national vote, respectively, a party in Israel is guaranteed a place in the Knesset if it obtains a mere two percent. Since no single party ever wins a majority of Knesset seats, large parties depend on support from small ones to form coalitions, giving the small—sometimes fringe—parties? disproportionate influence. Israel has seen over 30 governments, each comprised of 10 to 15 parties, in its 61 years of existence. 

“The root cause of Israel’s institutional weakness,” says Gidi Grinstein, director of the Reut Institute, an Israeli policy center, “is an electoral system that generates unstable and fragmented governments.” It also creates incentives for acting and thinking in the short term, he says, when Israel needs a leadership that can think broadly and plan for the future. “It’s a potentially tragic mismatch.” 

The newest government, led by Likud veteran Benjamin Netanyahu and his sprawling, mainly right-wing coalition, is as good an example as any. Twelve parties were elected to the Knesset—Likud, Kadima, Yisrael Beiteinu, Labor, Shas, United Torah Judaism, United Arab List, National Union, Hadash, New Movement-Meretz, The Jewish Home and Balad. Six joined the ruling coalition, which boasts 30 ministers, making it the largest and messiest in Israeli history. “They used to talk about a kitchen cabinet,” says Harvard law professor and Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz. “This is a mega-mansion cabinet. It’s unwieldy and unworkable.”

The day after Netanyahu’s government was sworn in, the distinguished American scholar of the Middle East, 92-year-old Bernard Lewis, addressed the issue in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” he wrote, “that electoral reform of some kind is imperative if Israeli democracy is to survive.”

 

Gideon Doron, a 64-year-old professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, has been fighting for electoral reform for over three decades. Last year, frustrated by the lack of progress, he came up with a quintessentially Israeli ploy to both mock and rally support against the status quo. Taking advantage of Israel’s liberal electoral qualifications, he founded his own political party, “The Israelis,” a one-man boondoggle focused on a single issue: electoral reform. 

Doron’s party was one of 33 on the ballot in February (an unprecedented 43 parties registered, but 10 chose not to run), and it received fewer than 1,000 votes—not enough to capture a seat in the Knesset. But Doron didn’t run to win; he sought “to get reform to the top of the public agenda.” “The registration fee was $20,000,” he says, “but the TV and publicity—that was free.”

The campaign to reform Israel’s electoral system is as old as the country—but the system itself is older. “The electoral system that we have is a reflection of the 19th century idea of how to represent as many Jews as possible,” says Doron. “The Zionist Congress wanted to create the image that it represented Jews from all over Europe, that it spoke for all Jews.” It had no other choice, he explains, if it wanted to enlist support—and collect money—from international Jewry.

As a result, the Jewish Agency, the Jews’ de facto government in Palestine before 1948, adopted a system that was as inclusive as possible—one based on proportional representation, national party lists and a low threshold for parliamentary representation. “Under pre-1948 circumstances this was a reasonable system,” theJerusalem Post columnist and Shalem Center lecturer Amotz Asa-El wrote recently in the publication Azure, “since the Yishuv [the community of Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948] was minuscule, its elected representatives were not sovereign, and the representation of myriad ideologies and communities, as allowed by the proportional system, seemed both just and practical.” 

Not long after Israel declared independence,  its provisional government began to plan for a convention to create a constitution, which would, among other things, establish rules for elections. It appointed a three-member committee to determine a procedure for electing delegates to the convention. One member was Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency and leader of the dominant, left-wing party, Mapai. Ben-Gurion admired the British system, which he called “the most efficient political system in the world.” In particular, he was impressed that the British had managed to maintain their “political freedom even during the storm of war.” More broadly, he felt that it struck a healthy balance between representation and governability. “Two-party rule,” he said, was “absolutely necessary.” 

His fellow committee members were Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a fiery Polish-born journalist and politician affiliated with the liberal, free-market-oriented General Zionist Party; and Pinchas Rosen, a German immigrant who founded the New Aliyah Party in 1942 and later joined the centrist Progressive Party. As members of small parties, the natural beneficiaries of the pre-state system, Gruenbaum and Rosen were less interested in the British system. In fact, they were disinclined to push for change at all. 

The 1948 War was a boon to the small party representatives. With battles raging, a consensus emerged that the only viable choice was to preserve the existing system. “The opponents of district elections [including Rosen and Gruenbaum] clearly had their hidden agenda,” says Asa-El, but “there really was a diplomatic need to hold an election with no delay.” David Bar-Rav-Hai, chairman of the election committee at the time, said that creating a new system would have required “complicated preparations” and thus would have been “impossible to carry out within a short period of time.” 

Elections for the constitutional convention were held in January 1949. But in February, Ben-Gurion decided to hold off on a constitution—“he had to prioritize his objectives,” says Doron—and the convention declared itself Israel’s first Knesset. Mapai won 46 out of 120 seats, and the United Religious Front—a group of religious parties that would become his main coalition partner—16. The Religious Front opposed the idea of a constitution and thereby the establishment of a permanent electoral system. “They said they had a constitution already: the Bible,” says Doron. And like the other small parties, they weren’t keen on changing the electoral system at their own expense. 

While Ben-Gurion was prepared to temporarily forego a constitution for the sake of national unity, he was determined to change the electoral process at any price. “I do not think that the appearance of 21 competing [party] lists in the Knesset elections in this little country of six or seven hundred thousand inhabitants is the expression of democracy or social maturity,” he told the Knesset in 1949. “As a Jew, I am ashamed of this sick phenomenon.” 

As Ben-Gurion saw it, the small parties not only inhibited his ability to govern; without their support—which would have required their willfully relinquishing power—reforms would be virtually impossible to pass. In effect, they had him in a stranglehold. 

Try as he might, Ben-Gurion couldn’t break free from their grip. A 1954 effort to raise the minimum threshold—thereby limiting the number of parties in government—and switch to a British-style system drew little support, and the pre-state electoral system was enshrined in what are called Israel’s Basic Laws. In 1964, following his second dramatic resignation, Ben-Gurion considered forming a broad-based party focused solely on electoral reform, but backed out when his Mapai colleague Levi Eshkol, the reigning prime minister, assured several small parties that he would block any attempts at reform. A year later, Ben-Gurion broke away from Mapai to form Rafi—one of its central aims was electoral reform—but his efforts were thwarted once again.

As long as Mapai, later Labor, was the dominant party, winning around 40 percent of the vote, Israel’s electoral system worked reasonably well. “Mapai was ruling quite comfortably with the religious parties and that was stable,” says Doron. But disgust at government corruption on the heels of the 1967 war changed Israel’s political landscape, ushering in a strong and dynamic opposition. When the right-wing Likud party, led by former Irgun leader Menachem Begin, burst onto the scene in 1977, stability was undermined. 

Under Israel’s Basic Laws, the party that won the most Knesset seats was not guaranteed the prime minister position. The result was that the individual deemed by the smaller parties as most capable of forming a coalition won. Instead of devolving into a two-party system, as Ben-Gurion had once hoped, the smaller parties became kingmakers in Israeli politics. 

Ten electoral reform bills were introduced between 1958 and 1988 and, according toAzure’s Asa-El, were shot down by religious parties. The 1984 attempt came closest: Likud and Labor together gained about two thirds of the Knesset’s 120 seats; because neither could form a coalition, they agreed to share power in a national unity government. Many members of both parties agreed to reform the electoral system in order to prevent the sort of near-paralysis that the election had caused. But, as Asa-El writes, the religious parties “threatened to sever all ties with the Likud once and for all should the party support electoral reform,” and the Likud members quickly backed down. 

In 1985, responding to growing public outrage, Uriel Reichman, then the dean of Tel Aviv University’s law school, started a campaign to create an Israeli constitution, warning that Israel was “on a track to suicide.” One of his suggestions, that Israelis should vote for prime ministers directly, was adopted in 1992 (along with a motion to raise the minimum threshold from 1.5 to 2 percent), and implemented in 1996. Intended to give the prime minister more power in the coalition-building process, the move backfired. 

The reform prompted the electorate to split its vote between a prime minister and a party that often had a narrow agenda. The big parties began to disintegrate. In 1996, the largest, Likud, won a mere 34 seats—the fewest in Israeli history to that point—and in 1999, Labor won the election with only 26. Together, Likud and Labor controlled 45 out of 120 seats. “What we had in ’96 and ’99 was sectarian politics,” says Doron, who opposed the reforms. Starting in 1996, he says, citizens voted increasingly along cultural and religious lines, making it “very difficult to form a coalition and to rule.” Widely acknowledged to have been a failure, the reforms were abolished. 

Proponents of change may have suffered a major setback, but their cause continued to gain steam. In 2003, Isaac Parviz Nazarian, an Iranian-born businessman based in Los Angeles, founded the Citizens Empowerment Center in Israel (CECI) to promote electoral reform. It was one of several recent American initiatives “to save the Israelis from themselves,” says Doron, and it paved the way for the creation of the Commission for the Examination of the Structure of Government (the President’s Commission) in 2005. Led by Menachem Magidor, president of Hebrew University, the commission recommended that half of the Knesset’s members be elected regionally, that the cabinet’s size be limited to 18 and that the minimum threshold be raised to 2.5 percent. 

In 2008, members of Labor and Likud co-sponsored an ambitious bill written by the Kadima Party’s Menachem Ben Sasson based on the commission’s recommendations. It was backed by three of the Knesset’s four largest parties—only Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu did not endorse the bill. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had granted veto power over changes to the Basic Law to the parties in his coalition. Shas promised to employ its veto, and the bill was shelved. 

By the time of the election this February, support for electoral reform had reached a fever pitch. “Today,” says Yuval Lipkin, a Kadima member and the head of CECI, “everybody understands that the political structure is not good.” Indeed, a recent CECI poll found that more than 60 percent of Israelis support the adoption of reform in line with the Commission’s plan. “If we do regional elections we’ll have two or three parties [in the coalition],” adds Lipkin. “This is the only way we can have stability.” 

Kadima reintroduced its electoral reform bill on the first day of the new Knesset, late in February. But at the time, Netanyahu was scrambling to form a coalition. Rather than risk alienating Shas or Yisrael Beiteinu, whose support he would need, Likud chose to nix the bill. Gideon Sa’ar, a leading Likud figure and one of the bill’s sponsors, laid the blame on the usual suspects. Shas, says Lipkin, “understands that they’ll have a problem with the new system.” 

Even if change can be pushed through, it’s unclear what it could achieve. Asher Arian, a fellow at the Israeli Democracy Institute, one of the earliest think tanks to agitate for electoral reform, points out that electoral reform in other countries has been unsuccessful. Italy, he says, which historically used a near-proportional electoral system and has been plagued by unstable governments, has enacted several major reforms. “They haven’t managed to solve their problems,” he says. “What this suggests is that the problem is not in the mechanism. The problem is in the issues facing the political system and/or the behavior of the individuals in the system.” 

Arian believes that change needs to occur incrementally. “Introducing districts will give people a stronger sense of connection to the system,” he says, and ensure that Knesset members are responsive to their constituents. “A reform that says the party that gets the largest vote will be the one who will form the government will help, and perhaps raising the minimum requirement to three or four percent will help, too.” 

Still, Arian worries that the hype around electoral reform is motivated by a belief that it will cause the country’s major problems to disappear. “I think it’s looking for a magical potion,” he says. Changing the system “will not make the Palestinians Zionists.” 

Gideon Doron, on the other hand, attributes “most of the problems in Israel” to the country’s political system. But he questions whether anything can be done to change it. “We are working very hard for reform, but I don’t think there will be a chance until there is a major crisis,” he says. “Like Lenin said, ‘it will get worse before it gets better.’” Until then, he says, the issue will stand alongside Iran and the global economic crisis as one of the “existential threats” to Israel. 

Doron’s analysis is shared by many American Jews who favor a two-state solution. Daniel Gordis, the vice president of the Shalem Center in Israel, suggests that the focus on electoral reform among American Jews is in some ways a reflection of their naively optimistic outlook. “Americans really believe that all conflicts have a solution,” he says. “If you say that the Palestinians simply don’t want to make peace, then there is no solution. So, they reason, the problem must be the political system. I think there’s an attempt here to give them some vestige of hope to hold on to without making the problem seem completely insolvable.” 

Gordis also believes that American Jews want Israel to model its political system on that of the United States. “They are very proud of their democracy,” he says, “and Americans who are looking to be proud of Israel think, if only Israel functioned more like America.” David Ben-Gurion, for his part, looked to Britain, not the United States, and he came up empty-handed. Whether or not the American or any other model proves easier to emulate, the challenge remains formidable. Those who believe that reform is possible may take comfort in Ben-Gurion’s famous words: “In Israel,” he said, “in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”

Jeremy Gillick is Moment’s Rabbi Harold S. White Fellow. His most recent article forMoment, “An Israeli Prescription for American Health Care,” was in the March/April issue.

Israel still looks good, warts and all

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The alliance between the Western Left and Islamic anger is perplexing, writes Greg Sheridan | May 06, 2009

Article from: The Australian

I HAVE my very own Israel problem and it is this: the Israel I know, which I have visited for weeks at a time, which I experience through its literature and media and the Israeli citizens I have met, bears no relation to the Israel I see in most of the Western media. That Israel seems almost to dominate Western intellectual life. It is commonly held that Israel lies at the heart of the widespread Muslim hostility to the West and much of the ideological conflict in the Middle East. But Israel must surely also lie at the heart of the West itself; it is so often the centrepoint of raging ideological debate, shrill mutual denunciation, ferocious polemic, emotional demonstrations, university activism and academic boycotts.

That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering.

Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious; any two Israelis will have three opinions and be happy to argue them to a lamp post. It is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life. I've heard Israelis voice a desire to neutralise Hezbollah or remove Hamas from leadership in Gaza, but I've never in any context heard an Israeli express the view that the value of a human life is determined by race.

The Israel I know is a Western democracy, often under siege, often making mistakes, sometimes moral mistakes. But I also see its institutions, its courts, its free press and vigorous academics challenging those mistakes and trying to correct them, sometimes exaggerating them in the process. I see a society striving for the good, sometimes doing the wrong thing, certainly not beyond criticism, but overall behaving as well as any comparably sized Western society would or could in all the circumstances.

How to explain this contradiction between the Israel I see and that other, evil Israel that dominates so much Western intellectual life?

One reason Israel generates such passionate responses is because of the multiplicity of its identities and the variety of functions it fulfils in political debate. Each of these identities or roles is affected by all the others, but it's helpful to disentangle them conceptually.

First, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Turkey is a democracy but is not technically in the Middle East. Lebanon is no longer a full democracy, its politics dominated by armed militias and Syrian interference. Israel is the only society in the Middle East with all the institutions of a democracy: a media that reveals all its secrets, a free parliament, independent courts, independent universities and the rest. This earns it a lot of support, especially in the US, but it also means that Israelis generate much of the most damaging criticism of Israel.

This is a singular quality of Israel but it is also discloses a singular quality of the Middle East. Is there another region in the world in which there is only one democracy? This fact alone demonstrates how utterly at odds with its own region Israel is, but also how very odd that region is. The Jewish people, as Walter Russell Mead has written, are an old people but the Israelis are a young people. And deeply imprinted on their DNA is the culture of democracy.

Israel is also the only Western nation in the Middle East (with the exception of substantial but minority parts of Lebanon). Israel is the only national expression of Western values, and indeed Western power, in today's Middle East. These terms can be confusing. The West aspires to universal values of democracy and human rights that can be as well observed in Japan, South Korea or India, nations with very different cultural traditions from the West. Nonetheless these values, while universal, define Western nations in their polities.

This leads to the third of Israel's distinctive roles. Second only to the US, Israel is the most acute object of the hostility to the West that flourishes in Western intellectual life. Official Iranian propaganda has described the US as the "Big Satan" and Israel as the "Little Satan". In the West, this is a view mostly found on the ideological Left but it has echoes more generally. Much of it is heir to traditional Marxism, which saw the structure of capitalist societies as inherently unjust and built on exploitation. This ideology was expanded to incorporate the international economy: Western nations are rich because they exploit poor nations. This is not the social democratic critique of neo-liberalism recently articulated by Kevin Rudd. It is instead the view that capitalist societies, and the international system, are of their essence irredeemably and intolerably unjust.

If you add to this inheritance the polemic of Noam Chomsky and his disciples against Western militarism, of Edward Said against Western scholarship and understanding of the Middle East and indeed of all formerly colonised peoples, and of the epistemological assault on traditional Western knowledge mounted by French critical theory from the 1960s onwards, you have a paradigm for understanding the West into which Israel fits all too neatly.

This paradigm can be reduced to four propositions: Western societies are inherently evil and unjust in their economic order; they are inherently racist both as successors to European colonialism and in their treatment of their own racial minorities; their knowledge is inherently false, they labour under false consciousness; and they maintain global hegemony through military and financial power.

It is easy to see where Israel fits in this analytical grid, and why it has a starring role. It is capitalist, Western, an ally of the US and uses military force when necessary to maintain its security. It rules, if temporarily, over an occupied Arab population and despite its own racial diversity is a mostly non-Arab population in a predominantly Arab region.

Of course a lot of people in the West are hostile to Israel without embracing this intellectual world view but the coherence and strength of some version of it in the most politically active minorities in the West -- academe, media, many church bureaucracies -- gives great added force to the generalised hostility to Israel.

But there is another factor, probably as important as these, and this is Israel's role as the homeland of the Jewish people. Israel's founders decided that it would be a Jewish state and a democracy, a home and a refuge for Jewish people, but which also gave full political, civic and human rights to all its citizens regardless of their religion or racial background.

When you come from a predominantly Western, immigrant society such as Australia or the US, you know some groups well but you know them only as minorities. When you visit their homelands, it is a strange experience; you see them no longer as minorities but as the setters of social, cultural, even religious norms. I had this experience when I first visited India, Vietnam and Israel. You see the minority as the majority and it's at first slightly disconcerting, then exhilarating.

Israel's role as the Jewish homeland, when Jewish civilisation was nearly wiped out by the Holocaust, gives it a special place in the estimation of those who love and admire Jewish culture. It is an inherent part of Israel's purpose and identity, which is little remarked in mainstream media because there is an understandable focus on covering the occupied Palestinian territories rather than the life inside Israel.

But it is the central reality for those motivated by anti-Semitism. And the evidence is strong that anti-Semitism is once more a growing force in the world. Anti-Semitism has a long, shameful and astoundingly resilient history in Western civilisation. You can make a case that Western anti-Semitism predates Christianity because of Jewish resistance to ancient Rome. In a sense, the world owes monotheism to the Jews.

But classical Western anti-Semitism begins with the view of the Jews as the people who rejected Jesus, and indeed were responsible for his death, thus being guilty of deicide.

This Christian hostility to Jews was not present among the first Christians but took some centuries to develop fully. Many of the finest Christian thinkers struggled to work out their religion's relationship to the Jews. Were the Jews at best the chosen people who rejected Christ? Were the Jews no longer the chosen people, with that mantle transferring to Christians who accepted Christ's incarnation as the messiah? The greatest of the early church fathers, St Augustine, in the fourth century titled one of his last works Sermons Against the Jews.

Through the Crusaders to the Spanish Inquisition and beyond, the persecution of Jews, to varying degrees of intensity, was a factor of Western life, culminating in Hitler's Final Solution. It was not until the Second Vatican Council that the Catholic Church issued its definitive instruction: "True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (cf John 19.6); still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the holy scriptures."

That was a welcome statement by Vatican II but a culture cannot easily eradicate something as ingrained as Western anti-Semitism, even after the horror of the Holocaust and the clarity of modern church teaching.

What can be surprising to the modern consciousness is how pervasive anti-Semitism was in Western culture, and not very long ago. Recently I spent a summer holiday self-indulgently reading Victorian literature. I made my first direct acquaintance with the works of Charles Dickens. Consider this description of Fagin from Oliver Twist:

Standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old, shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair.

Dickens was a writer of genius and a man of prodigious moral and political imagination. Yet throughout Oliver Twist Fagin is almost always referred to as "the Jew" and presented as the embodiment of moral depravity and manipulation, whose only interest is money and whose chief activity is the corruption of the young.

I also read Maise Ward's biography of G.K. Chesterton, who straddled Victorian and later periods in English letters. Ward's biography is the only serious study of Chesterton to be written before the Holocaust. She airily admits and dismisses Chesterton's relatively mild anti-Semitism, unlike later sympathetic biographers who hide it or explain it away. Chesterton was a man suffused with decency and gentleness, and the greatest English proponent of the Catholic vision, yet he was also a kind of mildly anti-Semitic Zionist who believed Jews could not live well in a Christian kingdom such as England and therefore should all go and live in Palestine.

What has this to do with today?

Apart from the deicide charge, the most powerful elements of classical Western anti-Semitism were the contentions that Jews wielded vast and malign "money power", manipulated politics for their own benefit, corrupted, generally in some sexual way, the morals of Western societies, were disloyal to the nations they lived in and, later, were behind the rise of international communism.

This resulted in an operational double standard towards Jews. Any crime, and many harmless actions, by an individual Jew tended to be seen as part of a Jewish conspiracy. And Jews were held to standards no one else was held to.

There are clear echoes of this in modern attitudes to Israel. In 1975 the UN passed an infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism. More than 15 years later this was rescinded. Now, Israel is frequently called an apartheid state. The foundational basis of Israel is argued to be illegitimate.

But this, surely, is remarkable. Nobody declares Saudi Arabia an illegitimate state because it has no democracy or human rights, and its doctrinaire Wahhabi Sunni establishment rules over a marginalised Shia minority. Nobody declares Turkey an illegitimate state because it has a disgruntled Kurdish minority, some of whom certainly aspire to statehood. Even North Korea, the most extreme Stalinist gulag on earth, is constantly reassured that the West accepts not only the legitimacy of its state, but does not even seek regime change. Only the legitimacy of Israel is routinely questioned: a special standard for the Jewish state.

Similarly, a malign Zionist or Jewish influence in the media is frequently asserted, even though the Western media is full of criticism of Israel.

Increasingly, anti-Israel demonstrations in the West include direct references to Jews as well as to the state of Israel. Even in a peaceful society such as Australia, the Jewish community routinely has to take security precautions at religious, educational and social functions that no other religious community has to. In Jewish suburbs in London, the graffiti could not be more direct: "Kill the Jews". British novelist Howard Jacobson has written of how he now feels uncomfortable as a Jew in Britain. He has written of "the slow seepage of familiar, anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation".

Every American Jew who supported the US intervention in Iraq was suspected, without evidence, of doing so because of consideration for Israel, thus reviving the old canard that Jews cannot be loyal citizens of the states they live in because of their over-arching loyalty to Israel.

Even where hostility is directed specifically at Israel rather than at Jews, when this hostility is extreme and beyond reason, it affects the social atmosphere for Jews. As Jacobson comments, there is "a deranged revulsion, intemperate and unconcealed, which nothing Israel itself has done could justify or explain were it 10 times the barbaric apartheid state it figures as in the English imagination".

However, even as classical anti-Semitism has had to make its reappearance in the West in mostly disguised form, it is raging without any disguise at all across the Arab world. The examples are limitless but let me offer just a few. The government-aligned Al-Gomhuria newspaper in Egypt published a cartoon of a serpent strangling Uncle Sam. The caption read: "The Jews taking over the world".

An Egyptian cleric, Ahmad Abd al-Salam, on Al-Nas TV, said: "I want you to imagine the Jews sitting around a table, conspiring how to corrupt the Muslims ... The Jews conspire how to infect the food of Muslims with cancer."

Also on Al-Nas TV, another Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, revealed the wholly fictitious scoop that the female figure in the Starbucks logo was really Queen Esther of the Jews.

Throughout the Arab world, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious tzarist forgery, figure in popular culture. The Iranian Government, famously, sponsors conferences in which the sole purpose is to deny that the Holocaust took place.

Throughout Gaza and the West Bank an extravagant anti-Semitism is a central part of the Palestinian discourse. Anyone who doubts this should Google the Hamas charter, where they will learn that even Rotary and Lions clubs are part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

One of the most telling examples of this Arab anti-Semitism is provided in Martin Indyk's brilliant new book, Innocent Abroad (Simon & Schuster, 494pp, $49.95 hardback). Although focused predominantly on the '90s Middle East peace process, when Bill Clinton was US president and Indyk one of his senior advisers, it is one of the best recent books on the modern Middle East, with a compelling narrative, shrewd insider accounts, engaging personal insights and a sense of the broad sweep of history. 

But for the purposes of this analysis, a meeting Indyk describes in 1998 between Clinton and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is most instructive. This was at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Indyk writes: 

Abdullah leaned across the table and explained to Clinton in a hushed voice that he had information that Monica Lewinsky was Jewish and part of a Mossad plot to bring the president down because of his efforts to help the Palestinians. He told the president that he intended to share this intelligence with senators he would meet after lunch in an effort to help forestall his impeachment. 

This anecdote echoes one of a generation earlier told in Henry Kissinger's memoir, in which Kissinger holds a formal meeting with a Saudi ruler who tells him the world is beset by a global communist conspiracy, which is a mere part of the broader global Jewish conspiracy. 

The Indyk and Kissinger anecdotes, each astonishing in its way, confirm the pervasiveness of Arab anti-Semitism and that it is not wholly a construct of Arab regimes for internal political purposes but is to some extent genuinely believed in Arab societies. 

Nonetheless it would be wrong to underestimate the benefits that anti-Semitism can provide Arab regimes. Israel is the licensed grievance for these societies. By theologising the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and presenting it as a case of Western and specifically Jewish persecution of an Arab minority, Arab regimes, even those allied with the US, can offer an outlet to anger on the street and attempt to channel both Islamist and pan-Arab sentiments in a direction that does not challenge their rule. 

This exploitation of anti-Semitism fits a broader political narrative of the Arab world. A few years ago a committee of Arab intellectuals working under the auspices of the UN produced a devastating indictment of the Arab encounter with modernisation. Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis recounts and updates some of their most shocking findings in the March-April 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. Here are a few of the depressing highlights. In the previous quarter century, real per capita gross domestic product has fallen in the Arab world. Combined Arab GDP in 2000 was less than that of Spain. One-fifth the number of books are translated every year into Arabic as are translated into Greek in Greece. Between 1980 and 2000, Egypt registered 77 patents in the US, South Korea 16,328. And so on. 

As a matter of mere logic, the presence of 5.5million Jews in Israel cannot be responsible for the economic and political development of hundreds of millions of Arabs. But the Arab mind is presented with a disagreeable conundrum. The Arab world possesses, in its view, the one true religion, the greatest culture and much of the world's oil, yet its societies are impoverished and dysfunctional. How can this be explained? In societies that do not allow searching criticism of ruling regimes, the answer has to come in the form of anti-Arab conspiracies, centred on the West generally, but more specifically on the US, Israel and the Jews. 

This Arab anti-Semitism, popular and official, is incidentally a huge obstacle to peace. If Israel is not just a nation like any other but the most visible and offensive manifestation of a giant Western and Jewish conspiracy against Islam and the Arabs, then making peace with it is not honourable but despicable. 

What is perplexing is the emerging strategic alliance between the Western Left and Islamist anger. This is evident especially in Western demonstrations where left-wing protesters carry banners saying things such as "We are Hamas". 

But it is also to be observed in the general silence of the Western Left on human rights abuses throughout the Arab world and in Iran. One of the most arresting sights in Israel is the magnificent Bahai headquarters in Haifa. The Bahais have an equally beautiful temple in New Delhi. The Bahais fled to Israel and India, two states where minority religions are not subject to official persecution, because of the murderous repression they suffer in Iran. Yet the Western Left is infinitely more active about Israeli human rights abuses, real or alleged, than Iranian human rights abuses. Similarly, the more left-wing the Western feminist, the less will be said about the routine abuse of women's rights in much of the Arab world. 

The strategic alliance of the Western Left and Islamist sentiment, on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is evident at the UN. There, Arab and African majorities in league with the UN bureaucrat class constantly formulate condemnations of Israel's alleged human rights abuses while no resolution is moved regarding human rights in Iran or Saudi Arabia or China. Much criticism of Israel is genuinely concerned with Palestinian welfare and the injustices numerous Palestinians have suffered. It is the exaggeration of Israel's sins, some of them real enough, and the hysterical criticism and denunciation of Israel, that owes so much to meta-rational factors. 

Similarly, the assumption that Israel does not seek peace and a just solution for the Palestinians is flawed. Again, Indyk is most instructive on this. He provides the crispest account so far of the 2000 Camp David peace conference and the offers that Israel's prime minister Ehud Barak, under Clinton's influence, made to Yasser Arafat. It is clear that Clinton and Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state on more than 95 per cent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, as well as a territory transfer from Israel proper to make up for the less than 5 per cent of the West Bank that would be taken in the main Jewish settlements. The Palestinian state was to embrace all the Palestinian suburbs of East Jerusalem and even have a form of sovereignty over the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. 

It may be a long time before Israel feels enough confidence in a Palestinian interlocutor to make such an offer again, as such a settlement would involve grave risks to Israeli security. 

Whatever the reasons for Arafat's blanket rejection, the offer flatly rebuts the idea of Israel as determined never to make peace. Since 1977 Israel has given up territory equivalent to three times its size in exchange for peace with various neighbours. This was land acquired in defensive wars that made a contribution to Israeli security. Israel may be guilty of many things but a refusal to compromise is not one of them. 

There are also several positive identities that Israel projects. Israel's successful economy, built from nothing, ought to be an inspiration to the rest of the Middle East. Israel is also a front-line state in the conflict with terrorism. Israeli policymakers are forced to confront and think through the political and moral dilemmas all democratic states face in the age of terror. Israel's agonising internal debates are of interest to all democracies. Israel does not have the option of not taking terrorism seriously, yet its diverse and feisty people are determined to remain democratic. Beyond security, its multicultural and multiracial peoples, and the compromises they need to make to forge a common nation, are relevant to a society such as Australia. 

Both the intense hatred and in other circles the affection that Israel inspires have little to do with the actions any Israeli government could reasonably take. It is rather Israel's multiple identities, going to the heart of Western history and contemporary Arab politics, the hostility among intellectuals to Western society, the inheritance of anti-Semitism and the search for scapegoats for the Arab world's troubled encounter with modernity, that ensure that the Israel of the mind will remain at the forefront of international concerns.