I’ve recently written about the issue of conceptual framing and how Israel finds itself trapped inside a frame in which its neighbors’ actions never matter – only the Jewish state’s actions count. It is therefore always the Jews who stand accused.

Given the practical nature of this blog I’d now like to address what can be done to get out of this bind. When an audience is presented with pro- and anti-Israel frames, how do we make sure it will be the truthful one that they accept?

Why is one frame accepted and another rejected?

Whether the subject is Israel or anything else, the public are often presented with competing conceptual frames. Conceptual frames are the parameters of a discussion – what is included and what is excluded; what is considered relevant and what is considered irrelevant. What makes one conceptual frame win out over another? What makes one “stick” in the public consciousness and the other not?

Let’s consider two competing conceptual frames.

1. Apartheid wall: Israel has built a reincarnation of the Berlin Wall through the middle of illegally
   occupied Palestine, separating Palestinians from their fields, work and families. Within it, Israel has created a ghetto like the one that Jews were confined within in Warsaw.
2. Security barrier: In a reluctant response to a campaign of suicide bombings (148 over eleven years resulting in 1,565 deaths) Israel adopted a non-violent approach to protecting her citizens by creating a barrier (mainly of chain link fence) to keep the terrorists at bay.

At first glance, which of the two is more likely to draw in an audience? For someone who knows little or nothing of the facts, it is the first one that appeals.

Even though it is short on information, it is long on emotion and values. Furthermore, it assumes important parts of the argument as givens: there is a country called Palestine, it is occupied by Israel, and the occupation is illegal Also, note how it positions itself as part of a wider narrative that the reader already agrees with. Who isn’t against Nazism and the oppression of the former Eastern Bloc regimes? Who could possibly support apartheid?

In contrast, the second frame appears anemic, despite enumerating a horrifying number of murders. Its language lacks emotion, and it is light on values. Apart from a passing reference to non-violence, it does not connect to any wider narrative; neither does it assume much as a given.

Immediately we begin to see why one of the two frames is more likely to “stick” than the other. Each of them plays the part of a building block in its own larger narrative about Israel and the Middle East. The first one, however, plays a part in an even larger, overarching narrative about human rights and justice. Although the second one could be improved by doing more to engage the audience’s emotions, that wouldn’t alter the fact that it is almost totally cut off from any overarching narrative.

Let’s try to understand this key issue; the significance of narrative.

Story time

When individual conceptual frames fit into a larger structure, they create a “narrative.” This is a way of making sense of a complex myriad of facts by attempting to establish a story that they tell. Events in North America and Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century were so numerous as to defy categorization, but we group some of them into a structure called The American Revolution. This story has a beginning, middle and end, as well as clearly recognizable characters with motivations. It may even have a moral (the Triumph of Freedom over Despotism). It is made up of a number of interlocking conceptual frames (“No Taxation without Representation,” “The Boston Tea Party,” “Crispus Attucks,” “The Shot Heard Around the World,” etc.). And we can link this story with other ones (The French Revolution, The Special Relationship between the US and Britain) and even categorize it as one of the original genres of literature (comedy, tragedy, epic, etc.).

On one level we know that reality is more complex than a story, but on another level we are sure that history is not “just one damn thing after another.” The narrative is a meta-truth above and beyond the mere list of facts of which it consists.

True stories and fiction

The critical thinker will always be willing to test the story against facts. The narrative of the American Revolution is widely accepted as true (even by the British!). In contrast, there was a widely shared narrative in interwar Germany that the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield in World War I, but had only lost because it had been betrayed at home by capitalists, communists and Jews. It was called the “Stab in the Back”. It can be demonstrated to be counter factual by (among other key events) the entry of the United States into the war. It’s an example of a clearly false narrative. Yet huge numbers of Germans continued to believe it, contributing to the rise of Nazism
and World War II.

Between these two extremes are narratives that are harder to verify or falsify. Was the British Empire a vast conspiracy of colonial exploitation, or a mission to bring the blessings of civilization (including cricket) to the less fortunate? Perhaps both, perhaps neither, but rather something else entirely.

What’s the story of Israel?

Anti-Israel advocates have a story to tell about Israel. It’s a story of racism, expulsion and apartheid. It is a dramatic story, not least because it contains a striking dramatic element: “the persecuted turned persecutor.” Of course, it is a demonstrably malicious fiction. The fact that it is self-evidently a false narrative, however, hasn’t stopped it from becoming the dominant narrative about Israel in some surprising parts of the world.^[1] The biggest triumph of anti-Israel advocates has been the acceptance of their narrative even by those who oppose it; that is, refuting the anti-Israel narrative has become the major content of the discourse of advocates for Israel.

Of course, the anti-Israel narrative needs to be demolished,^[2] but even more importantly, it needs to be replaced with something better.

Since a narrative is made up of a series of interlocking frames, simply changing an individual frame alone won’t destroy the narrative as a whole. And it’s not enough to develop individual, accurate pro-Israel frames because unless can be placed into a larger narrative, they will be left as free-floating and unappealing.

Let’s learn a lesson from Israel’s enemies; the first step to achieving dominance for our narrative is to enunciate it clearly and repeat it incessantly. We especially need to present it when there is no counter-narrative in place. We have become so used to having to respond that we sometimes forget that it’s preferable to initiate. So, to use a modern idiom that tells us a lot about how people think: What’s the story about Israel? Here are some elements of the pro-Israel narrative.

Israel is a triumph of justice

Unjustly exiled from their homeland, the Jews struggled without cease to return. It took 2,000 years for the world to see the justice of their cause and let them go home.

Israel is a beacon of hope

The rest of the Middle East is an almost complete desert of freedom. The Jewish state is not only proof of the determination of the Jewish people to live as free citizens of a democracy, but is the one place in the region where over a million Arabs can live freely as well.

Israel shares the values of free nations

Just as _____ (fill in the name of your country) has a free judiciary, so does Israel. Free elections? Israel too. Governments criticized by the citizens? Israeli national sport!

The world must not abandon the Jews again

Within living memory the Jews came close to annihilation. Anti-Israel advocates say that the Jews should learn from that experience and stop “persecuting” others. Run that by me again? Surely the lesson from the Holocaust is one the non-Jewish world should learn: don’t stand idly by while the Jews’ existence is threatened.

The Jews are the canary in the mine shaft

And even if you haven’t learned the lesson of the Holocaust regarding your responsibility to the Jews, learn the lesson of your responsibility to yourselves. The evil forces in history might start on the Jews, but they never finish with them. What threatens the Jews today will threaten you tomorrow.

Internalizing the false narrative

My last blog post generated more discussion than any previous one (largely thanks to Elder of Ziyon). I chose not to approve one critical response because I thought it was too important to be relegated to the comments section. It reads (in part):

With regard to the conceptual frame: David, I have
news for you – in the eyes of the world we are the thief who has to
give back what it took from the others. There is no room for nuance in
today’s public diplomacy. Is that frame untruthful? Not exactly, not
enough in any case to take us off the hook. Because our hands are not
clean, as a matter of fact they are really very dirty. We are in a
homeland that is a homeland to other people as well, like it or not,
and we have to share it, which we don’t particularly want to. And as
long as we don’t we’ll be challenged, rightly so. Glad you try dealing
with it but as long as our hands are as dirty as they are, it’s a
losing proposition. And you know it.

The writer is a veteran immigrant with a distinguished record of public service, both military and civilian, and a prominent position in public life. It’s impossible to dismiss such a person as a “self-hating Jew.” Yet even such a person, with the gifts of a good intellect and an advanced education, has internalized the false narrative to a frightening degree. Although accepting that the anti-Israel narrative is “not exactly” truthful, he is left with the position that it is essentially true. The story is that Israel is a country whose “hands…are really very dirty.” As long as we (Israel) don’t share our homeland with another people, we will remain “in the eyes of the world…the thief who has to give back what it took from the others”; it’s right that we should be viewed that way and trying and oppose it is “a losing proposition.”

For a man of undoubted courage, who has done so much to serve his people and country, to so completely surrender to the false narrative, is evidence of how pernicious this narrative is and how vital it is to destroy it and replace it with the truth.

2 In a future blog post, I will show how to destroy a false narrative by exposing its internal flaws.

On July 17, 2013 the European Union announced new rules for dealing with Israeli NGOs. Henceforth, no NGO based over the Green Line (beyond what were Israel’s boundaries before 1967) could receive any funding from the EU. Furthermore, all future agreements between Israel and the EU are to include a clause stating that Israel accepts the European Union’s position that all territory over the Green Line does not belong to Israel.

The announcement met with widespread opposition in Israel, ranging across the political spectrum. The EU bureaucrats who had drafted these new regulations seemed shocked at the strong Israeli response to what was, after all, merely the formalization of existing European policy. They seemed unaware that the required clause, in effect forcing Israel to state that it has no claim on the Old City of Jerusalem and the holiest sites of the Jewish people, might upset anyone.

July 17 was, on the Jewish calendar, the ninth of Av, Tisha b’Av, the solemn fast that commemorates the destruction of both the first and second Temples and the conquest of the Land of Israel by first Babylon then Rome.

Israelis feel viscerally that Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, are their eternal capital. Most Israelis feel as well that the land that came under Israeli rule in 1967 is part of their homeland. The division within Israel is whether it’s right or worthwhile to trade some of that homeland for a peace deal with its neighbors. It turns out that what most Israelis feel to be right in their bones is supported by the law of nations. The problem is, not enough people know the facts.

The summer of love (and week of war)

In the summer of 1967, 100,000 hippies converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. They proclaimed their allegiance to love and peace (and several other things not suitable to mention in a G-rated article). Meanwhile, that same summer, over 7,000 miles away, four Arab armies poised to wage a war of annihilation against the Jewish state. Providentially, their plans were thwarted, and the war ended with Israel in control of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

These pieces of land have become known as the “occupied territories,” and Israel has come under a lot of criticism because of them.

But what are the occupied territories? Who do they really belong to?

Occupation

The basic definition of “occupation” is when territory of one country is controlled by a different country’s army.^[1] The words “occupied territory” have very negative connotations. The Nazi and Soviet occupations of huge stretches of Europe and the oppression that they imposed there were enough to give this neutral legal term a massive image problem. But occupation, per se, isn’t illegal. If Israel were occupying territory, that would not, in and of itself, be a crime. In fact, like the Allied occupation of Germany and Japan after World War II (which lasted until 1972!), it might be entirely legitimate.

What are the occupied territories?

At the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949, there were a few areas that were at that point controlled by Arabs. These are the pieces of land that would become known as the occupied territories: the Gaza strip (controlled by Egypt) and Judea and Samaria (controlled by Jordan). Gaza was never annexed to, Egypt. Judea and Samaria (now called the West Bank) were annexed to Jordan, but the international community never accepted the legitimacy of the annexation.^[2]

Not really occupied

Remember, the definition of occupation is when territory of one country is controlled by a different country’s army. A key point is that it has to be the territory of a country for it to be occupied. Before that summer of love and war in 1967, the West Bank and Gaza did not legitimately belong to any other country. So when these areas came under Israeli control, they did not gain the status of “occupied territories.” This is not a matter of dispute in Israel. Every Israeli government, regardless of which parties were in power, since June 1967, has maintained the same position on the issue of alleged “occupation” – there isn’t one.

So, what are they if they aren’t occupied?

In 1922 the League of Nations recognized the Jewish people’s right to their ancient homeland.^[3] They said that the Jews could exercise that right in the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.^[4] From that day to this, no other nation has established recognized legal rights to any of that area.

The pieces of land that are referred to as the “occupied territories” came under Israel’s control in 1967, and Israel has a strong claim to them in international law.

Israel exercised its rights to these territories when, in 1967, it annexed the eastern part of Jerusalem (previously controlled by Jordan) into the Jewish state. But no other part of these territories has been annexed.

A short step

Occupation can be legitimate, but in most people’s mind it’s a short step (usually no step at all) from “occupation” to “illegal occupation.” If Israelis are illegally in control of someone else’s land, then the only issue to discuss is how quickly they can be forced to give up their ill-gotten gains. If they haven’t given them up yet, then they are unrepentant criminals who should be punished.

This theme – Israel the outlaw country – is one of the main planks of the campaign to delegitimatize the Jewish state.

• But what if these pieces of land are not illegally occupied?
• What if they are not occupied at all?
• What if they are areas that Israel has a strong claim to?
• What if, despite that strong claim, Israel has refrained from exercising its claim over the territories to keep open the possibility of trading land for peace?

Why this matters so much

Failing to understand Israel’s claims to the disputed territories can make you blind and tone deaf at the same time. The EU’s bland assertion that not only doesn’t the Western Wall belong to Israel but that Israel must be required to state as much, repeatedly and explicitly, shows that the Europeans either don’t understand how Jews feel about their ancient homeland or don’t care. Israel is not some shameless criminal brazenly holding onto its booty. It is rather a brave peace seeker. Against enormous provocation, Israel is still offering the possibility of giving up part of its patrimony in exchange for the greater boon of peace. No Israeli government is going to sign a piece of paper stating in effect that Israelis are criminals when the law says otherwise. The lie of “illegal occupation” has wrought terrible damage on Israel’s standing in the world. Those who promote this claim are deceitful, and those who fall for it are often simply ignorant. It must be refuted at every opportunity.

On the ninth of Av, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and exiled the Jewish people from their land. Let us hope that the European Union’s announcement on that same date almost two thousand years later is only a fading echo. One would think that nearly two thousand years would be long enough for the world to realize that Jerusalem does indeed belong to the Jews.

I was in the UK recently and spoke for Jewish students at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Within days of me being there, a charity ball they had planned was forced into hiding by threats to the hotel that was hosting it. The “crime” of the students? Raising money for the JNF and the UK branch of Friends of the IDF.

In the controversy that followed, I posted a comment that described the protestors against Israeli charities as “anti-Israel”. Someone else asserted that such groups are not “anti-Israel” but “pro-Palestinian”.

Are they? Is there a difference between these concepts, or are they the same thing? And does it matter?

Positive vs. negative

As a student activist in the UK more than three decades ago, I (like all my peers) was up against a group called BAZO (the British Anti-Zionist Organization). This fringe group would be worthy of no more than a nasty little footnote in history^[1] except for one amusing recollection; the group had such a negative image that its acronym briefly became a synonym for being unhinged. (“What’s wrong with him? He’s acting all BAZO!”)

BAZO exemplified an era in which enemies of Israel were at least frank about what they wanted: the denial of the national rights of the Jewish people that had been championed by the Zionist political movement and concretized in the rebirth of the Jewish State of Israel.

The very name of this group proclaimed the negativity that it embodied. It was extreme, antisemitic and not for anything. It stood in favor of obliterating the Jewish state, and it was unpopular.

Times change and people learn from their mistakes.

By 1981 BAZO had changed its name to BAZO-PS (British Anti-Zionist Organization – Palestine Solidarity). It was too late for that particular fringe group to change its image and salvage any relevance. Perhaps it was the unfortunate choice of the initials “PS” that conveyed the reality that their purported solidarity with Palestinian Arabs was only an afterthought. Nonetheless, you would be hard pressed to find any organization in the Western world today that is so naive as to title itself “anti-Zionist” or “anti-Israel”. It’s bad PR, and it’s bad for your image to be viewed as negative.

Today, in the UK, a much more dangerous (because it is more persuasive) group is active. They are called the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), and proclaims that they campaign “for peace & justice for Palestinians, in support of international law and human rights & against all racism”. Naturally, they support the international BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign against Israel, which calls for punitive measures against Israel “until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights”.

Around the world you will find groups that operate under similar titles. PSC has Irish and Scottish incarnations. The Canadian group Canada Palestine Support Network seems to have taken over from Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, a university-based group that once shut down the Concordia campus in Montreal because Binyamin Netanyahu was about to speak there. Australians for Palestine is obviously the antipodal manifestation. In the US the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (AAPER) operates as a lobby on Capitol Hill while ubiquitous Students for Justice in Palestine groups operate on campuses around America.

All these organizations have learned the lesson that presenting oneself as a merely anti-Israel group limits one’s appeal to the hard core of Israel haters.

Better to be for something than against something.

Hiding the truth?

But is the description of the protestors being “pro-Palestinian” justified? I think there’s a simple litmus test to apply: Does the organization in question express sympathy for Palestinian Arabs who face difficulties that can’t be attributed (rightly or wrongly) to Israel?

One that does fit that description is the Independent Commission for Human Rights. Although harshly (and often unjustifiably) critical of Israel, it doesn’t stint in reporting on the mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs by the Palestinian Authority, in either its Hamas or Fatah versions. Unfortunately, I couldn’t access their reports directly via their own website, but here is some media coverage of their latest report on PA abuse of power:

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Report-Palestinian-lost-speech-ability-after-PA-torture-313660

http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-group-abuses-by-ruling-groups-increasing/

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Eleven-Palestinians-have-died-under-PA-Hamas-detention-313905

A search on the name of the organization via Google News threw up only five citations, four of which were from Israeli news media. The exception was Palestine News Network, which caries a number of stories on PA abuse of power.

The first article cited above carries the shocking account of Mohamed Abdel Karim Dar of Hebron. He was detained and tortured by the PA’s Preventive Security Service to the point where he lost the power of speech. If you do a Google search on his name, however, the total number of results is unlikely to crash your computer. I found only the original Jerusalem Post report and a quotation of it in a conservative web magazine.

Check out the websites of the “pro-Palestinian” groups I listed above. Not one of them carries any information about Mohamed Abdel Karim Dar, nor the eleven Palestinian Arabs who died under PA detention. Haroun Abu Arrah and Omar Arqoub, two Palestinian Arab journalists who have been repeatedly harassed by the PA, won’t be found on any of them either.

We understand why Mohamed Abdel Karim Dar is silent; he was beaten into it by the torturers of the PA. But why are all the organizations that claim to be on his side also silent?

It’s nothing new. During the Battle of Gaza, when Fatah and Hamas forces were killing each other as well as uninvolved civilians, the whole panoply of “pro-Palestinian” organizations couldn’t even muster a Rodney King style, “Can we all just get along?”

Why does it matter?

Let’s return to my original question: Is there a difference between being “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel, and if so, does it matter?

As we have seen, there is a disadvantage in being perceived as anti-Israel if you are trying to appeal to an uncommitted audience. If someone seeks an advantage, it’s fair to check that they are entitled to it. If you want to buy liquor you need to be prepared to be carded, if you want a senior discount you have to be willing to reveal your age. Obtaining a privilege that you are not entitled to is cheating. The vast majority of “pro-Palestinian” groups are cheats, plain and simple.

This deception also matters because of the overall conceptual frame of the discourse. Is it between two partisans of competing sides, each seeking their own rights (pro-Israel versus pro-Palestinian)? Or is it a dispute between those seeking legitimate rights (pro-Israel) and those seeking to deny those rights (anti-Israel)?

Add to that the fact that those who seek peace between Jews and Arabs are arguably the most “pro-Palestinian” groups that can exist, and we reach the counter-intuitive conclusion that the State of Israel is likely the most pro-Palestinian entity in the Middle East.

As is so often the case, presenting Israel’s position effectively starts with telling the truth. Those who oppose the Jewish state are seldom honest.

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Palestinian_territories

BAZO has (thankfully) almost completely vanished. For a flavor of what it was like, see this article about one of its founders: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/greenstein/questions.html

Lets’ Get This Settled

Settlements: A Good Idea or a Bad One?

We’ve spent two installments of this blog^[1] looking at Israel’s legal claims to the disputed territories^[2] . We reached the conclusion that Israel’s settlements are not illegal under international law and that the legal status of “belligerent occupation” doesn’t apply to the disputed territories ^[3]. If the conclusions we have reached are right, what is there left to talk about?

In the face of such evidence, can anyone argue that Israel should cede territory? The answer is, of course, yes. Just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean it would be wise or just to insist on your right. In Israel an entirely legitimate debate goes on regarding the wisdom and/or morality of the settlement enterprise that has nothing to do with the legal status of the settlements or Israel’s territorial claims.

The proponents of settlements:

• Point to the historical claims of the Jewish people (Jews come from Judea).
• Assert the need to retain at least parts of the territories for security reasons.
• Argue that, without Jews inhabiting the areas, it would be much harder to retain them in the face of international pressure.

The opponents of settlements:

• Assert that at some point Israel will have to withdraw from the territories, since incorporating them into Israel poses a danger to Israel’s Jewish majority due to the higher Arab birthrate.[3]
• Maintain that the disparity between the liberal democratic legal system prevalent in Israel and the modified system of martial law in effect in areas of Judea and Samaria under Israeli control are unsustainable in the long run.
• Agree with proponents of settlement that the very presence of Jews in the territories make it more difficult for an Israeli government to withdraw from Judea and Samaria; however they see that presence as an obstacle to trading land for a peace agreement.

The fact that Israel has already actually uprooted settlements can be interpreted at least two ways. It could be viewed as proof that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are no more of an obstacle to withdrawal than those in Gaza were. On the other hand it can be argued that, if the uprooting of 8,500 Jews from Gaza was a national trauma, then the evacuation of 300,000 or more from Judea and Samaria is an impossibility.

What Are We Arguing About?

Despite the very real controversy within Israel regarding the settlement enterprise, it should be clear by now that it is not the “root cause of the conflict” as it is so often presented. The “1967 borders” were not borders at all but only ceasefire lines and were never recognized as borders by Israel, the Arab states, the PLO or anyone else[4]. When the PLO signed the Oslo accords with Israel in 1993, there was no mention of Israel’s settlement as being “illegal” and no requirement for any restriction on building new settlements, much less dismantling the existing ones.

If the debate on territorial concession and the related issue of settlement was only about the wisdom and/or morality of these policies, it would be a legitimate one. But the assertion that Israel has no claim on the territories and that settlement activity is inherently illegal strikes at the heart of Jewish claims (religious, historical and legal) to any part of the Land of Israel since there is no firm basis to differentiate Jewish rights on either side of the “green line.”

Since the debate over settlement almost always assumes that Israel has no rights in the territories, it forms the thin end of the wedge of the delegitimatization movement… unless it is firmly couched in terms of whether it is wise and/or just for Israel to insist on her full rights.

There are advocacy consequences to the way in which the debate is framed. If the assumption is that Israel is a thief who has taken what belongs to others, then the Jewish State can expect little, if any, credit for reluctantly giving up what she stole. International reaction to the withdrawal from Gaza (a traumatic and divisive episode for Israeli society) seems to bear out this conclusion.

Advocates for Israel, regardless of where they stand on the issue of territorial concession, have a duty to insist that this distinction (between the false allegation of illegitimacy on the one hand and the legitimate issues of wisdom and/or morality on the other) is always clearly made. There are precedents for insisting on this sort of clarity of public discourse.

Other areas of public discourse infected with bigotry

Take the issue of illegal immigration, for example. This has been a legitimate matter of debate in many Western countries over the years (and has recently become one in Israel). Reasonable people may differ over the relative weight to be attached to the problems caused by illegal immigration and the benefits the immigrants have brought to their host societies. Equally one can argue over the duty of compassion to the immigrant versus that owed to the native. The conclusions one draws from such analyses will lead to policies that are more or less welcoming to the illegal immigrants. However, the issue of immigration has been so widely used as a cover for racism that it is reasonable to insist that those who argue (say) for the repatriation of immigrants first clearly reject the racist attitudes that have come to infect the debate. The price one must pay to make an argument that calls for such policy is the explicit rejection of bigoted assumptions about Africans or Latinos or whoever the local ethnic communities of illegals are.

Similarly, we must insist that those asserting that Israel must cede territory clearly reject the assumptions of delegitimatization that underlie so much discourse about settlement policy. It may be unfair to the conservative opponent of illegal immigration to make them prove that they are not racists, but it’s necessary and justified. It may be unfair to the liberal opponent of settlements to insist that they prove that they are not a delegitimatizer, but to do so is equally fair and necessary.

What’s the law?

Almost no subject in contemporary Israel generates as much controversy (at home and abroad) as the issue of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Let’s try and take as objective a view of the matter as we can. At this stage, let’s ask ourselves only one question; are Israel’s actions legal or not?

Legal status of the Territories: Occupied or Disputed?

Between it’s reestablishment in 1948 (after a hiatus of about 2,000 years) and the Six Day War of 1967, the Jewish State was a tiny thing. At its narrowest point only nine miles of Israel lay between the Mediterranean Sea and the boundary with Jordanian controlled territory. Jerusalem was divided.

On June 5, 1967 Israel went to war to lift the illegal blockade on Israeli ships traversing the Suez Canal^[1]. In less than a week, Israel extended its control over Gaza^[2], the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights.^[3]

Israel distinguishes between greater Jerusalem, which has been annexed to Israel by Act of the Knesset, and the rest of the Territories that have not. Arab residents of Jerusalem are entitled to certain rights (they can vote in municipal elections, receive National Insurance payments etc.) and can obtain other rights by requesting Israeli citizenship. The rest of the world makes no such distinction, and when they speak of “occupied territory” they are including the Old City, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount as well as Jerusalem suburbs such as Ramat Eshkol and Gilo.

It has been the position of every Israeli government since 1967 that the Territories are undistributed areas of the Mandate of Palestine to which the Jewish National Home provision still applies. As such, Jews have no more, or less rights to them than to Tel Aviv. The 1948 ceasefire lines were never recognized by anyone as permanent borders and represented only the places where Arab armies were halted in their attempt to destroy the nascent Jewish state. The Territories are areas of disputed sovereignty to which Israel has a strong claim under International Law.

If the Territories are areas without a prior, legitimate sovereign, then they cannot be “occupied territory” under the definition of customary international law.^[4] Hence Israel’s assertion that she is not bound by the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention (Geneva IV) when dealing with the Territories and their residents. Nonetheless, Israel has committed to apply the humanitarian provisions of Geneva IV, without prejudice to its claim on the Territories^[5].

Others point to the sweeping nature of Geneva IV^[6] as justification for its application to the Territories. Israel retorts that the very same clause cited limits the application to conflicts between states.^[7]

Settlements: legal or illegal?

The legal status of the Territories is not the end of the matter. If they are not occupied, then Israel may have a strong claim to settle its citizens there. After all, the Mandate called for the “close settlement” of Jews on the Land.

But what if the Territories are, contrary to Israel’s position, occupied? And what of Israel’s unilateral decision to apply the humanitarian provisions of Geneva IV?

Article 49

The main accusation leveled against Israel (aside from incoherent rants about “stealing land”) is that the movement of Israeli citizens to the Territories constitutes a breach of Article 49 of Geneva IV. The relevant section of the text reads:

The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

It’s this clause that is the basis for the accusation that the settlements are illegal. Its unequivocal and broad language seems to support such a position. Yet Israel’s High Court ruled that Article 49 clearly could not be taken as forbidding any population movement at all. It ruled that, since Geneva IV was drafted immediately following WWII, it should be understood in that context. The Nazis engaged in mass, forced population transfers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before and during the war in order to displace the local populations and even endanger their separate existences as races. Indeed, the International Red Cross’ authoritative commentary to the Convention confirms that interpretation. Regardless of ones views on the wisdom or morality of settlement activity, it hasn’t displaced a single Arab from their homes in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Reclaiming the frame

One of the major achievements of anti-Israel advocates has been to focus attention on Israel’s presence and actions in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and Gaza. It has become widely accepted, even amongst Israel’s friends, that Israel simply being in the Territories is the cause of the conflict and Jewish communities are a positive crime. The obvious anachronism of this view (the conflict existed before Israel entered the Territories, so her presence there can hardly be the cause of the conflict) does little to weaken a force drawn from repetition.

Recently the BDS^[1] movement has sought to use the Territories as a beach head to a full-fledged campaign to boycott Israeli products and services. Produce and products from the Territories are forbidden by some European governments from bearing the “Made in Israel” label. At the time of writing, the South African government is proposing to have such products labeled as being from the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Attacks on Israel’s presence in the Territories provides the perfect cover for attempts to delegitimatize Israel in general. It’s a short step from defining Israel as being a criminal state (for the “illegal occupation”) to being an illegitimate state (due to it being “born in sin”). It’s also a tactic with enormous potential to divide supporters of Israel; continued debate on the future of these areas is a real issue in Israeli politics and it’s therefore neither desirable nor possible to forbid Diaspora Jews from taking sides on the issue.

The way to draw the poison from the debate is to change the way in which it is framed. The discourse is currently framed as:

• Israel is illegally occupying an area that belongs to someone else.
• Israel must immediately withdraw, because every moment she remains there is another crime.
• When Israel eventually, reluctantly, repents of her crime of occupation and does withdraw, she can expect neither goodwill nor concessions as a result.

We have to reframe the discourse so that:

• Israel has a strong legal and historical claim to the Territories.
• Israel is in control of the heartland of the Jewish people and the cradle of our civilization. This is an area that we claim as ours.
• Notwithstanding her strong legal and historical claim to the Territories as part of the homeland, Israel has already compromised on their status and is willing to discuss further concessions if it will promote the even greater value of peace.

In short, we need to transform the discussion from one about whether settlements are legal or not, to one about whether they are a good idea or not.

(I’m breaking with my usual format to write much more than usual post on this topic. Since I’m suggesting a rather radical shift in the way we discuss the issue I think we need to look at the issue in more depth than can fit into one post. I’ll post two more installments of this over the next couple of weeks. If you’ve grasped the essential idea, you can stop here. If you want more detail, please read on.)

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Caroll

I’ve written before about the need to take a pre-emptive role in advocating for Israel. Here I want to stress another reason why we need to take the initiative: it is physically impossible to keep up with the rate of accusation. Like Alice, we are forced to run as fast as we can just to keep up.

If you have been following my travels, you will know that I recently returned from a speaker tour of South Africa. There I visited the beautiful city of Durban, whose name is now inextricably linked with the 2001 international anti-Israel hatefest. One of the dedicated rabbis of the community later e-mailed me that one of his congregants had received a message from a friend who, to her horror, supported a cultural boycott of Israel. The rabbi (like most rabbis, overworked and underpaid) passed it on to me for comment. I won’t quote the whole message from the Israel detractor – it’s long, consisting of ten accusations against Israel. Here are my answers to two out of the ten points:

2) The denial of the Palestinian “Right of Return” as recognized by the United Nations Resolution 194

UN General Assembly resolutions neither create nor adjudicate International Law. They have exactly as much legal import as a resolution of the local Rotary Club. Only Security Council Resolutions are legally binding, and then only if they are made under Chapter VII (Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression) of the UN Charter. (See second to last paragraph here.) Israel can’t be committing a “crime” by denying a “right” that doesn’t exist in law.

9) The War Crime inherent in the use of White Phosphorus as a weapon during the Israeli Defense Force Operation Cast Lead of 2009

What war crimes are “inherent in the use of White Phosphorus”? The International Committee of the Red Cross said there is “no evidence to suggest” that Israel had used white phosphorus as a weapon. (See here.) Notice the shift to alleging that the supposed crime is “inherent” in the use of white phosphorus; that’s happened since the ICRC said that there is no evidence of there having been any casualties from its use by Israel (see here; it’s a long document, search for the word “phosphorus” to find the relevant statement).

I didn’t blame the rabbi for feeling out of his depth here; these are pretty arcane subjects that normal people don’t spend much time thinking about. It wasn’t hard for me to refute them, but that’s not because I’m particularly clever – it’s just that I do this for a living.

But look at the accusations and the refutations. The first thing that should strike you is the language. The accusations are replete with emotive terms (“denial” of a “right,” “war crime” and “weapon”). The refutations are technical (“legally binding”, “Chapter VII” and “International Committee of the Red Cross”). The second thing you should notice is the disparity in length between the accusations and the refutations. Even ignoring the texts referenced through internet links, the refutations are about four times as long as the accusations.

Whereas anti-Israel accusations can be manufactured out of a mixture of thin air and chutzpah at enormous speed, they need much more time to refute, and the refutations often make for turgid reading or listening. If I’d refuted all ten of the accusations in this article, I would have found myself without a reading audience.

Setting the Frame

Only half in jest the very talented David Jacobson of South Africa’s Jewish Board of Deputies recently mentioned to me that anti-Israel advocates can make us do whatever they want. A sham “court” (whose verdict is a forgone conclusion) is set up to put Israel on “trial,” and at once the local Jewish community must apply its limited time and resources to countering it.

Although it’s important to let no negative message about Israel go unanswered, as advocates for Israel we must realize that it is even more important to push our own conceptual frame. Communal decisions about how to apply scarce resources should be based on this fact as well as the impossibility of ever truly refuting every false charge.

The only way to get out ahead of the game is to set your own conceptual frame. To do so effectively requires two elements:

1. Positive messaging about Israel to convey the basic truths about the rights of the Jewish people in their own land.
2. Negative messaging about our adversaries to put them on the defensive and dissipate their resources answering us.

Of course, both of these objectives must be carried out by telling the truth (a stricture our opponents often seem to be untroubled by).

In a future article, I’ll go into greater detail about how to set the agenda and conceptual frame. Stay tuned…

Engineering a flop

For most of the three months from May to July 2011, the Jewish world was abuzz with the impending Gaza flotilla and its higher-end cousin, the “fly-in.” After Israel’s mixed success in dealing with the 2010 flotilla, there was obvious apprehension that things might be disastrous. In the end, Israel’s diplomatic efforts and security measures turned the flotilla into a non-event. Instead of an armada, a single overcrowded French-owned yacht staggered in the direction of Gaza and was intercepted in international waters – with no casualties on either side and next to no media attention.[1]

An ambitious plan to fly over a thousand anti-Israel activists to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv was largely preempted by Israeli liaison with foreign airlines, which prevented most of the agitators from even reaching the Jewish state. The minority who arrived were (briefly) detained and deported with little fanfare. A handful were even admitted to Israel.

I’d like to discuss what lessons we can learn from this whole episode: what we did well and what we can do even better.

Media events – the flotilla and fly-in

In a recent post (https://jccat.org/2011/06/13/the-media-and-israel-biased-or-just-dumb/) I wrote of the ease with which the media can be manipulated. One of the simplest ways to achieve this objective is through media events: incidents contrived solely to generate coverage from the media.

The flotilla and the fly-in were conceived of as just such stunts, actions designed to manipulate the media into covering events a certain way to produce the story that the anti-Israel organizers wanted. Israel responded remarkably well to the flotilla of 2010, realizing that they did not have to be passive victims of media manipulation. The IDF found they could add their perspective to the media stream by shooting their own footage of events in the Mediterranean and releasing the video directly through YouTube. This use of the Internet allowed them to bypass mainstream media outlets that had already fallen into the conceptual frame of the anti-Israel activists.

In 2011 Israel went one step further. The Israeli government asked itself the old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and CNN doesn’t cover it, has it happened?” By ensuring that the media event never took place, the message it was intended to convey was lost.

Another media event – the GA ploy

Through diplomatic and other means, Israel was able to control events surrounding the would-be flotilla and fly-in. But Israel had no way to control actions in countries hostile to Israel. In September 2011, the Syrian government and Hizbollah organized mass marches on their borders with the Jewish state. Forced to act forcefully to defend her borders, it was the IDF who were manipulated into falling into the stereotype of “brutality.” Fortunately for Israel the story picked up little momentum, perhaps because it was such a transparent attempt to divert attention from the real brutality of the Syrian and Iranian regimes’ suppression of domestic dissent.

With the prospects of a reprise, the IDF is straining to develop new tactics to minimize the potential damage from even larger mass demonstrations likely to coincide with the threatened appeal to the UN General Assembly to acknowledge Palestinian Arab sovereignty in September 2011.

Israel has grasped that the GA ploy is another media event and is using diplomatic efforts to try and stymie this stunt as well. By the way, those who – like myself – are critical of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s advocacy efforts should take pause to congratulate the diplomats on their success when they do what they are supposed to do: exercise diplomacy. As I write these words, it’s too early to tell whether Israel’s envoys will succeed or not.)

What can we learn from the successes and failures of these attacks on Israel?

All politics are local

When Tip O’Neil coined that slogan in the 1930s, he was talking about the need to relate to the concerns of your local constituents. As local activists for Israel, we should apply the lessons of the flotilla successes and failures to campaigning for Israel on the local level. Local media is read, listened to, and watched much more than national and international outlets. If we are to define the parameters of debate we should learn the lessons of the crucial importance of media events, but translate them to a local level where we can have the biggest impact. To focus the attention of local media, we might try staging events such as the following:

• Street theater dramatizing the plight of Gilad Shalit. Three volunteers (two dressed as Hamas terrorists and one as Gilad Shalit), a cage, a few people to hand out flyers, and a prime location (shopping mall, sports stadium, local legislature, or Iranian Airlines office) are all you need to get on the six o’clock news.
• Placing anti-Israel terrorists on trial. Under Article III (c) of the 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” the “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” is a crime. That makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call to “wipe Israel off the map” a crime under international law. Targeting Israeli civilians with rockets and mortars are war crimes. That makes the leaders of Hamas and Hizbollah criminals. Use local legal academics to set up a public tribunal to try any of the above on suitable charges. Take dramatic testimony from individuals who have suffered or are threatened by them. Invite the media. Repeat as necessary.
• Celebrate your community’s links with Israel. When your community sends a mission to Israel, have local political leaders and/or celebrities welcome them back at the local airport. Get up a crowd with national and Israeli flags. Arrange some sort of award. Have the under-12 Jewish day school choir, dressed in white (always think about how to make an event photogenic) and holding candles, sing to greet them.

Generating our own stories gives us the edge. It’s much better to have Israel’s enemies loose sleep wondering how they are going to counter our campaigns than vice versa.

If you are a supporter of Israel, you don’t need convincing that most of the mainstream media is (at best) suspicious of and (at worst) openly hostile to the Jewish state.

If you are not a supporter of Israel, it is very likely that you would dismiss such assertions as paranoia. Most media consumers suppose that the information they are given, though it may lean slightly to the right or the left, is more or less balanced.

There is a clear discrepancy between the way Israel’s supporters view the media and the way everyone else does. What is the reason for this? Part of the explanation is that much of what we supporters of Israel perceive as bias is only discernible if you know quite a lot about the Middle East.

A generally well-informed reader, viewer, or listener might find nothing problematic in, for example, the following extract from an overview of the history of the Middle East in the newspaper USA Tody. Describing the events of November 29, 1947, the journalist writes:

One would have to be fairly well-informed to spot that although the Jewish residents did accept the UN partition plan, it was rejected not only by local Arabs, but all of the regional Arab powers (the term “Palestinians”  for Arabs wouldn’t emerge for another decade). The blanket rejection of Israel’s right to exist by the whole Arab world would be central to all further developments ― but it is absent from this account.[2]  With no obvious falsehoods, the description would pass muster as fair, unless you know that it is leaving out significant facts. Drawing attention to this sort of thing can look like nitpicking if you don’t understand the significance of the missing information, and you can only understand that if you are reasonably well informed.

This begs the question why the media consuming public are so ignorant of the background to the Arab-Israel conflict that they can’t spot this sort of thing. One of the answers is that the media doesn’t keep them better informed! (Someone once said that one of the advantages of circular arguments is that they are, at least, consistent!)

Some supporters of Israel will sniff a conspiracy here, and it’s easy to get the impression that the media people must hold a conference call every morning to decide what they can do to upset the Jews today.

However, the real causes of Israel’s problems with the media are both more, and less, sinister than an antisemitic plot.

Don’t Worry, Make Money

In a free-market, democratic society (like the United States) the production of news media is, overwhelmingly, a commercial activity. Whether print, broadcast, or Internet, almost everyone producing news for mainstream audiences is doing it to make money. They may have other objectives as well, including the well-worn journalistic ideals of informing and educating the public, but if they don’t make money, they will not stay in business long enough to fulfill their other aims.

Western reporting tends to be superficial, especially when it comes to the very influential electronic media, particularly TV. The reason it is superficial is that viewers, on the whole, don’t want much depth. There are instances of anti-Israel animus in the media, but most of the problems the Jewish state faces in reportage are due to superficiality not malice.

One can perhaps forgive the media for missing the founding of al Qaeda, in 1988. It was, then, only one of many obscure splinter groups, whose unique significance would only become apparent years later. Even its “re-launch” in 1998, as the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, might have reasonably gone unnoticed. Yet today, more than two decades after it began, and a decade after the September 11 attacks, how much have we learned from the media about Osama bin Laden’s organization? How many people can describe the Salafist ideology that animates it, or distinguish it from the Salafi ideology that preceded it? Who knows what influence it bears on mainstream Islam? Surely these are the key questions that would help form a public policy toward the Islamist threat to the West, so why doesn’t the media cover them?

The answer is as frightening as it is simple: people aren’t interested. If faced with a choice between a one-hour-long “talking heads” show about the first three generations of Islam and their significance on the world today, and a “reality” show, most normal people opt for news from the “Big Brother House.” The media is superficial because that is what most of its consumers want.

The pro-Israel media watcher who notices superficial and sloppy reports should bear in mind that this is also probably true of almost any other story that the media is covering. It’s just that we tend to notice it when the issue is Israel. Talk to some of your friends who are sensitive to other issues (feminists, members of racial minorities, believers in other religions) and you will often find that their concerns about media bias mirror ours. It leaves you wondering if the media can be wrong about everything?

I’ve come to the conclusion that, with the possible exception of sports reports and the closing prices, they can indeed.

(Don’t think that that means that I view the situation as hopeless. In a future blog I’ll write about possible strategies for dealing with this problem.)

Recent pronouncements by the US president have again focused attention on the “pre-1967 borders of Israel,” and they are being spoken about as if they lay in some golden age of legitimacy that Israel abandoned when it made war on the Arab world in 1967.

Some years ago I was on a cable TV show in Toronto, part of a panel of pro- and anti-Israel speakers, and one of my interlocutors was an attractive young Arab woman who represented the Canadian Branch of an Arab-American organization. The issue of Israel’s security barrier came up, and she trotted out the standard line about Israel lying about the anti-terror motive that Israel claimed for building it. Surly, she claimed, if Israel were only motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, they could have built it on “their own land” inside the “1967 borders.”

I asked her if she was actually stating, on national TV, that she as a leader of a major Arab organization in North America was publicly accepting the legitimacy of Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries – a recognition never before proffered by any Arab government (except for Egypt and Jordan)?

She spluttered and tried to change the subject, but the cat was out of the bag – and she was the one who had untied the string!

We all know that Israel is a unique country, but one of its lesser-known peculiarities is that for most of its history, it had no borders. The Jewish state’s first, recognized border only came into being in January 1980, with the implementation of the peace treaty with Egypt. Before that, all Israel had were ceasefire lines.

In 1947 the UN had proposed a partition of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews (reluctantly) accepted this suggestion; the Arabs rejected it. Local Palestinian Arabs and the armies of five Arab states set out to strangle the Jewish state in its cradle. The Jews stubbornly refused to die, and when the fighting stopped in July 20, 1949, they were in possession of 50 percent more land than had been allocated to them under the UN plan. But this was not some new agreement; it just happened to be where the Jewish forces had beaten their genocidal attackers to a standstill. That’s where the situation was and stayed until the attack was renewed against Israel in 1967.

The “pre-1967 borders” were really the post-1949 ceasefire lines. These boundaries of a failed genocide are today being spoken of as if they are Israel’s natural borders that the Jewish state is required to draw back to. She is not. Even the UN Security council accepted this point when, in the famous resolution 242, they looked forward to a peace in which Israel (like other states in the region) is entitled to boundaries that would be both “secure” and “recognized” – something the 1949 ceasefire lines manifestly were not.

Whatever your views are on the desirability of Israel making territorial concessions, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that Israel is required to return to the borders that never were.