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lethargic_manNotes from the Conservative Yeshiva
So What Is Really Going On? What The Media Do Not Report
Jim Lederman
Disclaimer: Accuracy of transcription is not guaranteed. All views are those of the speaker. These notes are from an evening talk at the Conservative Yeshiva, not from the course programme.
Everybody complains about the Israeli הסברה system [explaining Israel to the outside world]. Conventional wisdom says aren't the media horrible. And there are several organisations set up to monitor the media. For example, the series the BBC ran to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War. Of all the programmes broadcast, though, they all had one theme: that all would be well in the world if Israel gave up land for peace. This is typical of the way the BBC treats the Israel/Palestine conflict. Issues like Palestinian education for peace, or justification of water rights, or any of the so-called small details that actually make up a peace agreement, get overlooked.
While some journalists may snipe at Israel, the government speciailises in shooting all Israelis in the foot when it comes to הסברה.
For example, every night there are a number of refugees arriving in Israel from various African countries: a few from Eritrea, 40% from Sudan, and the rest from other African countries. There are 750 people from Darfur arriving in Eilat alone (not including Beersehva and the Bedouin settlements in the Negev).
Though this crisis began in 2004, the government has as yet been unable to decide what to do with the refugees from the Darfur holocaust. As a result, the media has focused exclusively on the refugees dumped on the street in Beersheva or packed twenty to a room. The army says it's not their job to deal with the refugees; the police says it's not their job to deal with the refugees; the Interior Ministry says it's not their job to deal with the refugees.
The government sputters when it's faced with questions about this. But no one has thought to ask the refugees, who are mostly Muslim, subject to the most anti-Israeli propaganda possible [i.e. Arab media], why they have trekked 3000 miles in extreme heat to come to Israel. They asked them what they expect the government to do, but not why they came.
When one of the social workers finally asked this, they got three answers. It seems the Arab propaganda doesn't quite have the effect they wanted. The first answer was they came because Israel is the closest democracy within walking distance. Secondly, because it's the closest country with human rights laws. Thirdly, because it's the closest country that's safe.
So why weren't these interviews done, and why weren't they broadcast? These issues should have penetrated into the Western consciousness.
[Note: I have since learned there are fifty odd refugees from Darfur currently camped in front of the Knesset. They are being looked after by a bunch of university students who have chosen to miss out on taking their finals to look after them, since the government has said it would but so far done nothing. A couple of people from my course learned about them from a film at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and were moved enough to stand up after שחרית the following day and make an request for people to donate money for essential supplies. By lunchtime they had raised over 1200 NIS (£150).]
A second example: the recent broohaha in Gaza. Bear in mind this was a time when Ḥamas was kneecapping reporters and holding people hostage. Yet the same pictures shown night after night was of about two hundred Palestinians caught on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing. These pictures were shown night after night because there was nothing else they could show. The Palestinian cameramen were under threat from thugs in Gaza, so could not film what was going on. For four days the Israelis prevented foreign correspondents entering Gaza, so they could not get to show the world what was actually going on. And when they did let them in, they did not let them use their own cameramen, so they had to use the Palestinian cameramen who had been under threat.
The reason for this was because four years earlier Israeli cameramen had pressured the government to force foreign correspondents to use Israeli cameramen, as the Israeli cameramen feared for their jobs.
Now when this all broke out, the government as normal forbade Israelis from entering Gaza, as a result of which the only thing the world could film was the bedraggled Palestinians captured on the Palestinian side of the border. And the only thing the Palestinians could film were scenes showing everything was normal. This was the image that Ḥamas wanted to present to the world, and, thanks to Israel shooting itself in the foot, that was the image that they managed to present to the world.
Why did Fataḥ collapse so quickly in Gaza? A report a year ago by Salam Fayyad who had been the Palestinian finance minister, and is now the prime minister, said there were 65,000 people on the Fataḥ security report. He had done a comptroller report on these, and discovered only 15,000 bothered to turn up to work each day, and only 4500 had been properly trained. So, unlike 15,000 Fataḥ soldiers against 15,000 Ḥamas ones as reported, it was actually 15,000 well-trained Ḥamas men against 4500 Fataḥ ones whose leaders had deserted them and run off to the West Bank.
Who was really in control during the takeover? Not Ismail Haniyya. He didn't want the coup, because taking over meant he would have to deal with the basic economic issues, which was beyond Ḥamas's capabilities. So who was it that actually made the order to go in and take control. Nor was it <missed the name>.
It was actually Ali Jabari, commander of the regular Ḥamas forces, and Abu Obeyd, aka Jemaal o-Jeddah, who commands the ... Brigades. These were the ones with the guns, who told their men what to do. They answered to a small number of extremists, the ....., who actually hold the real political power there. When people say that Haniyya is a moderate, or is moderating Ḥamas, and you can talk to him; he's actually out of the loop!
People talk about Haniyya's success in freeing BBC correspondent Alan Johnston from the Army of Islam, but this is only part of the story. There are forty-seven armed clans in Gaza, some of them are funded by Syria, some by Iran, some by Al-Qaeda. To many of them the Army of Islam is an embarrassment.
Ḥamas does not confront these clans because it cannot. But if Ḥamas wants to get a ceasefire from Israel, it should first take over these clans. But this is extremely unlikely, as it would result in a bloodbath, and would lead to Ḥamas being accused of fighting against the Palestinian cause. The Armed Front is a loose umbrella of these clans, and they are willing to do whatever work they are paid to do. This is why the Quartet is not lifting sanctions on Ḥamas. It's not just their ideology, but also the fact Ḥamas even if they wanted to could not deliver the goods.
At the beginning of last month the value of the dollar plummeted. There was talk of an interest cut in Israel, and an interest rate rise in the States. As a result, within a few days the exchange rate went down by more than 8%. What was not noticed was that within six days 30% of the Israeli government bonds available on the open market were sold, dumped—perfectly legitimately—by foreign investors because it looked like US bonds would give a better result.
As a result, the sharp fluctation came to the attention of the speculative hedge funds. This is exactly the same thing that happened in 2002 when the economy collapsed; and was almost exactly ten years after the tiger economies collapsed in the Far East.
The government had put in measures to prevent this happening again, and instituted a regime of fiscal discipline. As a result, Israel continued to be viewed by long-term investors as sound, and the bonds were bught up by domestic investors, which prevented the collapse of five years ago from being repeated. But there was absolutely no reporting of this whatsoever.
What did happen was that the government's <it got too fast here for me to take down, but it was something along the lines of the fact an election year was coming up and they [who?] were told> you will be punished the next time a financial crisis arises. The lesson from this is that the government may make all kinds of promises about distributing money to Holocaust victims, etc, but it cannot: Israel is no longer in control of its own economy, and has not been for the last five years; its economy is too globalised. It cannot using the old system be both humane and responsible; to do this it has to make budget priorities rather than bowing to demands of every pressure group that may bring a few more votes. (Which is part of the problem with the PR electoral system: you end up with lots of small groups which can twist the government's arm by threatening to topple the governing coalition.)
The finance ministry is now in a position to prioritise in this manner. There were 10 billion shekel surplus in revenues at the start of this year. This money will not be spent, but will go to paying off the National Debt, so that if Israel does need to borrow money, it can do so without crippling interest rates.
Now consider the Katsav Affair. Nobody has been talking here about the real issue; they're all talking instead about the drama: will he or not be punished, will there or not be a trial. Despite all the hours of television coverage and acres of newsprint, not one person has said out loud yet what really is at stake. Maybe that's because the real issue, whether Israel can introduce the concept of shame into its political culture, is so absent from Israeli culture. Certainly politicians have as yet never apologised for their mistakes.
Sometimes there is no law to deal with a particular case. Normally laws are crafted to protect the innocent. That is why we have things like the statute of limitations. Our only recourse when we know someone has done something wrong but we know the law can't be applied is to use public embarrassment as a weapon. But that only works in a country where pride and honour is considered important, to the extent that the loss of these can be used as a punishment. (A member of the audience mentioned that there are no words in Hebrew [yet] for things like "accountability" and "fair" and "gentleman".)
Many people were outraged by the plea bargaining that went on in the Katsav case. [?Mazuz] was trapped by the statute of limitations. Is it worth giving up this just to pursue vengeance against one man? Katsav had admitted in court guilt to the lesser charges. In any other country, this would have been enough to put Katsav under house arrest for life.
Instead we had a political circus, because the concept of shame is unknown in this country; the prosecutors could not conceive of shame as a punishment. No one, and none of the commentators, raised the issue. Had shame been the public issue this week, Chaim Ramon would never have been chosen as the vice premier, a man just three months ago found guilty of a sexual offence.
This is also why neither Ehud Olmert or Shimon Peres resigned after they were responsible for the deaths of several hundred people last summer [in the Lebanon war]. We [Israel] need the idea of going beyond the cause, and the ability to shame people who have done wrong. Here there is only a legal sentence, or a public declaration of innocence, nothing in between. Mazuz was tying to fill this void, and he didn't get it because the public didn't grok what he was doing. [Yes, that's my word, not the speaker's. :o)]
People think this doesn't affect them directly, but it does, just in ways they can't directly perceive. Nowhere is this better shown than in the new way of measuring national wealth developed by the World Bank. At the beginning of the 1980s many economists were becoming dissatisfied with using GDP to meadsure wealth. For example, in the 17th and 18th century the Spanish had the highest GDP by plundering Latin America's gold; but they never became wealthy because they never invested the money, they spent it.
OTOH the Jews of Europe were never rich until the twentieth century, but they were wealthy, because what little they had was invested in their investment in the education of their children, so when the twentieth century came they were able to increase their wealth geometrically, because they could capitalise on the education of their children.
Using the new World Bank index some countries were shown to have negative growth. Nigeria, with its huge forests and oil wells, has negative growth, because the riches are taken out of the ground and not reinvested in the country's infrastructure. And Syria is amongst the six countries with the greatest negative wealth—something which has to be taken into account vis à vis Lebanon: the Syrian economy would collapse if it withdrew completely from Lebanese affairs.
Using the new World Bank index, a country's wealth is divided into three categories. The first is national capital—forests, cropland etc. Every Israeli citizen owns cropland worth $1077, but this makes up only 1% of Israel's national capital.
The second category is produced capital—everything from industrial plants to roads, railways and people's homes. Produced capital amounts to only 18% of Israeli's total wealth, or $1443 per capita.
By far Israel's greatest source of wealth, 81% of the $2094 that each citizen is worth, is intangible capital: the quality of the country's institutions and the knowledge they carry around in their head.
Fully 91% of this 81%—70% of everything that every Israeli owns, and that can be used for reinvestment—lies in two fields only: education and the quality of governance: the rule of law, and the quality of institutions including the Supreme Court.
Both these fields are now under attack. This is why the debate in Israel over education is actually a matter of life and death, also why the corruption probes matter to each and every Israeli. People do not recognise just how important they are to their physical and economic otlook as a country, and therefore ultimately to the country's survival.
Therefore to the speaker the most important things going on at the moment are not the problems with Ḥamas etc, but this and the demands by Charedim for ever more money for yeshivas that produce graduates who never return anything to the state. By 2012 30.9% of children in schools will be Charedi. 18(??)% will be in state religious schools. 17(??)% only will be secular, and these will be the tax base for the next generation.
[This was where the talk ended; after this the speaker responded to questions from the audience, whilst I tidied up the above notes. A couple of things that were mentioned, however, was interesting enough for me to record, albeit in isolation:]
It was in Iran's interest to keep the Israeli army weak. They were furious at Ḥezbollah's kidnappings, not because they led to a war which everyone lost, but because they led to the start of a process afterwards in which Israel started fixing the problems with its army.
Most of the bunker designs in Gaza are of Iranian design; the Israelis learned about these by discovering them in Lebanon. This was something Ḥamas wanted Israel not to find out about.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-12 03:54 pm (UTC)That should probably be Amir Peretz, and not Shimon Peres.
Also - even though I knew that our minds are our greatest assets (considering Israel lacks in most other resources), the part about the World Bank index puts things into a sharper focus for me - especially considering the now failed outcome of the student strike I was part of this year...
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 11:24 pm (UTC)In an atmosphere where bargains are ubiquitous, all a guilty plea means is that the person has consented to be punished as if he were guilty; often that's because he did it and they've got him bang to rights, but sometimes it's because he'd rather take the penalty for a conviction than expend his resources on fighting, as well as risk conviction for a much worse crime. (As a senior federal appeals court judge wrote just last week, "anything is possible with a jury".)
I've not followed the Katzav affair closely enough to form a definite opinion on whether he's actually guilty of anything, and a guilty plea doesn't help me form such an opinion. I do believe that the Israeli legal system is so corrupt and unreliable when it comes to high-profile cases like this, that it is entirely possible for Katzav to have been railroaded for political reasons. On the other hand "just because they're out to get you doesn't mean you're innocent".
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 11:30 pm (UTC)Australia came up with a good solution to this dilemma. When someone shows up illegally, claiming to have had no other choice because staying at home would have got them killed, they are now shipped off to Nauru. Nauru is a perfectly safe place, and in desperate need of cash, so Australia pays the Nauru government to put these refugees up, the refugees have a safe haven, Nauru has some income, and everybody wins, provided that the refugee is telling the truth. But if the real reason they came was to take advantage of Australia's economic opportunities, and their claim of refugee status is really just an attempt to jump the queue, then they won't be at all happy about being shipped off to Nauru, where there is no economy to speak of. If they don't like it they can go home, and apply to immigrate to Australia legally, getting in the back of the queue with everyone else who applies legally.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-16 07:00 am (UTC)