Founding Father John Adams and Hebrew Nation, Jews. Religion and Zionism

A article in the Wshington Post about the second president of the United States, John Adams, prompted me to look up the fuller context of two major quotes from him.

 Adams, who was born on October 30, 1735, in Braintree, Massachusetts, grew up in a household based on Puritan values. The Puritans believed themselves to be like the Israelite's fleeing Egypt, wandering into the vast and unknown wilderness and reaching the promised land of the New World.
As their guide, they used the Bible, adopting biblical customs, established biblical codes, such as observance of the Sabbath, and gave their children Hebrew names.

In 1808, in a letter to Dutch Patriot leader and American immigrant François Adriaan van der Kemp, Adams wrote:

I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations ...

They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more and more happily than any other nation, ancient or modern.

Note that Adams, like most people throughout history, naturally thought of Jews as a nation, not merely a religion.

And he made that even more clear in this 1819  letter to Mordecai M. Noah:

M. M. Noah Esq.
March 15th. 1819

Dear Sir, 

I have to thank you for another valuable publication your travels in “Europe
Africa” which though I cannot see well enough to read. I can hear as well
ever & accordingly have heard read two thirds of it & shall in course hear all
the rest. It is a magazine of ancient & modern learning of judicious observa-
tions & ingenious reflections. I have been so pleased with it that I wish you
had continued your travels-into Syria. Judea & Jerusalem. I should attend
more to your remarks upon those interesting countries than to those of any
traveller I have yet read. If I were to let my imagination loose I should wish
you had been a member of Napoleons Institute at Cairo nay farther I
could find it in my heart to wish that you had been at the head of a hundred
thousand Israelites indeed as well disciplined as a French Army-& marching
with them into Judea & making a conquest of that country & restoring your
nation to the dominion of it. For I really wish the Jews again in Judea an
independent nation. For I believe the most enlightened men of it have
participated in the ameliorations of the philosophy of the age, once restored
to an independent government & no longer persecuted they would soon wear
away some of the asperities & peculiarities of their character & possibly in
time become liberal Unitarian Christians for your Jehovah is our Jehovah
your God of Abraham Isaac & Jacob is our God. I am Sir with respect
esteem your obliged humble servant.

John Adams 

Like most British and American proto-Zionists, the desire for Jews to return to Zion was based on the idea that this would be a precursor to them being converted en masse to Christianity. Nevertheless, the desire by many prominent Christians for Jews to return to their homeland cannot be denied, and was a major reason why Zionism was politically successful.

John Adams (October 30 [O.S. October 19] 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American lawyer, author, statesman, and diplomat. He served as the second President of the United States (1797–1801) and the first Vice President (1789–97) and, as a Founding Father, he was a leader of American independence from Great Britain.Adams was a political theorist in the Age of Enlightenment who promoted republicanism and a strong central government. His innovative ideas were frequently published. He was also a dedicated diarist and correspondent, particularly with his wife and key advisor Abigail.

He collaborated with his cousin, revolutionary leader Samuel Adams, but he established his own prominence prior to the American Revolution. After the Boston Massacre, he provided a successful (though unpopular) legal defense of the accused British soldiers, in the face of severe local anti-British sentiment and driven by his devotion to the right to counsel and the "protect[ion] of innocence".Adams was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, where he played a leading role in persuading Congress to declare independence. He assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and was its foremost advocate in the Congress. As a diplomat in Europe, he helped negotiate the eventual peace treaty with Great Britain, and acquired vital governmental loans from Amsterdam bankers. Adams was the primary author of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780 which influenced American political theory, as did his earlier Thoughts on Government (1776).

Adams' credentials as a revolutionary secured for him two terms as President George Washington's vice president (1789 to 1797) and also his own election in 1796 as the second president. In his single term as president, he encountered fierce criticism from the Jeffersonian Republicans, as well as the dominant faction in his own Federalist Party, led by his rival Alexander Hamilton. Adams signed the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, and built up the army and navy in the face of an undeclared naval "Quasi-War" with France. The major accomplishment of his presidency was a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the face of Hamilton's opposition. Due to his strong posture on defense, Adams is "often called the father of the American Navy". He was the first U.S. president to reside in the executive mansion, now known as the White House.

In 1800, Adams lost re-election to Thomas Jefferson and retired to Massachusetts. He eventually resumed his friendship with Jefferson upon the latter's own retirement by initiating a correspondence which lasted fourteen years. He and his wife established a family of politicians, diplomats, and historians now referred to as the Adams political family. Adams was the father of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States. He died on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Modern historians in the aggregate have favorably ranked his administration.

Israel and its reluctance to Choose Peace? Status Quo? One State? Two State? Three State ? Confederation? Federation?

There is agreement on very little in the fractious Holy Land, but on one issue there is near unanimity these days: A two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more distant than ever, so unimaginable that it appears little more than an illusion sustained by lazy thinking, interest in the status quo or plain exhaustion.

From Tel Aviv to Ramallah in the West Bank, from the largely Arab city of Nazareth to Jerusalem, I found virtually nobody on either side prepared to offer anything but a negative assessment of the two-state idea. Diagnoses ranged from moribund to clinically dead. Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem, up from about 249,000 in 2005. The incorporation of all the biblical Land of Israel has advanced too far, for too long, to be reversed now.

Greater Israel is what Israelis know; the smaller Israel west of the Green Line that emerged from the 1947-49 war of independence is a fading memory. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with its contempt for Palestinians and dissenting voices in general, prefers things that way, as the steady expansion of settlements demonstrates. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, has lost the legitimacy, the cohesion and the will to do much about it. The cancellation of municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza that had been set for this month was another sign of paralyzing Palestinian infighting.

“Two states are not achievable in the foreseeable future,” the former Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, told me. “It has become a process about a process, and not real.”

The Obama administration has reached a point of acute exasperation. The Israeli announcement this month of a new West Bank settlement was the final straw, coming just weeks after the US concluded a $38 billion, 10-year military aid deal. Israel’s explanation that the settlement was a “satellite” of another did not wash; its actions were viewed as egregious. Seldom has Moshe Dayan’s old dictum — “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice” — been more vividly illustrated. Yet it’s uncertain if the US is prepared to calibrate its ironclad support in order to pressure Israel into change.

Within Israel, where Netanyahu has now amassed more than a decade in power, the political and cultural drift is toward ever more assertive and intolerant nationalism. Criticism is increasingly equated with treason. Groups like B’Tselem, which focuses on allegations of human rights violations against Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories, are under withering attack. The Messianic religious Zionism that holds all the West Bank to be Israel’s by biblical decree is ascendant. The left is in feeble disarray.

It is sobering to note that Netanyahu probably represents the more moderate wing of his government.

The most credible challenge to him may eventually come from his own spot on the political spectrum, the center-right, in the form of the telegenic Yair Lapid, who told me that Netanyahu “won’t merit even a page in Israeli history books.” Lapid believes he can conjure up some two-state magic, but he began his first political campaign in the large settlement of Ariel, and the notion that he can reverse the settler movement seems far-fetched.

I drove to Ramallah, through a clogged checkpoint, always a startling transition from the efficient developed-world hum of Israel to the dust and haphazardness of the West Bank. I stopped to see Walid Batrawi, Director of BBC Media Action, a charity mentoring journalists and promoting an independent press. He was despondent, describing a “lack of confidence and faith in anything.” Palestinian statehood was “more distant than ever.” Abbas was distracted, embroiled in the conflicts of Fatah, worried about Hamas, providing no direction. “Something has been lost…A special feeling of patriotism, of belonging, is vanishing.”

In Ramallah, I heard similar sentiments, talk of a more individualistic Palestinian society, with less sense of community, where people were focused on taking care of themselves and doing the best they could with the current situation. Two states had become a bad joke. Young people had more faith in nonviolent resistance leading eventually to equal rights within a single state than in yet another aborted international peace initiative or aborted uprising.

Palestinians — whether in Israel proper, where the 1.5 million Arab citizens make up about 17% of a population of 8.5 million, or in the West Bank, where they number about 2.6 million — are tired of the humiliations, big and small, that Israel dishes out. How, they wonder, can anything resembling a state ever be fashioned from their countless little self-administering enclaves on the West Bank broken up by Israeli settlements?

In a sense, then, Israel has won. David Ben-Gurion was right when he observed in 1949 that, “When the matter is dragged out — it brings us benefits.” Policy since then has been pretty consistent: Create facts on the ground; break the Arabs’ will through force; push for as much of the biblical Land of Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as possible.

If the maximalist camp was tempered, it was chiefly through the knowledge that with all the land came people, specifically millions more Palestinians, and a 50-50 state was not what the Zionist dream was about. Hence Israel’s improvised 49-year occupation — in effect dominion over Palestinians without enfranchisement of Palestinians. Hence, too, the periodic stabs at a two-state peace, most conspicuously the Oslo accords of 1993: Running the lives of subjugated others is exhausting, corrupting and inherently violent, as well as incompatible with true democracy.

Back in Tel Aviv, I had dinner with Gil Friedlander. He’s an Israeli patriot who served in the air force for many years, before creating and selling a tech company. But his country, so dynamic on the economic front, fertile soil for start-ups, finds itself at a terrible political impasse.

“The great victorious war of 1967 had an impact that is eating us from the inside,” he said. “I would be more than happy to get out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and build a country with a morality I believe in. I will fight for peace, but I will not fight to maintain the status quo.” He described feeling more and more confined, living in “smaller and smaller areas where I find people who think like me,” and feeling a stranger in the Jerusalem where he grew up.

I have long been a strong advocate of a two-state outcome myself. But there is no point beating a dead horse. It is time for incremental steps instead. Israel could find lots of ways to ease humiliations and economic hardship for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, without compromising its security. It could take down some roadblocks, curtail the formalities for movement in and out of Gaza, and grant more building permits in the West Bank, as it just has in quietly authorizing some Palestinian development plans in West Bank areas under exclusive Israeli control. It could even, without saying so, stop settlement expansion.

The worst thing would be for Western leaders to come up with some new “peace initiative” that would offer a convenient diversion from political responsibility. Netanyahu will one day have to tell Israelis if he wants a big binational state or a smaller Jewish-majority state side by side with a Palestinian state. He is trying his best to avoid making the choice, keeping millions of Palestinians in limbo; the West helps him with a “peace process” that goes nowhere. Abbas also owes his people clarity and accountability — as well as a political destination. He is marking time. After the election but before he leaves office, President Obama may present America’s principles for a two-state outcome in a Security Council resolution that sets out how Israel and Palestine would look in their “final status.” Israel is strongly opposed. That is the best reason for doing it. As long as Israel has a blank check from Washington and an effective Security Council veto through the US, nothing will change. And something has to.

Israel is now a modern society. Its per capita income is higher than Spain’s. But behind the sheen of economic success, the shadow of undefined borders and violence always lurks. I was a guest at a dinner on a penthouse terrace hosted by a former Israeli ambassador to the US and attended by a former head of military intelligence, a tough Israeli lawyer and an Arab Israeli couple with a high-tech neuroscience business, among other luminaries. Tensions rose.

Reem Younis, one of the Arab entrepreneurs, was saying that the father of her husband, Imad, in his will had identified property lost to Israel in 1948 that his sons might try to recover, whereupon an Israeli woman, alluding to property her family had lost in Austria in the Holocaust, said, “You have to move forward, you cannot go back.” Whereupon the lawyer pressed the Younises, demanding to know if they saw themselves as Israelis, or Palestinians, or Muslims, or Arabs, or what. “You cannot force me to choose!” Imad Younis exclaimed. “I’m an Israeli. I’m a Palestinian. I’m an Arab. I’m a Christian, as it happens. I am all of these identities. I identify with the people in what amounts to an Israeli prison in Jenin or Nablus on the West Bank.” Reem said, “I can tell you this, on the day that I say I’m an Israeli, we should all be very proud.” That solemn little sentence, with its implicit admonition to Israel to extend equal rights to all its citizens, induced a solemn little silence.

“How can you feel equal when you are not?” Reem said, mentioning that she had found it impossible to buy a house in a nearby town because she is an Arab. “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish.”

Imad believes the personal trumps the political. “One state or two states? Who cares?” he told me. “What matters is human dignity and equality under the same law. Palestinian kids want to live well. That’s what they want.”

Israel and its reluctance to Choose Peace? Status Quo? One State? Two State? Three State ? Confederation? Federation?

There is agreement on very little in the fractious Holy Land, but on one issue there is near unanimity these days: A two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more distant than ever, so unimaginable that it appears little more than an illusion sustained by lazy thinking, interest in the status quo or plain exhaustion.

From Tel Aviv to Ramallah in the West Bank, from the largely Arab city of Nazareth to Jerusalem, I found virtually nobody on either side prepared to offer anything but a negative assessment of the two-state idea. Diagnoses ranged from moribund to clinically dead. Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem, up from about 249,000 in 2005. The incorporation of all the biblical Land of Israel has advanced too far, for too long, to be reversed now.

Greater Israel is what Israelis know; the smaller Israel west of the Green Line that emerged from the 1947-49 war of independence is a fading memory. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with its contempt for Palestinians and dissenting voices in general, prefers things that way, as the steady expansion of settlements demonstrates. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, has lost the legitimacy, the cohesion and the will to do much about it. The cancellation of municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza that had been set for this month was another sign of paralyzing Palestinian infighting.

“Two states are not achievable in the foreseeable future,” the former Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, told me. “It has become a process about a process, and not real.”

The Obama administration has reached a point of acute exasperation. The Israeli announcement this month of a new West Bank settlement was the final straw, coming just weeks after the US concluded a $38 billion, 10-year military aid deal. Israel’s explanation that the settlement was a “satellite” of another did not wash; its actions were viewed as egregious. Seldom has Moshe Dayan’s old dictum — “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice” — been more vividly illustrated. Yet it’s uncertain if the US is prepared to calibrate its ironclad support in order to pressure Israel into change.

Within Israel, where Netanyahu has now amassed more than a decade in power, the political and cultural drift is toward ever more assertive and intolerant nationalism. Criticism is increasingly equated with treason. Groups like B’Tselem, which focuses on allegations of human rights violations against Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories, are under withering attack. The Messianic religious Zionism that holds all the West Bank to be Israel’s by biblical decree is ascendant. The left is in feeble disarray.

It is sobering to note that Netanyahu probably represents the more moderate wing of his government.

The most credible challenge to him may eventually come from his own spot on the political spectrum, the center-right, in the form of the telegenic Yair Lapid, who told me that Netanyahu “won’t merit even a page in Israeli history books.” Lapid believes he can conjure up some two-state magic, but he began his first political campaign in the large settlement of Ariel, and the notion that he can reverse the settler movement seems far-fetched.

I drove to Ramallah, through a clogged checkpoint, always a startling transition from the efficient developed-world hum of Israel to the dust and haphazardness of the West Bank. I stopped to see Walid Batrawi, Director of BBC Media Action, a charity mentoring journalists and promoting an independent press. He was despondent, describing a “lack of confidence and faith in anything.” Palestinian statehood was “more distant than ever.” Abbas was distracted, embroiled in the conflicts of Fatah, worried about Hamas, providing no direction. “Something has been lost…A special feeling of patriotism, of belonging, is vanishing.”

In Ramallah, I heard similar sentiments, talk of a more individualistic Palestinian society, with less sense of community, where people were focused on taking care of themselves and doing the best they could with the current situation. Two states had become a bad joke. Young people had more faith in nonviolent resistance leading eventually to equal rights within a single state than in yet another aborted international peace initiative or aborted uprising.

Palestinians — whether in Israel proper, where the 1.5 million Arab citizens make up about 17% of a population of 8.5 million, or in the West Bank, where they number about 2.6 million — are tired of the humiliations, big and small, that Israel dishes out. How, they wonder, can anything resembling a state ever be fashioned from their countless little self-administering enclaves on the West Bank broken up by Israeli settlements?

In a sense, then, Israel has won. David Ben-Gurion was right when he observed in 1949 that, “When the matter is dragged out — it brings us benefits.” Policy since then has been pretty consistent: Create facts on the ground; break the Arabs’ will through force; push for as much of the biblical Land of Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as possible.

If the maximalist camp was tempered, it was chiefly through the knowledge that with all the land came people, specifically millions more Palestinians, and a 50-50 state was not what the Zionist dream was about. Hence Israel’s improvised 49-year occupation — in effect dominion over Palestinians without enfranchisement of Palestinians. Hence, too, the periodic stabs at a two-state peace, most conspicuously the Oslo accords of 1993: Running the lives of subjugated others is exhausting, corrupting and inherently violent, as well as incompatible with true democracy.

Back in Tel Aviv, I had dinner with Gil Friedlander. He’s an Israeli patriot who served in the air force for many years, before creating and selling a tech company. But his country, so dynamic on the economic front, fertile soil for start-ups, finds itself at a terrible political impasse.

“The great victorious war of 1967 had an impact that is eating us from the inside,” he said. “I would be more than happy to get out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and build a country with a morality I believe in. I will fight for peace, but I will not fight to maintain the status quo.” He described feeling more and more confined, living in “smaller and smaller areas where I find people who think like me,” and feeling a stranger in the Jerusalem where he grew up.

I have long been a strong advocate of a two-state outcome myself. But there is no point beating a dead horse. It is time for incremental steps instead. Israel could find lots of ways to ease humiliations and economic hardship for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, without compromising its security. It could take down some roadblocks, curtail the formalities for movement in and out of Gaza, and grant more building permits in the West Bank, as it just has in quietly authorizing some Palestinian development plans in West Bank areas under exclusive Israeli control. It could even, without saying so, stop settlement expansion.

The worst thing would be for Western leaders to come up with some new “peace initiative” that would offer a convenient diversion from political responsibility. Netanyahu will one day have to tell Israelis if he wants a big binational state or a smaller Jewish-majority state side by side with a Palestinian state. He is trying his best to avoid making the choice, keeping millions of Palestinians in limbo; the West helps him with a “peace process” that goes nowhere. Abbas also owes his people clarity and accountability — as well as a political destination. He is marking time. After the election but before he leaves office, President Obama may present America’s principles for a two-state outcome in a Security Council resolution that sets out how Israel and Palestine would look in their “final status.” Israel is strongly opposed. That is the best reason for doing it. As long as Israel has a blank check from Washington and an effective Security Council veto through the US, nothing will change. And something has to.

Israel is now a modern society. Its per capita income is higher than Spain’s. But behind the sheen of economic success, the shadow of undefined borders and violence always lurks. I was a guest at a dinner on a penthouse terrace hosted by a former Israeli ambassador to the US and attended by a former head of military intelligence, a tough Israeli lawyer and an Arab Israeli couple with a high-tech neuroscience business, among other luminaries. Tensions rose.

Reem Younis, one of the Arab entrepreneurs, was saying that the father of her husband, Imad, in his will had identified property lost to Israel in 1948 that his sons might try to recover, whereupon an Israeli woman, alluding to property her family had lost in Austria in the Holocaust, said, “You have to move forward, you cannot go back.” Whereupon the lawyer pressed the Younises, demanding to know if they saw themselves as Israelis, or Palestinians, or Muslims, or Arabs, or what. “You cannot force me to choose!” Imad Younis exclaimed. “I’m an Israeli. I’m a Palestinian. I’m an Arab. I’m a Christian, as it happens. I am all of these identities. I identify with the people in what amounts to an Israeli prison in Jenin or Nablus on the West Bank.” Reem said, “I can tell you this, on the day that I say I’m an Israeli, we should all be very proud.” That solemn little sentence, with its implicit admonition to Israel to extend equal rights to all its citizens, induced a solemn little silence.

“How can you feel equal when you are not?” Reem said, mentioning that she had found it impossible to buy a house in a nearby town because she is an Arab. “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish.”

Imad believes the personal trumps the political. “One state or two states? Who cares?” he told me. “What matters is human dignity and equality under the same law. Palestinian kids want to live well. That’s what they want.”

Abbas at Mount Herzl: A Complex Man at a Complex Moment

0

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to attend Shimon Peres's funeral on Mount Herzl – a highly meaningful Zionist site, and extolled as such by President Obama – should not be taken lightly. It required atypical courage from a man in fragile health, much reviled by many Palestinians, at a time of myriad conspiracies against him. This was another milestone in a complex journey that has taken Abbas from the service of the Soviet Union to an American orientation, and taught him the futility of the “armed struggle.” He does continue, however, to lionize “lone wolf” murderers, and to insist that Israel cannot be recognized as the nation state of the Jewish People.

What brought Mahmoud Abbas to Mount Herzl? Perhaps the realization that Palestinian options are limited, and are getting less promising as time goes by.

The "One-State Solution" is a fear-mongers' intellectual construct, not a viable option. Violence will achieve nothing but more pain. The vision of international coercion, cooked up by the Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, has delivered little – though it is possible that Abbas’s attendance at the funeral was tied, explicitly or implicitly, to an American quid pro quo at the UN Security Council.

There is a less cynical possibility. It could be that at long last, Abbas was attempting, through the gesture of his attendance at the funeral, to appeal to Israeli public opinion. For this to succeed, however, there will need to be more than the traditional bid to mobilize the Israeli left. If he is to make inroads to the Israeli mainstream, Abbas would do well to consider the Zionist messages in Obama's speech about a nation restored to its homeland. (Sadly, that prospect was undermined by an act of State Department folly: the refusal to acknowledge that the funeral took place in Israel.)

The presence of "President Abbas," as President Obama noted in his own oration, was indeed an indication of the "unfinished business of peace." It was, in its own way, an important (if symbolic) event. It may well be the case that for both Abbas and Netanyahu, there are good reasons at the moment to avoid taking things beyond the handshake and brief conversation caught on camera. Their fleeting interaction nevertheless represents a milestone that should not be taken lightly.

It took courage, which Abbas does not often possess. Here was a man in fragile health – he underwent a coronary bypass a week after the funeral – and besieged by Arab plans to bring in his hated rival, Muhammad Dahlan, either as his successor or as the power behind his successor. It was not an easy moment at which to ignore bitter criticism.

Yet he did attend the funeral, and was seated in the front row amidst Israeli flags at the very pinnacle of Zionist symbolism, the sacramental spot at Mount Herzl where Israel marks its sorrows and joys. His decision was made all the more remarkable by the absence of neighbors with whom Israel has much warmer relations, such as King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Abdel Fattah Sisi of Egypt.

Abbas’s decision remains highly controversial. Hamas has made use of it to call him a traitor, and the Palestinian social networks have heaped abuse on his head. Even the political leaders of Israeli Arabs – indeed, the entire "United List," which represents most of them in the Knesset – decided to remain absent, making his presence even more striking.

In the face of such predictable opprobrium, why did he attend?

While not always willing or able to translate his own insights into action, Abbas has been one of the more far-sighted leaders in the Palestinian national movement. He was once a Soviet agent, as the recent revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive confirm. The fingerprints of the KGB 10th Directorate are clearly visible on his infamous Ph.D. dissertation, which purveyed poisonous anti-Zionist propaganda about alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.

But Abbas’s close association with Moscow, and his understanding of what ailed it, also made him the first of his circle to grasp that the Soviet project had failed, and to begin to reorient the PLO towards the US.

More recently, the shock of seeing the Americans abandon their friends, particularly Husni Mubarak, added to Abbas’s natural caution at the negotiating table. This caution underlay his stubborn insistence on doomed preconditions that would help him make his case to his own people. His stances are thus often self-contradictory.

In 2002, he plucked up the courage to criticize Arafat for choosing violence ("militarizing the Intifada") – but when violence erupted again in 2015, he expressed support and admiration for the "lone wolf" attackers killed while taking, or trying to take, the lives of Israelis. He continues to authorize counter-terrorism cooperation with the Israeli security forces while paying fat checks to the families of terrorists killed or caught. He has spoken words of peace, but adamantly refuses to recognize Israel as the national state of the Jewish people. He seems at times to wish to enshrine the Palestinian position that Judaism is a religion, but the Jews are not a people.

If that is indeed his position, what was he doing at the place most intimately identified with Jewish peoplehood and the Zionist project? To understand what led him there, it is necessary to reexamine the basic choices facing the Palestinians.

Israel is strong, both militarily and economically. Despite severe disputes with several American administrations, it continues to enjoy a special standing in the hearts and minds of Americans. The Palestinians are weak, poor, divided and increasingly marginal. It will be no easy task for them to secure an outcome that does not reflect this imbalance of power.

On the face of it, there are four main avenues of action open to them. They are not mutually exclusive, but each represents a different source of power in the international and regional system. None seems especially promising, some even less so than others:

• The Palestinians can let go of their separate national identity (as a strategy, only to restore it when the time comes) and seek to destroy Israel "democratically" by calling for a one-state solution. The underlying assumption is that this would soon give them a majority in a reconstituted Knesset through which they can dismantle the Zionist project. This fantasy is popular with some intellectuals, and used by Israeli fear-mongers on the left as a warning against the consequences of present policies. But unless Israel commits institutional suicide on a massive scale, this is unlikely to happen (nor can it really be enforced through international coercion). It is useful as an abstract template against which to measure the dangerous outcomes of specific decisions on the ground. It is not a practicable option.
• The Palestinians can use violence to cower the Israeli people into submission. This is something even Hamas understands to be unfeasible, though it remains at the core of its ideology of muqawwama(resistance). Despite Palestinian propaganda and Abbas’s own virulent and de-humanizing comments about the "herds" (qut'an) of settlers, it is safe to assume that he still stands by his long-time realization that a resumption of the "armed struggle" would be a disaster. He is certainly hearing that from his key allies in the Arab world, above all Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for whom a flare-up of Palestinian violence is the last thing they need as they battle their real enemies (Iran, ISIS, and the Muslim Brotherhood). Hence the continued security cooperation with Israel, now headed by a unified command structure led by Majid Faraj (who joined Abbas at the funeral). This state of affairs contrasts sharply with the chaotic days of Rajoub, Tirawi and Dahlan chasing each other around, as was the case under Arafat.
• The Palestinians can attempt to corner Israel through international pressure, whether that of the global BDS movement or that of the EU and ultimately the UN (if the US allows it). This course was popularized by Erekat, "the Chief Negotiator" and propagandist.  It rests on Israeli vulnerability to its dependence on foreign markets and the psychological impact of perceived isolation. Israel's regional and global standing may have actually improved in recent years, but the Palestinians are still central to the concerns of a highly vocal minority of committed "progressives" in northwestern Europe and parts of the North American elite, who are able at times to shape the national agenda. But on closer examination, the coercive option looks less and less promising. The US remains formally committed to Israeli security. The European "guidelines" had less of an impact than expected, and are in any case limited to a very narrow spectrum of products and activities. Even the ultimate weapon of coercion – the International Criminal Court – is proving less useful to the Palestinians than they had hoped. Two and a half years after the Palestinians’ accession to the Statute of Rome, a team of ICC prosecutors, on their first visit to Israel, explicitly declared that they were coming not to collect evidence or even assess the adequacy of existing legal systems, but simply to engage in education and outreach.  That is a far cry from what Erekat attempted to conjure up in 2014 when he advocated this strategy.
• The Palestinians can attempt to convince the Israeli people that a generous approach towards them is in their own long-term interest. Here and there, signs of such an approach have appeared, only to vanish again because of resistance or the presence of a more appealing alternative. By responding positively to the urgent request of Peres's daughter, Tzvia Walden, to attend her father's funeral, Abbas signaled that to some extent, he does understand that the ultimate tribunal on the prospect of a future outcome will not be in the Hague, but in the court of Israeli public opinion. It is possible, as mentioned, that Abbas’s decision to attend Peres’s funeral was coerced by the Americans, to be compensated by a quid pro quo at the Security Council during Obama's lame duck period. But coercion might not have been the motivating factor. The Palestinian leader may well have come to doubt Erekat's siren song.

If Abbas does wish to reach out to the Israeli people, the effort cannot end with one symbolic act. Moreover, the traditional Palestinian approach to the Israeli political arena – trying to mobilize the committed Israeli left against their right-wing government – will no longer suffice. It would therefore be wise of Abbas to revisit the actual text of President Obama's speech. It made very clear that Israel is indeed, by right, the embodiment of the Jewish people's right to self–determination.

The Israeli left almost exclusively chose to quote the passages in Obama’s speech that implied that Israel should do more for peace; whereas many on the right side of the Israeli political map are so livid about Obama's policies as to have ignored his message altogether. But the speech did include strong, resonant Zionist statements about a nation restored to its ancestral homeland. This language, which Obama also used during his official visit in March 2013, should be the point of departure for any follow-up to the unique conjunction of participants and speeches at the funeral.

Sadly, the State Department largely vitiated this possibility by counter-factually suggesting yet again that Jerusalem is not in Israel. This exercise in futility can only make it harder for sober Palestinians to hear what Obama explicitly said about the Zionist project, as well as about young people in the Arab world being raised to hate. But if they are ever to engage seriously with the Israeli mainstream, those words are precisely what they should take away from this extraordinary event.

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This article was written Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman is a senior research associate at the BESA Center, and former deputy for foreign policy and international affairs at the National Security Council. He is also a member of the faculty at Shalem College.It has been republished with permission of the Author and the BESA Center.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

Israeli Palestinian Policy – Whereto?

 

Yaakov Amidror, Hillel Frisch, Gershon Hacohen, Efraim Inbar, Eran Lerman and Max Singer discuss Israel's policies on the Palestinian issue, in a post-Obama and post-Abbas era. All have recently spoken as BESA seminars ( Begin Sadat Institute at Bar Ilan Universities. BESA Fortnightly Seminars  are free. )

The upshot of their debate: Apply Obama’s first rule of governance. “Don’t do stupid things.” It is wiser for Israel to defer action than to take steps that threaten to make a bad situation worse. Conflict management is currently the least-worst option

With Barack Obama’s term as president of the US coming to an end, and Mahmoud Abbas’ four year term as Palestinian leader winding down too( after 11 years in office , 7 by deferring repeatedly democratic elections to reelect or replace him), the Israeli government will soon have an opportunity to recalibrate its diplomatic policies. Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue has been ham-fistedly frozen for two decades.

But in which direction should Israel go? Fortify or vitiate the Fatah-led dictatorship in Ramallah? Redeploy from parts of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), or re-assert Israel’s sovereign presence in major parts of Judea and Samaria through renewed building?

Do withdrawals toward the coastal plain offer a saner and safer future for Israel; or is building a united and “greater” Jerusalem from Jericho to Jaffa the DNA that holds the key to the future of Israel and Zionism – as General Gershon Hacohen argues?

Muddle through, or attempt a radical paradigm shift?

These questions have been argued out in recent months in the seminar rooms and on the website of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies by center associates, including Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror (the Rosshandler senior fellow at the center, and a former national security advisor to the Prime Minister), Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman (a former deputy national security advisor), and professors Hillel Frisch (an Arabist), Efraim Inbar (a strategist), and Max Singer (a defense expert).

The upshot of their debate: Apply Obama’s first rule of governance. “Don’t do stupid things.” It is wiser for Israel to defer action than to take steps that threaten to make a bad situation worse.

***

Frisch mapped out five possible Israeli approaches: caretaker conflict management, creative friction, constructive chaos, unilateral withdrawal, and unilateral annexation. The caretaker option is probably the most feasible, he feels; unilateral withdrawal is the least; and none of the options is ideal. In every case, Israel will have to maintain a significant military presence in Judea and Samaria.

Frisch completely dismisses a sixth option: Rapid establishment of a full-fledged Palestinian state. Neither he nor his colleagues view this as feasible or advisable in the foreseeable future.

Inbar says that “Israelis have gradually come to realize that at present the Palestinians are neither a partner for comprehensive peace nor capable of establishing a viable state, unfortunately. The Palestinian Authority has no intention of accepting a Jewish state in any borders, and the two sides remain far apart on most of the concrete issues to be resolved.”

“Israel’s recent governments are left, willy-nilly, with a de facto conflict-management approach, without foreclosing any options. While there are costs to this wait-and-see approach, let’s remember this was the approach favored by David Ben-Gurion. He believed in buying time to build a stronger state and in hanging on until opponents yield their radical goals or circumstances change for the better.”

Amidror too dislikes the drive for unilateral Israeli initiatives. “A partial withdrawal would likely increase, rather than decrease, Palestinian terrorism, as Palestinians would be motivated to push harder for total Israeli withdrawal. On the other hand, Israeli annexation would inflame Palestinian passions and engender severe opposition to Israel abroad.”

“This is not the time to embark on useless experiments or risky unilateral initiatives, either in the hope of preparing the ground for an eventual Palestinian state or in the hope of thwarting it. When standing on the edge of a cliff, it is wiser to keep still than to step forward,” Amidror concludes.

Lerman agrees, noting that many factors bind both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Opposition Leader Herzog to their current position of genuine but hung support for the two-state rubric. This includes the sensitivities of neighbors who matter (Jordan, Egypt, etc.), the views of Diaspora Jewry and of Western diplomatic allies, and defense establishment preferences for the status quo.

But Lerman also warns that the false Palestinian narrative of one-sided victimhood is a major hindrance to all peace efforts. “Global actors that want to help achieve peace need to assist the Palestinians in moving beyond wallowing in self-pity and rituals of bashing Israel,” he says.

“The concept of painful but practical compromises seems alien to the Palestinians, and the international community is not doing its part to help the Palestinians mature towards this realization.”

Along these lines, Singer says that Washington and Brussels must robustly make clear their distaste for Palestinian denial of the Jewish People’s connection to the land of Israel and Jerusalem. They should modify their aid programs to reduce Palestinian use of foreign money to support terror; determinedly defend free speech in Palestinian society; and act to resettle Palestinian refugees outside of Israel.

Singer also feels that Israel should improve its public diplomacy “by moving from appeasement to truth-telling.” Specifically, Israel should formally adopt the report of Israel Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy to challenge the myth that Israel has stolen Palestinian land. “Even opponents of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and supporters of a two-state solution should support Levy’s affirmation of Israel’s historic and settlement rights in the territories. This is critical in leveling the diplomatic playing field. Israel must not go into future negotiations as a guilty party.”

General Hacohen goes beyond his BESA Center colleagues. To him, caretaking and truth-telling are insufficient. He believes in Israeli activism that forces the adversary onto the defensive and creates advantageous new situations. This means maneuvering and expanding in Jerusalem and the Judean/Samarian heartland. “Settlements are forward outposts of Zionism, in addition to their being critical to Israel’s military deployment in the territories. Where there is a farmer on his land,” he says, “the army has the strength to rule.”

Antisemitism's Third Rail

Antisemitism's Third Rail

In an address before the EU parliament last month, Conference of European Rabbis president Pinchas Goldschmidt said that European Jews feel like they are standing in the middle of a railroad track with trains bearing down on them from both directions.

One train is "radical Islam and Islamic terrorism," he said; the other is "the antisemitism of old Europe, the extreme Right." Both "are existential threats" for European Jews, he warned. "Both trains have to be halted before it's too late."

Rabbi Goldschmidt's analogy aptly summates why European Jews feel sufficiently threatened to be emigrating in record numbers. The vast majority of rampant anti-Jewish violence on the continent is committed by Muslims, and most of the rest is perpetrated by individuals (and sometimes groups) that can be broadly characterized as right-wing. Anti-Jewish violence in the United States, which "rose dramatically last year" according to the Anti-Defamation League, displays a similar breakdown.

The departure of Jews from progressive circles is less a byproduct of militant anti-Zionism than its overriding purpose.

But there is third train on an adjoining rail, advancing more slowly. This one isn't producing physical assaults on Jews, or even (in most cases) explicit expressions of antipathy to Jews. However, it is fueling a different kind of Jewish emigration, made all the more disturbing by the fact that it elicits far less public attention and outrage.

Militant anti-Zionism first emerged in force in the West in the late 1960s, fueled by the growing popularity of far-left ideologies, hostility to allies of America, and Israel's sweeping military victory in 1967.

In an era when open expressions of hostility to Jews had become taboo, antisemitism – a unique Western prejudice two millennia in the making, with a remarkable ability to find expression across the political spectrum – surely helped swell the chorus of voices rejecting Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. But a case could be made that it was not the driving force of the movement.

No longer. Militant anti-Zionism has become centered around the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose singular purpose is introducing defamatory anti-Israel language into the bylaws and resolutions of NGOs, political parties, student groups and other institutions advancing unrelated, mostly leftist or progressive, agendas.

Clockwise from left: A 2003 anti-war rally in San Francisco; a 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City; a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Cleveland, Ohio.

These hijackings invariably drive large numbers of Jewish activists (and others outraged by antisemitism) out of the host movements, contributing to their decline. This pattern is most evident in the trajectories of the American anti-war and Occupy Wall Street movements, in the turmoil rocking Britain's Labour Party this spring and most recently in the firestorm that erupted following the Black Lives Matter movement's adoption of a formal manifesto in August charging Israel with genocide, which led to angry denunciations by its progressive Jewish allies, such as T'ruah and theJewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston (JCRC).

Of course, sabotaging progressive causes doesn't exactly advance the movement's declared aims. On the contrary, it weakens the very currents in Western society most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. And while the movement claims it seeks to "pressure Israel" to end its "oppression of Palestinians," its liberal use of Holocaust inversion (claiming Israelis are as bad as Nazis) and tactics glaringly reminiscent of inter-war antisemitism in the West (boycotts, blacklists, etc.) underscore that it isn't really aiming to persuade any Israelis.

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the departure of Jews from organized progressive causes is less a byproduct of militant anti-Zionist activism today than its overriding purpose. In a recent Tablet article, entitled "Why I Am Finally Raising My Voice Against Jewish Erasure in the Anti-Racism Movement," activist Carly Pildis recounts how merely mentioning her Jewish faith in progressive circles today brings hostile reactions. "I never once brought up Israel to these colleagues, but Israel was discussed at me, angrily, many times," writes Pildis, best known for her efforts to stop the 2011 execution of Troy Davis for killing a police officer.

Jewish erasure is perhaps most evident on college campuses. In an October 2 New York Times op-ed, the president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, Benjamin Gladstone, recounts efforts by BDS activists to cut him out of planning for a student demonstration calling for admittance of Syrian refugees because of his high-profile involvement in campus Jewish organizations.

He also notes that they circulated a petition against a lecture by transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because it was sponsored by Hillel. They "would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation."

We will all suffer if progressivism becomes Judenrein.

Although a resounding failure in its declared aims, the BDS movement has been increasingly successful in pushing Jews out of organized progressive circles.

While few conservatives lose much sleep over turmoil infecting the far Left and liberals continue to balk at calling out "progressive" antisemites, little is being done to combat this trend. Even university administrators, as Winfield Myers warned in The Miami Herald last February, typically object to Israel boycotts only on academic freedom grounds, while tolerating the movement's hate speech.

Make no mistake – we will all suffer if progressivism becomes Judenrein, for it will serve to normalize the social exclusion of Jews elsewhere. Surely we have learned by now where that can lead.

The Underground Tunnel Omission: A Predictable Failure

Republished with permission of the Author, Amir Rapaport

The Underground Tunnel Omission: A Predictable Failure
As far back as 2008 I cautioned that the IDF is not doing enough to cope with the major threat posed by the subterranean system being constructed by Hamas: technology is not likely to provide a solution to this problem and even political beheadings will contribute nothing. Amir Rapaport's weekly column

Amir Rapaport | 21/10/2016
http://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/content/underground-tunnel-omission-predictable-failure

One of the most severe chronic diseases of the IDF is a particularly short corporate memory. Commanders in the various corps of the 'green' (ground) military change at a mind-boggling pace, and the knowledge accumulated during the tenure of a serving commander will fade away very often – or would have to be learned afresh, with more blood spilled as tuition fees. The results of this inbuilt failure become evident again and again, during every new major operation. Naturally, during peacetime, many of these faults remain hidden from public view.

The omission involving the underground tunnels in the Gaza Strip, which evolved into the most acute aspect of Operation Protective Edge, is a significant example of the implications of that chronic disease, and is the natural extension of other omissions from the more distant past. Against the background of this omission, some senior military officers and government officials are currently anxiously awaiting the forthcoming report by the State Comptroller, who has been investigating the information that was available about the tunnel threat and the solutions provided for that threat. The report is to be submitted very soon, and dozens of lawyers are already conducting a series of dialogs with the senior officials of the State Comptroller's office in an attempt to contain the damage to the respective reputations of their clients.

Additionally, last week the IDF Radio revealed, for the first time, findings of the IDF Commission of Inquiry headed by Brigadier-General Yossi Bachar, which investigated the issue pursuant to Operation Protective Edge. Amazingly, that commission of inquiry ruled that the IDF had not prepared properly to face the tunnel threat.

The tremendous efforts currently under way are an utter waste of time. Here are some simple and alternative findings that were listed in a report regarding this omission which I had written long before Operation Protective Edge. The following was published on the NRG website on October 25, 2008, under the heading 'The Surprises Awaiting IDF under the Ground in the Gaza Strip'.

This is what I had written back then: "A construction effort is currently under way in the Gaza Strip. Admittedly, it cannot be seen, but it is gaining momentum nevertheless. We can tell just by the massive demand for cement, as on the ground you cannot see where all this cement is going. Throughout the Gaza Strip there are hardly any construction sites where high-rise buildings are being erected, and even the number of low-rise buildings currently under construction is very small. This gap can lead to only one conclusion: he who does not build high – builds deep. Most of the construction work currently under way is being carried out clandestinely, under the ground.

"What are they building down there? Ask the Hezbollah terrorists who invented the 'nature reserves' in Lebanon – those hidden, impenetrable firing positions that changed the rules so dramatically in the summer of 2006. That is the process currently taking place throughout the Gaza Strip – massive underground systems, bunkers, basements and mainly an infinite web of tunnels and fighting trenches.

"If the ceasefire agreement should collapse and IDF invade the Gaza Strip, those tunnels will be manned by thousands of terrorists who would attempt to inflict heavy casualties on the invading forces."

I also pointed out that "Military sources estimate that Hamas are building tunnels for two primary needs – offensive and defensive operations. The tunnels are being constructed under the central parts of such cities as Rafah or even Gaza, where, according to Hamas' estimates, extensive combat encounters could take place when IDF invade the Gaza Strip.

"The tunnels inside the cities were intended to enable Hamas terrorists to move freely from street to street under the ground, in order to take the IDF units by surprise – from a different position every time. The fighting trenches connect to underground command and control bunkers as well as to underground ammunition dumps.

"At the same time, tunnels are being constructed away from the city centers that connect to 'explosive pits' – cavernous spaces in the ground, located under the primary routes leading into the Gaza Strip, which Hamas might fill with explosives so that they may be detonated, when the time comes, under IDF vehicle convoys.

"The underground construction effort also includes, according to various estimates, hundreds of firing positions for Qassam and Katyusha rockets, designed to be immune to Israeli air strikes. Some positions of this type have already been uncovered during a limited-scope IDF operation in the northern part of the Gaza Strip about ten months ago. The overriding principle of this project is the fact that the entire underground construction activity is carried out while existing buildings are being converted for combat functions above the ground, too, so that everything may be coordinated efficiently.

"Sooner or later, as history has taught us, it is the nature of war to shift into the subterranean medium, mainly in the case of confrontations between regular armed forces and guerrilla groups."

I had also written the following back then: "Hamas is probably counting on its members to inflict massive casualties on IDF owing to the fact that they will be fighting out of those tunnels. In view of those heavy casualties, Hamas expects the (Israeli) political echelon to come under pressure to withdraw the forces, as the fighting would seem futile.

"At the tactical level, it is doubtful whether IDF can come up with an effective solution for coping with the web of tunnels being built by Hamas (…). When Hamas' plans seem so obvious, the question that needs to be asked is 'What are IDF doing about it?' Apparently, they are not doing enough."

I had concluded with the following remarks: "In view of the fact that 'an underground city' is currently being built in the Gaza Strip, one could have expected a tremendous effort by the best minds of the Israeli defense establishment, but that does not seem to be the case.

"'Sometimes it seems that the tunnel problem does not really concern anyone, as if it were the problem of some other country,' says a senior defense source with frustration, 'If we have to pay a heavy toll because of the fact that we are not investing every possible effort, people will say it was an omission. At this time, it looks like a severe omission, one which we can point out in advance'."

The Alternative Report

The obvious conclusion from the report published in 2008 is that all of the details regarding the tunnel system and its objectives were well known. Since then, the information only became more detailed and comprehensive, and even included the precise locations of some of the tunnels, as the data about those tunnels had been obtained by the defense establishment through an extensive range of intelligence sources.

What became of that information within IDF after 2008? Not much. The few commanders who were truly concerned about this danger were replaced by others. Some of them were discharged to civilian life at a fairly young age. The new commanders were kept busy, in the best IDF tradition, by more immediate, local threats – not by what had been conceived as a distant threat that would eventually become the problem of 'another watch'.

On the morning when Operation Protective Edge was initiated, the IDF Chief of Staff placed in motion an operational plan that had no connection whatsoever to fighting the tunnels. That entire issue had been kept out of the plan. The IDF Operations Division referred to the employment of additional element that were to be dispatched to the combat zone in the event of an actual enemy intrusion – nothing more than that.

The enormity and severity of the threat had been well known for a few years, but the IDF failed to internalize and understand it, and the memory was eroded. Consequently, IDF regarded the tunnels on the first morning of the fighting as a marginal issue – if they had ever addressed them to begin with – and all of that does not even refer to the argument between ISA and IDF as to whether a 'tunnel warning' had existed or not. Beyond that, there was no similarity between the manner in which the actual combat operations were conducted and the original battle plan.

Only IDF Southern Command had a plan for fighting the tunnels, designated 'Hagana Kidmit' (= Forward Defense). It focused on a section extending to a depth of several kilometers inside the Gaza Strip. The general commanding IDF Southern Command in those days, Major-General Sammy Turjeman, suggested it to the cabinet for the first time only five days after the operation had started.

The IDF Intelligence Directorate knew almost everything, but failed in presenting the over-all picture of the threat to the senior echelons of the military and the government. When Operation Protective Edge was launched, the IDF Intelligence Directorate was busy, first and foremost, disseminating thousands of bits of intelligence information to the field echelon – an important and worthy lesson drawn from the Second Lebanon War. The underground tunnels had not been defined as a high-priority threat.

The line of defense of the IDF Intelligence Directorate vis-à-vis the State Comptroller maintains that the tunnel issue was the exclusive intelligence responsibility of IDF Southern Command, as GHQ only handles strategic-level threats. Allegedly, IDF Southern Command had refused to hand over the authority to the IDF Intelligence Directorate (at GHQ), and only agreed to hand over the tasks of locating and tracking the long-range missiles, regarded as a strategic threat. Even the task of handling (intelligence-wise) the enemy's short-range rockets remained the responsibility of IDF Southern Command Intelligence.

At the operational level, between 2008 and 2014 IDF had made almost no preparations whatsoever for coping with the tunnel threat. The combat effort against the tunnels during Operation Protective Edge was nothing more than a makeshift, improvised activity. It is hard to believe, but back then IDF did not have any structured drills for engaging in combat operations inside the tunnels. Incidentally, since then IDF are constantly developing such drills and preparing for it using a specialized tunnel training facility.

Until Operation Protective Edge, the lion's share of the effort aimed against the tunnel threat was technological. The substantial efforts notwithstanding, dozens of projects intended to eliminate the enemy's underground system failed miserably. In 2011, MAFAT (IMOD's Weapon System & Technological Infrastructure Research & Development Administration) announced an emergency project. In 2012, a subsequent tender was issued for that project. The technology of the winning project was based, in part, on an idea conceived years previously by the late former President of Israel, Shimon Peres. That project failed on the ground. Even after Operation Protective Edge, when the technological effort was pushed to the limit, technology has failed to provide any magic solutions.

History Now

Against the background of the concerns regarding the forthcoming State Comptroller's report, the decision to start erecting an underground concrete wall between Israel and the Gaza Strip, which was made recently without an in-depth deliberation and even without a tender, may be viewed as nearly hysterical. Even if the limited-scale trial currently under way succeeds, the project as a whole seems to be an illogical idea: the cost of constructing a 60 kilometer long wall of this type could amount to hundreds of billions of ILS. The actual construction process will take many years to complete, and when everything has been done – the enemy may still penetrate the wall and cross it using mechanical equipment. Meanwhile, this enormous project is under way, and everyone's attention is drawn to the forthcoming State Comptroller's report.

Past experience has shown that the State Comptroller's report will point to specific individuals as those responsible for the omission more than others. If the State Comptroller fails to do so, the media will look for "beheadings". The names of former IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz (currently a civilian) and former Head of the IDF Intelligence Directorate Major-General Aviv Kochavi (who currently commands IDF Northern Command) have already been mentioned by the media in this context – as in the case of the article by Amos Harel published by the newspaper Ha'Aretz last week. Naturally, the question of what the defense cabinet had known or had not known will erupt with unabated intensity, and a fierce political debate regarding this issue would follow.

Focusing on the personal guilt of individuals will, naturally, be a mistake – just like the mistake made by the Agranat Commission after the Yom-Kippur War. An enlightening study by Professor Alex Mintz of IDC Hertzliya, dealing with this particular matter, has been published last month. Additionally, the problem of the cabinet's wartime performance and the faulty interface between the cabinet and the military echelon is much more profound than the question that is likely to be raised again in this context – "What did the government ministers knew about the tunnel threat?"

The failure is systemic and the chronic disease known as the short corporate memory of IDF will continue to exact heavy tolls in future operations as well. Even if this is difficult to prove in retrospect, it is perfectly obvious from the things that had been written well in advance. __