Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR)

 

 

NATIV

A Journal of Politics and the Arts Volume 11 ■ Number 4-5 (63-64) ■  September 1998

Table of Contents

Current Affairs Digest

Israel: Five Years to Oslo: Notes on Demoralization

Articles

Population Dispersal – The Next Zionist Challenge

Arnon Soffer

The Israel-Jordan Agreement – A Missed Opportunity

Raphael Israeli

Jordanian-Israeli Strategic Partnership in Historical Perspective

Alexander Bligh

Missiles, Defense and Israel

Angelo M. Codevilla

The AEGIS Option: How to Provide Near-Term, Cost-Effective Missile Defense to Both Israel and America

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

The Bible in the Arts Festival in Prague 1995

Moshe Yegar

Who is Really Responsible for Not Preventing the Murder of the Prime Minister?

Eliav Shochetman

The African Giant: From Military Rule to National Reconciliation

Moshe Gilboa

Reviews

Fit for Every Soldier's Kitbag – Eviatar Ben Zedeff on Science, Technology and Battlefield by Azriel Lorber ■ Judea and Samaria New Research – Ehud Netzer on Judea and Samaria Research Studies Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting 1997 by Yaakov EshelAharon Amir Ruth Netzer Orzion Bar-Tanna Raphael Israeli Moshe Shafrir

 

The Arts ■ Editor: Moshe Shamir

Poetry

Aharon Amir Ruth Netzer Orzion Bar-Tanna Raphael Israeli Moshe Shafrir

Essays and Reviews

Hillel Weiss – Ram Caught in a Thicket ■ Benyamin Gallay – Kaddish ■ Reuven Ben-Yoseph – On the Poetry of Rammi Ditzany ■ Esther Silber-Vitkon – The Poetry of Miriam Godal

Document

Yaakov Orland – The Land of Israel ■ Yitzhak Lamdan – Letters

 

Selected Summaries

 

Population Dispersal – The Next Zionist Challenge

Arnon Soffer

Since the establishment of Israel, its governments have been exercising the population dispersal policy.  By doing this, they have been exerting a decisive influence on the infrastructure and distribution of the population of the country.

 However, since the beginning of the 1990s, Israel has been undergoing a process of changes in its national planning.

 The National Master Plan No. 31 and Israel 2020 still pay lip service to a population dispersal policy, while, in fact, the focus is on the Tel Aviv metropolitan area alone (the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Core area).

The National Plan (Israel 2020) is based on three main, false, assumptions.  The first is that Israel in 1967 lines will live in an environment of peace.  The second, that the Israeli population will not live in a desert area.  And the third, that Israel, as a Western Society, will live in a western-like environment. 

 These three assumptions are a result of the planners’, - themselves living in the narrow strip along the Israeli coast, referred to in this article as the “Fata-Morgana Region”.

 In this region, the Israeli society lives a western life, and doesn’t understand, or acknowledge, that a mere 10 kilometers to the east people live by Middle Eastern standards of life.  These differ from those of the Fata-Morgana Region in large economic, religious, nationality, cultural and moral-code gaps.  Copying the Western models over to Israel can and will endanger the country.  A good example is the new policy of concentrating the Israeli Jewish Society in one big city – the Core area.

 In the Middle East, the only way to secure and ensure the Jewish territory, is to adopt the old-yet-new policy of population dispersal.  In the present period of “twilight”, this can be the next Zionist challenge.

This paper was also published as the ACPR's Policy Paper No. 42, 1998

 

back to top


 

The Israel-Jordan Agreement – A Missed Opportunity

Raphael Israeli

According to conventional wisdom, in Israel and the rest of the world, the peace between Israel and Jordan was a positive step in the peace process in the Middle East. This assumption rests on the premise that King Hussein being moderate and pro-Western, it was necessary to accommodate him and reinforce his rule by binding him more closely with the West via Israel.

This paper shows that not only Hussein is neither moderate nor pro-Western per-se, but he lacks legitimacy for his throne in the eyes of the Palestinian majority in his country. And so, instead of supporting democracy and the rule of the Palestinian majority in Jordan, the West, and Israel, find themselves approving of an autocratic king, who is neither a country nor a people, thus exacerbating, not resolving the Palestinian issue.

The paper also makes the point that the Palestinian problem, which needs to be addressed and resolved if there is to be peace in the Middle East, cannot even begin to taper off if we exclude Jordan, the main demographic and territorial basis of the Palestinians, from the settlement equation.

However, addressing the Palestinian problem in all its components, territorial and demographic (in Israel, the Territories and Jordan), does not have necessarily to mean the removal of the King, if he consents to rename his realm the "Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine", turns his rule into a constitutional monarchy and delivers the power to the Palestinian majority. Once in government, that majority, under Arafat or otherwise, will negotiate with Israel the permanent settlement in the West Bank and Gaza, these being a small part of the much larger Palestino-Jordanian entity. Under these circumstances, solutions will not only be easier but they could ultimately accommodate the Palestinian aspiration for statehood and in-gathering of the refugees, Hashemite survival as a royal house, and Israeli security concerns.

This paper was published in English as the ACPR's Policy Paper No. 26, 1998

 

back to top


 

Jordanian-Israeli Strategic Partnership in Historical Perspective

Alexander Bligh

The signing ceremony of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty in October 1994 made public one of the most known secrets in Middle Eastern politics: the strong bond between Israel and Jordan. It began in 1960 as top level negotiations between military officers and later developed into a king-prime ministers direct, secret and regular forum, which survived two wars and numerous political challenges.

This regional strategic alliance has been the result of a powerful sense of common aims, present interests and the realization that any future threat to any of them might in turn change the fate of the other.

Direct Israeli-Jordanian relations are approaching their 40th anniversary. It is clear that both sides have benefited from this relationship. Israel shared the burden of Egyptian enmity in the 1950s and 1960s with Jordan, while in the 1980s and 1990s found in Jordan a buffer state separating Iraq from Israel. Jordan found in Israel a trustworthy ally: in 1967 under circumstances not yet clearly discussed, Israel relieved the Hashemite kingdom of the Palestinian threat to its very existence by taking over the Palestinian West Bank. Again, in 1970 and 1980 Israel stood guard and deterred Syria from taking aggressive measures against the kingdom.

In addition to these mutual strategic benefits Jordan used Israeli connections in Washington to convey the message that Jordan is now a stable and moderate state. Clearly, the Israeli-Jordanian block, with constant US backing in the background have contributed significantly to the survival of the monarchy. All past crises follow one clear pattern of political and strategic behavior by the two partners: assisting each other against a third Arab player, usually the Palestinian threat.

During these almost 40 years of negotiations Jordanian foreign policy has been based on two pillars: a constant - a strong coalition with Israel, and a variable - a short term coalition with one of the Arab neighbors of Jordan. This way, publicly, Jordan has paid its dues to the cause of Arab solidarity, while secretly the kingdom based its very survival on the meeting of interests with the Jewish State. This duality has also characterized the Jordanian position vs. the components of the final settlement in the Middle East.

This paper was also published as the ACPR's Policy Paper No. 45, 1998

 

back to top


 

Missiles, Defense and Israel

Angelo M. Codevilla

The reader will quickly grasp that this study is about more than just Israel. This small, beleaguered country in the Middle East is, however, an instructive paradigm of the role of ballistic missiles in international affairs at the turn of the twenty-first century.

While analysts treat missile warfare as something of a theoretical matter regarding other parts of the world, especially the United States, the role of ballistic missiles in war against Israel is undeniably real and reasonably straightforward. Ballistic missiles struck Israel during the Gulf War. Israel’s retaliatory capacity and reputation did not deter its enemies. Nor did any measures designed to inhibit proliferation prevent the attacks. The most strenuous efforts to strike the missiles before they were launched, by massive unchallenged air forces in Iraqi’s skies, backed by the United States’ reconnaissance assets, failed totally. Hence, there is every reason to expect that missiles will be fired at Israel again and that, in the absence of defenses, they will land again.

First, nothing is deterring any number of countries in the Middle East from acquiring ever better missiles - primarily with a view to shooting them at Israel. Israel’s enemies have learned that it is easier and safer to threaten or use missiles against Israel than to launch other kinds of military attacks. In short, the missile threat against Israel is as open-ended as it is real. So it is against the United States and other countries as well.

Second, the plans being made to defend Israel against ballistic missiles bear no relationship whatever to the threat. This is even truer for the United States.

Third, the insufficiency of American preparations becomes undeniable when one examines the contribution that the antimissile defenses under active development in the United States could make to the defense of Israel. This is as significant for the United States as it is for Israel or any other ally that might seek US protection against missile threats.

This brings us to the main point of the study: Defending Israel (or the United States, or anyplace else) against all kinds of ballistic missiles, even in large numbers, is eminently possible. The missile defense devices now under the most active development in the United States are insufficient because of the restrictions imposed on their designers by officials who value the 1972 ABM Treaty more highly than they value defense.

In sum, Israel - and the United States and its other allies - will continue to be vulnerable to ballistic missiles until such time as the US government decides to remove self-imposed restrictions on the use of available technology. Until that happens, Israel’s (and the United States’) best efforts at missile defense amount to tokenism.

This paper was also published as the ACPR's Policy Paper No. 28, in the book
BALLISTIC MISSILES: THE THREAT AND THE RESPONSE, 1999

 

back to top


 

The AEGIS Option: How to Provide Near-Term, Cost-Effective Missile Defense
to Both Israel and America

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Thanks to the nearly $50 billion investment the United States has made to date in the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system, America already has deployed the infrastructure - platforms, launchers, missiles, sensors, command and control systems and operating personnel - necessary to provide an early, world-wide defense against ballistic missile attack. Basically all that is needed now is to put new "front-ends" on missiles that are beginning to come into the Navy’s inventory, revise some associated software and allow AEGIS ships rapidly to share missile tracking and targeting data obtained by land-, sea-, air- and space-based assets.

Once such incremental improvements are made, these assets can begin providing significant anti-missile protection for large parts of the globe within a few years’ time. For example, US warships routinely deployed in the Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean could be able to fire on missiles launched by Israel’s enemies before they come within range of the Arrow’s interceptors. Such attrition will greatly increase the effectiveness of the protection afforded by the Israeli system. And, if the anti-missile potential of the AEGIS system is properly exploited, the same system could provide highly effective protection against shorter-range missiles aimed at the Jewish state (so-called "theater" ballistic missiles) and longer-range (or "strategic") missiles aimed at the US.

In an era of budgetary restraint, it is important to note that - thanks to the large prior investment - the AEGIS approach affords the opportunity to secure such a dual benefit at a small fraction of the cost of alternative approaches. A blue-ribbon panel sponsored by the Heritage Foundation determined that 22 ships and 650 missiles could be so configured for between $2-3 billion - less than the outlay for the construction of one of the US Navy’s most modern warships.

This paper was also published as the ACPR's Policy Paper No. 37, in the book
BALLISTIC MISSILES: THE THREAT AND THE RESPONSE, 1999

 

back to top


 

The Bible in the Arts Festival in Prague 1995

Moshe Yegar

In September 1995, a festival of various arts which lasted almost three weeks was held in Prague.  It was conceived and initiated by the author of this report during his tour of duty as the Ambassador of Israel to the Czech Republic.  Its main idea was based on two concepts.  First, that it will encompass all arts and not be limited to one artistic form - music or dance or theater - as most festivals do.  Second, all events of the festival should revolve around themes and motifs inspired by the Bible, and reflect human artistic creation from medieval times to our own era.

 The response of Czech cultural and artistic community to this idea was overwhelming.  The President of the Republic, Vaclav Havel himself, served as the Honorary Chairman of the Festival.  Many other political, academic and religious leaders joined the Honorary Committee.  Banks and economic enterprises came forward with financial contributions.  Preparations lasted a year and a half.

 The seventy events of the festival included eight theater performances; puppet theaters; fourteen films; thirteen exhibitions of paintings, sculpture and old manuscripts and books ranging from medieval art to the most contemporary; forty-one concerts of various orchestras and other ensembles, including opera and ballet; an international academic symposium on “the Bible as a source of inspiration”; high school essay contest, elementary school painting competition and much more.

 The message of the festival came out very clearly:  the link between Israel and the Bible, which is the People of Israel’s greatest contribution to human civilization.

 It was a most impressive demonstration of the Bible as a major source of inspiration of the Arts.

 

back to top


 

Who is Really Responsible for Not Preventing the Murder of the Prime Minister?

Eliav Shochetman

Among the central questions that arose in the wake of the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were:  Could something have been done to prevent the murder?  Was there someone who knew of Yigal Amir's murder plans who did not report this to the proper authorities, as required by law?  The State Prosecutor decided to charge Margalit Har-Shefi with a violation of paragraph 262 of the Criminal Code of 5736-1977 (Failure to Prevent a Crime), and the court decided to convict her, yet this conviction is not enough to easily answer the above question, since the convicted party never admitted to knowing of the planned murder, and she also was not convicted of any other violation that would signal her criminal involvement in the murder of the Prime Minister.  According to the legal tradition in Israel, no one has ever been convicted of failure to prevent a crime without admitting to the fact, and Margalit Har-Shefi's conviction was based solely on assessments.  Another weak point in the legal judgement was that the heads of the General Security Services had in their hands the very same information as did the guilty party regarding the statements of Yigal Amir, and on the basis of such information they were not able to predict in advance the events of the murder.  How was Margalit Har-Shefi supposed to know what the heads of the GSS were not able to know, even though they had the same information in hand?!  Despite the conviction of Margalit Har-Shefi, the heavens cry out over the failure to bring to trial the GSS agent Avishai Raviv, who specifically admitted that Yigal Amir told him of his intention to kill the Prime Minister and, according to him, he took these words seriously.  If Raviv knew about this in advance, it is likely that this matter was known to his handlers in the GSS.  The Attorney General should order a police investigation and the opening of legal proceedings against everyone who knew of the plans for the murder and failed to do what was required to prevent it.  Even if this should involve a secret body such as the GSS, the principles of the rule of law require the undertaking of such an investigation and the initiation of all the necessary legal steps in order that the truth in this matter will come to light.

 

back to top


 

The African Giant: From Military Rule to National Reconciliation

Moshe Gilboa

The sudden death of the Military Ruler, General Soni Abacha, aged 56, and the controversial leader chief Mashood Abiola, on the eve of his long imprisonment, refocused world opinion on Nigeria.  It is not surprising that the world expresses interest in Nigeria.  It is the most populated country in Africa and it’s 107 million citizens place it as the tenth-ranking populated country in the world.  The inexhaustible oil and gas resources make Nigeria the fifth exporter of oil in the world.  Therefore, Nigeria has been considered as the “African Giant” and due to its diversified tribal, ethnic and religious composition, many believe that it mirrors the entire African continent, its challenges, difficulties and potential, and its success or failure will have far- reaching consequences and profound repercussions on the Black continent as a whole.

 Despite the tranquil and orderly way in which Nigeria achieved its independence in October 1960, its recent history is characterized by continuous internal strife, violent confrontations and repeated domestic crises.  These climaxed during the tragic bloodiest civil war which has ever occurred in Africa – The Biafra War.  The main reason for these traumatic experiences has been a tragic handicap which has haunted Nigeria since its inception.  The ethnic, regional and religious rivalry, intolerance and hatred, have overshadowed and subordinated the National interest to sectorial and separatist consideration.  The continuous domestic crises as well as the impotency and sometimes partiality of the civil government, coupled by the revelations of much corruption among the leadership, destroyed the credibility of the civil administration.  Thus Nigeria had seven military rulers, two democratically elected governments and one short-lived transitional cabinet.

 Exporting two million barrels of crude oil per day made Nigeria a welcome member of OPEC.  She became an important center of international economic, commercial and diplomatic activities.  Nigeria used its standing and influence to promote also the objectives of its foreign policy.  At the top of its priorities was the care for the African continent.  She played a leading role in crusading for the termination of the Imperialist rule in Africa, the democratization of South Africa, mediated in inter-African conflicts and was an active spokesman for the African cause in the UN, the British Commonwealth and other organizations.

 Since its establishment, Nigerian-Israel relations have been friendly, and though at the beginning there were Nigerian Christians who advocated that such a relationship would benefit both countries, later the majority of Moslems and their leaders joined in.  During the first 13 years (1960-73), many Israeli experts were sent to all parts of Nigeria, at the request of the Nigerians, helping to modernize agriculture, building new housing projects, highways, universities and assisting in laying foundations for a modern communication system.  Nigerian scholars, agriculturists, educators and students were sent to study in Israel and major Israeli companies and private entrepreneurs became involved in Nigeria’s development.  However, this fruitful and meaningful relationship came to a halt in 1973, when Nigeria adhered to the decision of the Organization of African Unity, that under hard pressure of its Arab members, called upon its members to break off diplomatic relations with Israel following the Yom Kippur War.  It took 19 years until the Moslem Nigerian Head of State, General Ibrahim Bagangida decided to restore and normalize the relations between the two countries. 

To establish the relationship on a reciprocal basis, Nigeria took an unprecedented step and established, for the first time, an Embassy in Israel, headed by one of its most experienced Ambassadors.  The two countries were preparing for closer cooperation when the Nigerian crisis erupted, the internal situation deteriorated, and as in many other cases, caused a decline in the mutual cooperation.

 With the disappearance of Chief Mashood Abiola and General Abacha, Nigeria finds itself at a crucial crossroad.  The new Military Head of State, General Abubaker, has taken significant steps, which might signal that his intention is to bring about national reconciliation and re-establish democracy.

 

back to top

 

 

Ariel Center for Policy Research / NATIV

POB 99, Shaarei Tikva 44810, Israel

URLs: www.acpr.org.il, http://nativ.cc

Email: ariel.center@gmail.com

Tel: +972-3-906-3920