Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR)

 

 

NATIV

A Journal of Politics and the Arts Volume 15 Number 1 (84) ■  January 2002

Table of Contents

Articles

Teach Them to Hate: The Use of Palestinian Children - A Legal and Political Analysis (I)

Justus Reid Weiner

Total Terror in the Name of Allah: New Islamic Anarchist Terror Groups

David Bukay

International Relations Theory and the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East

Shawn Pine

The Collapse of Israeliness

Steven Plaut

German Anti-Semitism in the Year 2000

Susanne Urban-Fahr

The Palestinian Security Forces: Capabilities and Effects on the Arab-Israeli Military Balance (I)

Gal Luft

The Settlements and Their Fight for Legitimization

Yitzhak Dahan

Myth: Cultural Asset or Anti-Zionist Weapon

Shlomo Sharan

Huntington's Scenario is Not Out of Date

Harald Vocke

Nuclear Deterrence Now - To the Attention of a Busy PM (II)

Louis René Beres

Arts and Prose

"The Wise Man Aharon Agababa"

Sicka Aharoni

"The Face of 'Israelism' in Three Formats on War"

Ahuva Feldman

Editorial

Or Maybe a Brilliant Exercise in Counter-Intelligence? - Arieh Stav on The Middle East Military Balance, 2000-2001 by the Jaffee Center, Shai Feldman and Yiftah Shapir, eds.

Document

"You Can't Converse with Allah" - Azriel Carlebach

Ideological Debate: The Ariel Center and The Israeli Left - Edited by Yona Hadari (Part V)

Political Dove with a Hawkish Point of View

Moshe Halbertal

Enlightened Fundamentalism - Toward the Third Temple

Hillel Weiss

The Collapse of Israel, God Forbid, Will Happen if We Don't Divide the Land into Two States

Moshe Halbertal

Book Reviews

"The Finest of the World and the Finest of the Times" - Yoram Beck on The Writings of Uri Zvi Greenberg - Volume 15  "A Touch of Reality in the Face of Illusion and Desperation" - Mordechai Nisan on Oslo's Gift of Peace: The Destruction of Israel's Security by Christopher Barder

Letters to the Editor

Ezra Sohar  Moshe Shamir Yoel Zilberg

 

Selected Summaries

 

Teach Them to Hate:
The Use of Palestinian Children - A Legal and Political Analysis (I)

Justus Reid Weiner

Watching the television coverage of the daily Palestinian riots, known as the Al-Aqsa intifada, one is immediately struck by the near total absence of adults. Indeed, most of those hurling Molotov cocktails and stones are teenagers; many are even younger. Intoxicated by the challenge of becoming a hero, lacking the maturity to calculate the dangers they are assuming, these young people are easily motivated to place themselves in harm’s way.

Media reports highlighting the instances in which Palestinian children have been killed or injured by Israeli troops or policemen have generated much criticism of Israeli policies. The Palestinian leadership has attempted to convince the international community of the need to dispatch a contingent of international observers to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ostensibly to protect the Palestinians from the depredations of the IDF.

The presence of rioting Palestinian children is not accidental. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has intentionally mobilized Palestinian children to man the front line in its struggle against Israel, frequently using them as shields to protect Palestinian gunmen. This mobilization of Palestinian youth has, moreover, been facilitated by the long-term impact of PA curricula, government-controlled media, and summer camp programs, which indoctrinated the youth for armed confrontation with Israel even prior to the current crisis.

The utilization of children in armed conflicts has been increasingly condemned by the international community. It is barred by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and recent UN Security Council Resolution 1261, which specifically described the use of children as soldiers as a “violation of international law”. International law broadly attempts to protect children from the horrors of armed conflict. Jean Pictet, in the official Red Cross commentary on article 28, notes that the use of civilians (of any age) as shields has been condemned as cruel and barbaric.

Moreover, the Palestinian leadership, in a classic case of bad faith, accuses Israel of committing human rights violations for the fatalities, while evading its own responsibility for the orchestrated appearance of children in the front lines of the conflict. This constitutes a cynical exploitation of human rights concerns. While the PA is not formally bound by international human rights conventions, it nonetheless is required by the Oslo agreements, which PA Chairman Yasser Arafat signed, to honor “internationally accepted norms of human rights and the rule of law”.

The new Palestinian violence undermines not only the spirit of the Oslo peace process but its raison d’être – to resolve differences through negotiation rather than violence. The problem of incitement to violence has been repeatedly addressed in the interim peace agreements. However, none of the anti-incitement provisions in the interim peace agreements, each one signed by Arafat, has been honored in practice.

The message from the top, from PA Chairman Arafat, is unequivocal. Arafat ruthlessly encourages the involvement of Palestinian children in violence, referring to them as “the generals of the rocks” and boasting after the IDF attack on Fateh offices, “[the attack] cannot shake one eyelash of a Palestinian child holding a stone to defend holy Jerusalem.” Arafat plays to their pride; he would have them believe they are “generals” and heroes when they function as cannon-fodder in the media campaign to discredit Israel.

According to international law, in particular Article 43 of the Hague Regulations of 1907, Israel is obliged to ensure public order and safety in the areas it occupied in self-defense in the Six-Day War of 1967. This means that Israel must carry out necessary security measures in response to the widespread shooting and stoning that has characterized the Al-Aqsa intifada. The force employed by the IDF in response to these complex and dangerous confrontations is not indiscriminate. Nor is it intended to harm the Palestinian youths. Rather the goal is to restore safety on the highways and other locations where violence has been instigated. IDF regulations make every effort to avoid incurring unnecessary casualties. Any soldiers who violate the rules of engagement are subject to investigation, disciplinary trial and, in serious cases, court-martial, as well they should be.

It is unquestionably a tragedy when children fall victim to the Al-Aqsa intifada, but the blame does not rest with the IDF. The tragic reality is that children, often of primary school age, man the intifada’s first line of offense. Thus, it is not the IDF, but rather the Palestinian leadership, which should ultimately be held responsible for the injury and death among their rioting children.

 

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Total Terror in the Name of Allah:
New Islamic Anarchist Terror Groups

David Bukay

The terror strike of September 11, 2001 generated an international earthquake which shocked the world, and “suddenly” gave concrete form to Islamic threats.

This article claims that since February 1998, when Osama bin Laden formed “The International Front of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” with other leaders of Islamic movements, the world has witnessed “new Islamic anarchistic terror groups”. Paradoxically, these groups grew up as a result of two developments: first, the defeat of the fundamental Islamic movements in their revolt against Arab states, which forced some of them to escape to Afghanistan; second, the Afghans’ triumph over the Soviet Union, with the enthusiastic assistance of the United States.

The new Islamic anarchistic Terror groups changed the Islamic fundamental ideology upside down. They are prepared to act with total terror against the infidel West, “the new crusaders” in Dar al-Harb, and drive it away from the Islamic lands of Dar al-Islam, and are then prepared to overthrow the secular Arab systems “the new Jahiliyah”, and to establish radical Islamic systems, which will endanger western civilization.

 

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International Relations
Theory and the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East

Shawn Pine

Since its inception, international relations theory has been the subject of intense scrutiny and criticism as its proponents have attempted to have international relations accepted in the same manner as hard sciences or at least social sciences.

Unfortunately, one of the most enduring criticisms of international relations theory, as a science, has been its inability to formulate any definitive laws that make international relations theory a quantifiable science that can be used to predict interstate behavior with any reliability.

After all, how can a theory of behavior, when confronted with all the components and complexities of international behavior be able to predict with any regularity a particular outcome? However, while international relations theory may not take it as an exact science, the development and refining of state behavior does lend itself to predicting the likelihood of state behavior given a certain set of circumstances.

This paper sought to strengthen the utility of the international relations theory by examining the prospects for peace in the Middle East by reviewing relevant international relations theories on the causes and amelioration of conflict, and what these theories might predict for future regional stability and the peace process. Examination of relevant theories assists in deducing the likelihood of any future agreement between Israel and its neighbors in bringing lasting peace to the region. The theories were evaluated as to whether they predict exacerbation, amelioration, or neutrality with regard to the development of Arab-Israeli conflict.

The theories selected for review were:

1.   Arms race as a cause of war.

2.  Contiguous territory as a cause of war.

3.   Alliances as a cause of war.

4.  Democratic peace theory in ameliorating war.

5.  Collective security arrangements.

Unfortunately, most of the theories examined did not support the contention that Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War would resolve the fundamental issues involved. Indeed, dispute over the territories is only one segment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and is of tertiary importance in resolving the underlying core issues of the conflict.

The regional arms race, contiguous borders, historical rivalry, and regional alliances theories have negative ramifications for peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While collective security and the regional proliferation of democracy have the potential to alleviate security concerns caused by the other factors, there is not much optimism that specific regional features are propitious for their development. Western concepts of democracy have failed to garner the popular support of the Arab masses and regimes in the region. Moreover, short term trends militate against the proliferation of regional democracy as existing Arab regimes confront rising Islamic fundamentalism. Additionally, divergent economic and political interests have precluded Western governments from forming an effective collective response to those elements that currently pose a danger to regional and global security.

 

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The Collapse of Israeliness

Steven Plaut

The collapse of Olso raises questions not only about the absence of intelligent life on Knesset Hill and among Israel's political leadership, but also about matters far more ominous. It raises serious questions about the nature of “Israeliness” and – in particular – whether secular Zionism was in fact a success in terms of resolving the “modernism dilemma” of the Jewish people. The Jews have been searching for some means of bridging Jewish identity with modernism for at least 200 years. None were successful other than secular Zionism, which was regarded as an unqualified success until about ten years ago.

Until the beginnings of the Oslo process, few would have questioned the idea that secular Zionism had successfully created a new stable form of modern Jewish identity, not threatened by modernity, by self-contempt nor by assimilationism.

Oslo however has revealed that the attempt to create an “Israeliness” largely detached from Jewishness has failed. Secular Zionism, it turns out, served as the petri dish for the bizarre form of self-hatred, self-debasement and assimilationism that has captured the Israeli elites, including the media, the universities, and the rest of the “chattering classes”. Without this contempt-of-self, Oslo could never have been imposed upon the country. No Israeliness founded on Jewish identity could have aquiesced in the adoption of policies based on the presumption that hatred of Jews and anti-Semitic atrocities are caused by Jews being insensitive, intransigent and failing to understand the “other”. No true Israeliness based on Jewish identity could have agreed to a situation where deniers of the Holocaust and those declaring the Jews drink gentile blood for Passover are “peace partners”. No bona fide Israeliness could have sought to achieve peace through the importation of anti-Semitic fascist hordes into the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, nor believed that anti-Semites could be “bought off” through public gestures of Jewish niceness.

Oslo is not simply a reflection of ignorance and stupidity. It is a reflection of the loss of the will to survive of large portions the Jewish people.

 

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German Anti-Semitism in the Year 2000

Susanne Urban-Fahr

Helplessness, headless activism and well-known rituals were the pillars on which the discussion in Summer 2000 stood after the bombings, murdering and cases of arson against ethnic minorities and even Jews in Germany.

There was no difference between the past ten years and the last summer in the behavior of racists and neo-Nazis – and the many bystanders acting against those minorities. The community of mankind is living 55 years after the Second World War and the end of the Shoah, but the history of Germany in connection to the “Third Reich” does not allow looking at these clashes against Jews and others in the same manner one does in France or Great Britain. In July 2000, a terrorist bombing in a bus station in Duesseldorf was like the wake-up call for many people. The “target” was a group of mostly Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, waiting for the bus following language lessons. Then there was a wave of other bombings, cases of arson, threatening foreigners and asylum-seekers, Jews, homosexuals and homeless people. The public reactions on the rising anti-Semitism were fluctuating between worries about the image of Germany and wishful thinking that there is no more anti-Semitism than in other countries. Those Jews – representatives, journalists, immigrants – who said in public that there is now once again a doubt whether it was right for Jews to start a new life in Germany after 1945, faced attempts to calm them down. One can state that Jews in Germany are somehow, as it were, by their existence there, legitimizing for Germany that there is a safe democratic basis to society.

This article questions the tension between staying in and leaving Germany, the hopes and the disappointments with which the Jews in Germany had to live in the Year 2000 – after a period of feeling securely established. 

 

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The Palestinian Security Forces:
Capabilities and Effects on the Arab-Israeli Military Balance (I)

Gal Luft

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, under the guise of an innocent police force, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has created a military organization with noteworthy fighting capabilities which could pose a significant military challenge to Israel in the event of a full-scale military confrontation. The army of the PA is presently a complex, multifaceted apparatus consisting of at least a dozen different branches with overlapping responsibilities. The proliferation of security apparatuses was a manifestation of Yasser Arafat’s style of leadership during the peace process period, but with the outbreak of the second intifada, the PA has confronted many problems in the application of military force due to the cumbersome nature of its security apparatus.

The intifada has also created a false perception in Israel and the world about the PA’s real military capabilities, since the forefront units of the Palestinian military, the National Security Forces have, so far, been excluded from the fighting. These units, the most capable part of the PA’s military apparatus, should be counted on to confront Israel if the conflict escalates.

This paper examines the milestones in the buildup of the Palestinian armed forces, their structure and organization, weapons, capabilities and tactics. It describes the peculiar nature of the relations between Arafat and his lieutenants and the complex relations between the Palestinian security services and the plethora of paramilitary forces that have emerged during the second intifada such as Tanzim, the Popular Resistance Committees and the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has met the Palestinian security services in battle in at least three major rounds of violence since 1994. In all of these engagements, the PA’s security services, despite their rudimentary image, proved that they have sufficient capacity to become one of Israel’s most challenging adversaries. What remains unclear is what would be their role in the context of a wider regional conflict between Israel and an Arab coalition. The paper concludes that in such an event, the presence of a Palestinian army west of the Jordan River would change the existing Arab-Israeli military balance and introduce new operational as well as psychological challenges which deserve serious care.

Published in English as ACPR's Policy Paper No. 131, 2001

 

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The Settlements and Their Fight for Legitimization

Yitzhak Dahan

In a period of continual conflict, integrated with the significant rise in power of the mass media, there is a great importance in focusing attention on the deep well-springs that shape consciousness and attitudes in the Israeli social-political field. In that context, this article is trying to analyze and discuss two issues:

  1. The interaction between two distinctive social-cultural groups, who have a contribution in creating the image of the Judea and Samaria inhabitants (“Mitnahalim”). The first group is the mass media, (or information producers); the second is the “mass” of people (information consumers).
     

  2. The inadequacy between the Israeli Post-Zionist practices (that identify with “information producers”) as against Post-Zionist ethics.

The fact that the mass media channels are being more and more controlled by people that in their life style and their spirit are tending to connect with “Post-Zionist” ideas, is deeply contradictory to post-Zionist ethics. That is because the main base of the post-modernism attitude (the “spiritual father” of post-Zionist thought), relies on undermining the modern social hierarchy, thus “constructing” social groups as minorities. Similarly, Post-Zionist criticism blames Israeli Zionist “nature” as an efficient instrument for constructing minorities (like Arabs, oriental Jews etc.) and pushing them to the bottom of Israeli social status. Such claims were found as a paradox if not a hypocritical one in the Israeli realty of the last decade.

A consideration of internal social change, shows that the 1990s decade was characterized by a basic reshuffle in the academic and the media institutions (the main sources for information and knowledge). In this process, more and more young Israelis (freed from the ‘big’ Zionist ideological obligation) take the place of the old generation. Henceforth, those institutions were monolithic (in terms of ideas, persons, agenda, etc.) and powerful. Therefore, they have an enormous influence potential on public attitudes, namely, to reshape the social hierarchy.

In fact, the old hierarchies were replaced by another one. The religious groups, especially the Mitnahalim, were excluded and proscribed as a dangerous people.

In respect of the relationship between the media and the “mass” of the people (“Ha’am”), indeed there is a significant gap between the basic conceptions of the Israeli media (values, conceptions, etc.) toward the consumers. This gap represents the core of identity of most Israeli’s Jewish citizens. At first sight, such a gap appears impossible under a democratic society’s conditions. However, such an anomaly is possible if we turn to the cultural system of both sides: the suppliers (“core”) and the consumers (“periphery”) of information. It seems to me, that the fact that the Jewish identity is quite assimilated in most Israeli People, – this maintains the Zionist base among the consumers, and does not allow “full” automatic (re)construction. This fact is not contradicting (in interpretive terms) the relatively passive position toward political action, which characterizes the consumers. These passive orientations will be also analyzed in a future cultural study. 

 

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Myth: Cultural Asset or Anti-Zionist Weapon

Shlomo Sharan

Serious students of mythology, including Ernst Cassirer and Henry Tudor among others, agree that myths, along with art, language, religion, music and science, provide the symbols needed for expressing humanity’s interpretation of the world. By contrast, Post-Zionist sociologists employ the term myth in its pejorative sense of  fraud and deception.. They even accuse Zionism of systematically “commissioning” great writers and scholars to disseminate Zionist ideology to justify its immoral act of occupying Arab territory in Palestine-Israel.

Zionism, it is asserted, sought to establish a “mythical” continuity between bygone eras of Jewry and contemporary Israel, and thereby to brain-wash Israel-born generations of  Jewish youth into believing that they were the descendants of earlier generations of Jews since Biblical antiquity who cherished a love of Zion. According to the Post-Zionists, the Jews who came to Palestine-Israel were merely a random collection of immigrants, not “olim”, and their Sabra offspring were no more than second generation immigrants. The notion that they belong to an ancient Jewish people that returned to claim sovereignty over its historic homeland, is, in their eyes, a Zionist myth.

This conception of  Zionist “mythology” reflects the influence of post-modernist deconstructionism that views “historical continuity” as mythical falsehood. History is an arbitrary concantination of separate events whose continuity is a figment of mythical thinking stemming from political ideology. There is no continuity in Jewish history, and contemporary Jews are not heir to any historical tradition. Those ideas merely serve the purpose of Zionist political propaganda, claim Post-Zionists.

However, allegations made about the “commissioning” of famous writers and scholars to work for some Zionist “propaganda machine” is a fabrication for which no Post-Zionist author ever produces evidence. Numerous documents dating from 1920 to 1960 from archives are remarkable for their outspoken devotion to, and support of, Zionist ideals. Post-modern individualism denies any meaning to people’s collective responsibility for their communities or nations. The Sabras’ devotion to Zionism is “explained” by Post-Zionists as the product of Zionist brainwashing by its commissioned agents. Post-Zionists have adopted a deconstructionist view of human events that atomizes history into disconnected units. Deconstructionist Post-Zionists denounce Zionism for attributing meaning to Jewish historical continuity, for “brainwashing” Jewish youth to think that they are walking in the footsteps of their forebears from ancient times, and for calling upon Jewry to assume collective responsibility for its historical fate.

In addition to eradicating the meaning humanity attributes to its historical experience, these accusations share the distinguishing features of classical anti-Semitism, to wit: Jewry and Zionism allegedly commit a crime by transmitting their “myths” to the next generation, while all the nations of the world consider that task to be their moral obligation in order to preserve and enhance the meaning of their human and national existence. For the Post- Zionists, the accepted norms of human and national behavior are to be denied to the Jewish people. The Post-Zionists are unequivocally anti-Zionist. These ideas express an anti-Jewish nihilism stemming from Jewish self hatred, regrettably rampant in Israel’s universities and colleges.

An expanded version of this article was published as ACPR's Policy Paper No. 134, 2001

 

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Huntington's Scenario is Not Out of Date

Harald Vocke

At the outbreak of the Six Day War of June 1967, Ahmed Shukairy, leading the so-called “Palestine Liberation Organization” (PLO) proclaimed: “Israel must be thrown into the sea.”

Observing Arab politics over the last half century, Harald Vocke is firmly convinced that in spite of all assurances to the contrary, the present leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Yasser Arafat, and his collaborators have never negotiated with Israel in the hope of a durable peace. The real intention of Arafat, in the erroneously nominated “peace process’, was always, by cunning and deceit, to gain better military positions in favor of the Arabs of Palestine, ready for future wars with Israel .

Tolerance and human rights are late fruits of European thought, but unknown to the Middle Ages and even now to contemporary Islam. In throwing stones on Israeli soldiers, young Arabs are trained to believe that Jews are devils, as their throwing of stones reminds these Arabs that during the pilgrimage to Mecca, all Muslims must stone symbols of the devil in the valley of Muna. The true meaning of the Arabic intifada is not “revolt” as foreigners are told. In classical Arabic the verb intifada means “to shake dust or dirt from a garment”, in the dialects of Syria and Palestine, intifada may mean as well “to shudder in disgust when seeing a person”.

Such choice of words reveals the deadly aggressive mentality of Arafat and his companions in their relations with Jews. Therefore, for long-term analysis, the scenario of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” still has to be accepted as valid.

 

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Nuclear Deterrence Now - To the Attention of a Busy PM (II)

Louis René Beres

During the past year, the ACPR has expertly examined problems of Israeli deterrence. Aharon Levran’s “The Decline of Israeli Deterrence” (ACPR policy paper no. 113) is an especially important and informed assessment. The article below by Professor Louis René Beres – cast in the form of a Memorandum to the Prime Minister – looks more specifically at the conditions and limitations of Israeli nuclear deterrence. Based upon the assumption that Israel’s survival depends entirely upon self reliance, this memorandum urges PM Sharon immediately to strengthen the country’s nuclear deterrence posture, and to take critical steps to ensure that a failure of Israeli nuclear deterrence will not bring about nuclear warfare. These steps will require: (1) a multifaceted nuclear strategy involving deterrence, preemption and warfighting capabilities; and (2) a corollary conventional strategy that can function in spite of serious security weaknesses created by the Oslo “peace process”.

Israel needs a strong nuclear deterrent – and the complex conditions of such a deterrent are identified and evaluated carefully in the Memorandum – but it cannot rely upon this one base of national security any more than it can rely only upon conventional deterrence. Israel’s survival now requires complementary nuclear and conventional forces, and the continuing and associated availability of certain preemption options. Taken together, these multiple bases of national security could endow Israel with at least tolerable measures of safety.

Specific issues addressed in the Beres Memorandum are: convincing prospective attackers that Israel maintains both the willingness and the capacity to retaliate in certain situations with nuclear weapons; the risks and benefits to Israel of intentionally detectable measures to reduce Israeli nuclear force vulnerabilities; the associated risks and benefits to Israel of active and passive defenses; the precise nature of Israeli nuclear weapons; the issue of disclosure vs. “deliberate ambiguity” (the “Bomb in the Basement”); the types and openness of nuclear targeting doctrine; the problem of enemy irrationality for Israeli nuclear deterrence; the interrelatedness of Israeli conventional and nuclear deterrence; and (should Israeli nuclear deterrence fail), the expected consequences of regional nuclear war. Finally, the Beres Memorandum imaginatively considers different scenarios of how a nuclear attack upon Israel might take place and the particular place for a “Samson Option”.

Professor Louis René Beres is the author of some of the earliest published writings on Israeli nuclear deterrence. This Memorandum looks soberly and in considerable detail at today’s urgent strategic challenges to Israel. Taken as a whole, the Memorandum points toward a comprehensive and coherent nuclear “master plan” from which specific policy options might be suitably extrapolated.

 

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