The Winograd Report will be ignored by the politicians.  The proper public response is to wipe out the parties responsible at the polls, whenever they take place.

How wonderful that Israel's government has prepared in advance for every possible scenario and constructed lines of defense against every possible threat.  No, of course I don't mean the events on the Gaza border last week, which could have a decisive impact on Israel's future, first and foremost on the welfare of the unfortunate residents
The tragedy of the whole Winograd Report affair is that it exists at all. In any other democratic country the new government elected in the aftermath of the war would long be busy executing its public mandate.
of Sderot and the Western Negev, so near to Hamastan and Sinai, so far from the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem and the Defense Minister's office in Tel Aviv.  Gaza, after all,  proved once more, if proof were needed, that our fearless leaders cannot see much farther than the end of their nose, are devoid of courage or character, and that nothing they say ("Gaza will be blockaded!") needs to be taken seriously.  Or maybe Hamas just took them by surprise while they were busy with more important things:  Neutralizing the anticipated effects of the Winograd Commission's report, to be published today, and ensuring their continuation in office.

The tragedy of the whole Winograd Report affair is that it exists at all.  In any other democratic country with a Parliamentary (rather than Presidential) form of government the publication of the Winograd Report, a year and a half after a lost war, would only rate a minor headline.  The new government elected in the aftermath of the war would long be busy executing its public mandate.  The personalities criticized in the report would have long moved off the public stage, and interest in the report itself would mainly be confined to technocrats and military professionals.

I greatly doubt that the Winograd Report will change much.  The plain fact is that neither Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak nor Eli Yishai of Shas want to face the public, so the public can go hang as far as they're concerned.  The main onus for the continuation of the Olmert government rests of course on Barak.  Most of the country wants Olmert out, but Barak isn't willing to let this happen until he's sure he can take Olmert's place.  This is now unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. 

Hamas has just proved that Barak can neither foresee their strategy nor deter them effectively.  This will become increasingly evident to the public at large in the ensuing weeks.  More than ever, the real response to Hamas is a large-scale offensive into Gaza, but this Barak will not initiate.  He may not be competent but he's also not a fool.  He wants a victory not another bloodbath with an uncertain outcome as in Lebanon, and he's not likely to attain anything but a bloodbath under the rules of combat Israel's legal system will dictate to him.  So he will do nothing and, like Olmert, become another failed politician taking refuge in his posh office from the public's ire.

The case of Eli Yishai, the head of Shas, is slightly different.  Yishai too can throw Olmert out of office if he wants.  If asked, "well, why don't you do it!?" he can give an answer that should give pause to any interlocutor:  "And if I do so, will things be any better after elections?"  Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud are saying all the right things about Gaza and Iran—for now.  The public at large now speaks from Netanyahu's mouth, but will Netanyahu actually do what he says once elected?  One hopes so, but one can at least understand Yishai's unwillingness to gamble on the uncertain possibility that the future will be better.

Nevertheless Yishai's calculus is mistaken.  Even if the Prime Minister who failed in Lebanon were from the Israeli
object of all—protesting company commanders, parents of the fallen, and millions of ordinary Israeli citizens, right or left, religious or secular—should be to wipe out the parties now constituting the Olmert government at the polls. There is a reasonable political alternative for every one of them.
Right—Menahem Begin comes to mind—he would be morally obligated to take the blame and resign (as Begin did).  The issue at stake is not just the government's policy but the integrity of Israel's democracy.  Principle requires that those who fail take responsibility for their failures.

During the Dreyfus affair in France, one of the rallying cries of Dreyfus' supporters was "ecraser l'infame!"—erase the infamy.  From today until the next elections, whenever they take place, this should become the rallying cry of all the groups now calling, in vain, for a change of government.  The object of all—protesting company commanders, parents of the fallen, and millions of ordinary Israeli citizens, right or left, religious or secular—should be to wipe out the parties now constituting the Olmert government at the polls.  There is a reasonable political alternative for every one of them.  Leftists can vote for Meretz or Uzi Dayan.  Rightists and the orthodox have a plethora of choices.  The voters need to send Israeli politicians a message:  There are worse things than submitting to the verdict of the people when the great majority of people demand it.  You might be condemned, not merely to opposition, but to the street outside the Knesset, and for keeps.

A "Reasonable Decision?"

The most remarkable finding of the Winograd Commission is that the government's decision to launch the final ground assault in the concluding 60 hours of the war, sacrificing the lives of 33 soldiers in the process, was "reasonable" even "unavoidable."  This is the political headline today and ensures that Ehud Olmert will remain in power until he makes another mistake Israelis recognize as egregious and unforgivable (such a mistake may materialize in Gaza sooner than anyone suspects).

I find this manner of presenting the decision astounding and substantially incomplete.  In the narrowest of senses the verdict is, strictly speaking, correct.  On the night of August 11 2006, it was clear that the UN was about to adopt a resolution ending the war that was largely unfavorable to Israel.  Moreover, the only way to ensure that those parts of the resolution favorable to Israel--those calling for the establishment of an international force along the border--were implemented depended on the Israeli army siezing the positions where the international force was to be stationed, so it could turn them over to the UN.  Hizbollah clearly wasn't about to cooperate voluntarily.  So yes, given the circumstances, the decision made some diplomatic and military sense.

But to say no more than that is a misrepresentation.  In evaluating the decision to launch the assault, one cannot say that the decision to launch was reasonable under the circumstances without analyzing how Israel got itself entangled in such "circumstances."  After all, the assault was launched in under the worst possible military conditions--under a deadline, when the enemy was totally alert and expecting it and in a position to exact the highest possible price in Israeli lives.  None of this need have happened.

UN Resolution 1701 was the product of the sharp erosion of Israeli prestige by a month of futile fighting.  Israel had many options at the start of the war, but it frittered them away.  By the time the decision to launch the ground assault was taken, Israel had boxed itself into a diplomatic and military trap, in which it had no good options left, only the bad one of launching an assault in the worst conditions and for an objective of doubtful value.  Only in that narrow sense was the decision "reasonable"--in light of the record of failure that had brought Israel to such a pass.

In March 1939, four months after the Munich debacle, Hitler's Germany swallowed what was left of Czechoslovakia.  Only then did the British Prime Minister, Nevile Chamberlain, wake up and realize his country's true situation.  He did a volte-face and extended a British military guarantee to Poland, thereby making war certain.  Of this Winston Churchill writes in his memoirs:  "Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground" [The Gathering Storm, p. 347].  Of course Churchill congratulated Chamberlain at the time.  Of course the decision was "reasonable," even "unavoidable" under the circumstances.  But it cannot be seen apart from the folly that created the circumstances.  It was produced by previous failures and did not rectify them.  Neither did the Olmert government's decision to launch the final assault of the Second Lebanon War. 

The most significant fact about the demolition of Gaza's border fence with Egypt is that the Egyptians can no longer keep ordinary Gazans bottled up.

Well, well.  Perhaps there’s some comfort in recognizing that Israel isn’t the only government to be out-dared by the Hamas.  Israel’s siege of Gaza was half-hearted and half-witted, but it definitely had some effect. 
First, if Israel had a demographic problem in Gaza, that demographic problem has just been reduced by 200,000. Second, Hamastan has just annexed Egyptian Rafiah.
In response Hamas thought up a brilliant solution—violent, harsh and simple.  Access between Gaza and Egypt is now quite open.  It was pretty open beforehand, and completely open to the smuggling of arms and munitions, but at least when the fence was up the Egyptians had some control over the rate of flow of arms and terrorists into the area.  Now they don’t even have that.

Moreover, it’s hard to see what the Egyptians can do about it.  I doubt they have the manpower to put the Gaza border back together and police it.  In part this is because of Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, which limits the number of Egyptian soldiers and policemen on the border.  The Egyptians have been agitating for a long time to get Israel to let them increase their forces on the border, but some vestige of the sense of self-preservation has kept Israel from agreeing to any but the most limited increase.  Who knows?  In a few days we may hear Ehud Barak musing about how a bigger Egyptian army on Israel’s border would be in Israel’s interest.  Let’s hope he doesn’t listen to himself.  Somehow I doubt that any large new accession of Egyptian soldiers on Israel’s border is going to concern itself primarily with Palestinians.

In one sense, the demolition of the border fence makes life easier for Hamas.  They can now drive explosives into Gaza by the truckload without messing with those cramped and claustrophobic tunnels.  There is a vast new commerce in cigarettes and gasoline for them to tax.  If I seem a bit cavalier about this, it’s because I really don’t think the new development will pose vast new security threats for Israel.  The vast security threats were going to happen anyhow.  They’ll just happen faster.

Yet it seems to me—it’s still too early to say—that the main political implications of the demise of the Gaza border arise from the fact that its most important function was not to keep arms and terrorists out of Gaza, but to keep Gazans in, something that was important to both Hamas and Egypt.  Egypt’s policy, as evidenced by its actions over the past several months, seemed to be to judiciously feed terrorists and arms into Gaza while keeping the exit from that cauldron of human misery firmly plugged. The plug has just been blown halfway across the Sinai Peninsula.
Israel’s humanitarian problem with Gaza is now dwarfed by an Egyptian one. It’s hard to see how the Egyptians can induce the Gazans to return to their prison by any means the world will consider acceptable.

The presence of 200,000 Gazans in Egyptian Rafiah has two main implications, seemingly diametrically opposed, but both true.  First, if Israel had a demographic problem in Gaza, or seemed likely to if it reconquered the area, that demographic problem has just been reduced by 200,000.  Second, Hamastan has just annexed Egyptian Rafiah.  Gazans can now flood freely into Egypt and from there, given enough pluck and determination, anywhere they please.  Israel’s humanitarian problem with Gaza is now dwarfed by an Egyptian one.  It’s hard to see how the Egyptians can induce the Gazans to return to their prison by any means the world will consider acceptable.

I smell an opportunity here.

What if Israel were to discreetly offer a one-time reward of $5,000 per person, plus reimbursement of travel expenses, to any Palestinian family from Gaza that presents itself at an Israeli consulate in any country with which Israel has relations?  You could take fingerprints to ensure nobody picked up his reward twice.  True, they might pick up the reward and go back to Gaza, but it’s hard to imagine anybody voluntarily going back to Gaza once he’d made the decision to escape.  Israel might ask for the good services of Christian allies in America to make the reward available in countries where Israel doesn’t have diplomatic relations.  There are several large nations which are a) Islamic, b) poor (so those thousands of dollars let one live like a king), and c) have visa rules thatcan be made flexible with cash.  They shall remain nameless, but they know who they are. 
What if Israel were to discreetly offer a one-time reward of $5,000 per person, plus reimbursement of travel expenses, to any Palestinian family from Gaza that presents itself at an Israeli consulate?

Egypt and Hamas could have prevented this solution by limiting exit from Gaza, but they really can’t do that anymore. Moreover, Egypt has suddenly acquired a huge new interest in moving Palestinians on.  It really ought to be Egypt offering that $5,000 reward from its embassies around the world, but I don’t expect them to see that.

The exodus of Palestinians from Gaza could go on for a long time and involve quite large numbers.  All that would be necessary is for Israel to continue to make life in Gaza intolerable, for which Hamas can be relied upon to provide an excuse.  It could come to the point where Palestinian residents of Judaea and Samaria, where life is hardly a picnic, became envious.  Israel could then consider what it might do to assuage that envy by including them in the reward. 

It would be naive to suppose that this policy could “solve” the Palestinian problem, lock, stock and barrel.  It won’t.  But it would change everyone’s calculus—Hamas’, other Palestinians’, Egypt’s, America’s, the Arab world’s—in ways that would be beneficial to Israel.  It’s hard to think of another policy that would accomplish this equally well.  If it works, it would be well worth the price.  Something to think about.

Malefactors in high office keep Sderot on the rack.  But today I want to concentrate on "malefactors" much further down the totem pole.

I’ll keep my comment on the day’s headlines short.  100 rockets were fired at Sderot, Ashkelon and the Israeli settlements (Hamas’ term, we’d better get used to it) in the Western Negev in the last 48 hours.  Not one of them struck Olmert’s back yard, or Barak’s office at Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv.  End of story, end of comment.
100 rockets were fired at Sderot in the last 48 hours. Not one of them struck Olmert’s back yard, or Barak’s office. End of story.

I have far more disturbing news to report.  Today I drove down with our attorney to Ramat Gan.  A new, cult-like phenomenon is sweeping the city’s public high schools.  Parents are concerned.  School principals are more than concerned.  They are doing everything in their power, and often things well beyond their legal powers, to suppress the phenomenon or at least keep it out of their schools.  The mayor of Ramat Gan, Tzvi Bar, literally had a temper tantrum when confronted with the phenomenon, which he fears will lead to the corruption of young morals and the spread of draft-dodging.  He has instructed school officials in his town to crack down hard.  Students involved in the phenomenon have been threatened with suspension if they don’t abandon the practice, at least while in school, and in one case a parent who works for the city was threatened with dismissal if his son continues to be involved.

The dread cult phenomenon is mincha, the afternoon prayer Orthodox Jews recite every day.
A new, cult-like phenomenon is sweeping Ramat Gan's high schools

The statistics are ominous.  In Bleich High School, an elite school featured in the news before every election for the straw poll its seniors conduct, 45 kids reportedly gather for mincha every afternoon.  In the school whose students we met today the number reached 40 before the principal started locking classrooms where his students gathered to pray and threatening them with suspension.  Our information is that this is going on in every high school in town.

Why is this so shocking?  Ramat Gan has public high schools that are defined as Orthodox.  They are part of the official Religious Education Stream run by Israel’s Education Ministry.  We’re not talking about them.  These are ordinary high schools, unbranded, which Israelis have learned to term, er, secular.  Turns out that’s a misnomer.

Ordinary high schools in Israel are termed “state” schools.  Nowhere are they defined as secular per se.  Religion is not formally practiced or taught, but nowhere does the law say that liberty of religious conscience can be constrained within their precincts (That’s not the case with religious schools.  To attend one you have to observe an Orthodox lifestyle, which is why they can’t be for everyone).  Israel has not copied the United States’ silly legal doctrine that church and state are so separate that even private prayer cannot be tolerated in public schools. (To maintain this position consistently, you'd also have to outlaw private prayer in public parks.)  The prejudice against religious observance within these Israeli schools is simply that, a prejudice. 

Next week the principal of the school whose students we met with, as well as Mayor Bar, will get a lawyer’s letter warning them to cease and desist violating their students’ fundamental rights, and not to try to apply sanctions (such as threats of suspension) to students who insist on exercising them.  The letters will be ignored, and the next step will be to go to court, where it’s hard to see that the school or City Hall have a legal leg to stand on.  Stay tuned.

For me, the important aspect of the phenomenon has nothing to do with its legal aspect.  A few months ago a left-wing policy institute, the Israel Democracy Institute, published a survey showing that 33% of Israelis consider themselves Orthodox and 47% consider themselves traditional.  Only 20% describe themselves as secular, half as many as 30 years ago. The trend toward observance is even more pronounced in the younger age groups. 

About 35-40% of Jewish youths go to schools overtly defined as Orthodox, including a fair number of kids from families that define themselves "traditional."  That means that, no matter how you pitch it, a small but significant proportion of students in ordinary "state" schools are Orthodox and the majority are either Orthodox or traditional.  State schools in Israel may be run by secularists, but their students--and those students' families--are not secular.  The mincha malefactors I spoke to, composed of a minority of people from religiously observant homes and a majority of kids getting interested in religion, reflect the new trend within the general population that ordinary schools are supposed to serve.  If Ramat Gan’s school principals didn’t vigilantly police their schools for signs of religious crimethink, deterring many students, the Bleich mincha service might attract 120 students, not just 40.
If Ramat Gan’s school principals didn’t vigilantly police their schools for signs of religious crimethink, deterring many students, the Bleich mincha service might attract 120 students, not just 40.
  The Israel Policy Center will be proud if we can get the courts to quash prejudice against Judaism in the school system, and get sympathy for religion and tradition recognized as part of normal, mainstream Israeli life. 

Israel is getting more conservative and traditional, and it’s showing up in the schools.  In ten years, ordinary public schools in Israel may be “observant lite” rather than secular. Secular fanatics like the Mayor Bar and the education minister, Yuli Tamir, had just better get used to it. 

(Postscript:  It’s little appreciated that current American doctrine on the separation of church and state, to which non-Orthodox streams of Judaism in the States have learned to attribute a kind of holiness, is exactly opposed to the original intent of the first clause of the First Amendment.  Fact:  the phrase, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion . . .” was put there to prevent the Federal government from messing with official, established state churches.  But there’s no telling what will happen to your constitution once judges sink their teeth into it).

By inviting Bush, Olmert is doing what he's best at:  Getting us to focus on the irrelevant.

I'm bored by George Bush's visit to Israel and it hasn't even happened yet.

What nobody has bothered to explain is what this visit is about.  That's because the true explanation won't bear scrutiny.  Bush is coming for only one reason, to give Ehud Olmert a photo-op, which Olmert calculated seven weeks ago that he would need about now.
I'm bored by George Bush's visit to Israel and it hasn't even happened yet.
  Bush's visit has no bearing on anything else.  Olmert is betraying Jerusalem and Sderot and Israeli security as hard as he can right now and he won't do any better (or worse) just because Bush took a trip.  His policy is as incapable of implementation as it was when his spin doctors thought it up and Bush's visit certainly won't change that.

Bush is coming because he and his secretary of state believe in Olmert's commitment to peace, whereas everybody who spends any time around Olmert or being governed by him knows that the only thing Ehud Olmert is committed to is Ehud Olmert.  It reminds me of when Bush's father purported to believe in Gorbachev, way back twenty years ago, though you couldn't find a single Russian who shared that belief.
 
The timing of the visit was determined exclusively by Olmert's political problems.  First, Israel's 2008 budget was passed last week, so Shas and Avigdor Lieberman need Olmert far less than they did ten days ago, and second, because of the publication of the full Winograd report.  Oops, that didn't happen.  The report was going to come out last week, and Bush's visit was going to cancel its political fallout.  However, the committee members pulled a fast one on Olmert (it's good to know someone is faster than he in this town):  They just announced that the report will come out at the end of January, when the memory of the Bush visit has faded and the public can concentrate on Olmert's obscenely patent unfitness for office.  Does the President do emergency political house calls?
I greatly dislike the immense effort good and dedicated people are investing in Bush's visit

When the President of the United States visits a country, and that country is a democracy, it's simple courtesy and standard protocol to schedule a visit with the head of the opposition, who may be the next leader (and in Israel's case almost certainly will be).  But Bush is snubbing Netanyahu, in a breach of both protocol and manners, for the sake of his good friend Ehud.  A photo-op with Bibi would ruin the only point this visit has.  I didn't expect anything else from Olmert, but I'm ashamed for the President of the United States.

I greatly dislike the immense effort good and dedicated people are investing in Bush's visit—protesting, demonstrating, etc. etc.  The main point of the Bush visit is to enable Olmert to determine the media's agenda for a week or so.  In reacting to the Bush visit my fellow faithful are simply playing Olmert's game.  Olmert's strategy—with us, as with the majority of citizens—is to keep us from paying attention to the important things.  So I don't want to end this blog before I mention what they are:
Israel's Jews are 33% orthodox and 47% traditional in religious observance. 55% describe themselves as "right wing." If these people were presented with a coherent program—here and here are our dangers, this and this is what we should be doing about it—it would generate the mother of all political revolutions in this country. What we ought to be doing is planning what the message is we want to convey to the Israeli public.

Olmert and his government and the unelected elites they serve are almost irrelevant to Israel.  The public can be bemused by Olmert's PR antics but they don't believe in them.  Israel's Jews are 33% orthodox and 47% traditional in religious observance. 55% describe themselves as "right wing."  If these people were presented with a coherent program—here and here are our dangers, this and this is what we should be doing about it—it would generate the mother of all political revolutions in this country.  The reason it's not happening is lack of imagination—on our part.  Yes.  The country is ready to turn around, and if it's not doing so, we're to blame, you, me, everyone who reads this site and plans to go to an anti-Bush demonstration Thursday.

What we ought to be doing is planning what the message is we want to convey to the Israeli public, how we're going to spread it, and how we're going to use power once we win it. 
 
As for President Bush's visit to Israel, my wife and I have concert tickets at the Jerusalem Theater Wednesday night.  With the capital snarled by security arrangements, we'll probably have to park in Beer Sheva.  That's my primary interest in his visit right now. 

David Landau, editor of "Haaretz," invited Condi Rice to join him in "raping" Israel.                                                                         

Some months ago, the American ambassador to Israel invited a group of Israeli “intellectuals” to a private meeting with the Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice.  At this meeting David Landau, editor of the left-wing daily, Haaretz, beseeched Rice to “rape Israel.”  “Israel wants to be raped,” he assured her.  According to reports, many of the others in the room, most of them ageing white males of European extraction, nodded their heads in agreement.
One wonders if the historical parallel flashed through Rice’s mind, if she imagined other rooms, in other times and places, full of ageing white males assuring each other that “they want to be raped.”

Imagine the tableau.  Landau is saying this to a black woman, acknowledged to be—whatever one thinks of her policies—one of the smartest, toughest and accomplished ladies in the United States, a standing reproach to the benighted bigots who enslaved her forebears.  One wonders if the historical parallel flashed through Rice’s mind, if she imagined other rooms, in other times and places, full of ageing white males assuring each other that “they want to be raped.”

Sometimes a single ugly metaphor suffices to illuminate the ethical world of the person who utters it.  David Landau was not just egging Rice on to perform a solo hate crime, he was inviting her to join a gang-bang.  The essence of rape is not merely illicit sexual congress but a denial of the humanity of the victim, an assertion that her right to exist is a function of the rapist’s arbitrary will.  In the sense in which David Landau used the word “rape,” he and his newspaper rape Israel every day.  Every week Landau and “Haaretz” cast doubt on Israel’s right to defend herself, and portray her as evil and inhuman.  Her enemies are always right.  Israel’s indelible fault, her original, unforgivable sin, is the idea that the Jews are a people and deserve a state of their own.

Israel is raped in this sense every day by unelected elites who enjoy excessive access to the levers of political power.  Judges and jurists prevent her from defending herself and give preference to the rights of her enemies over the lives of her citizens.  Professors and publicists express contempt for her traditions, and state authoritatively that she is a tyranny with no right to exist among the nations of the world.  Corrupt and incompetent politicians trade her vital interests for another year in office.  Most of these people feed at the expense of the nation they abuse.The The bitter truth is that the rapists enjoy such power as they have by virtue of the consent of the governed, because of many Israelis’ ignorance about democracy, their inability to understand their true situation, and the brainwashing their masters subject them to, convincing them that the image those masters portray of them is accurate and the contempt in which those masters hold them is justified.
bitter truth is that the rapists enjoy such power as they have by virtue of the consent of the governed

A year and a half ago, at the end of the Second Lebanon War, something in this pattern of domination broke.  All polls show that since that time the Israeli public has entirely lost confidence in its political leadership, its public institutions, and the policies they would foist on Israel.  The public no longer believes its rapists nor trusts them.

True, that is not enough.  A wide gulf exists between loss of trust and the ability and willingness to do something about it.  But it’s just a matter of time.  Once the mythic aura of Israel’s unelected, self-hating elites is broken, liberation from their yoke will come someday.

Viva la liberacion!!