Category: Israel 2003-08

I was really sorry to hear of the death, a few days ago, of the veteran Israeli defense-affairs correspondent Ze’ev Schiff. Schiff was a smart, well-connected, and extremely canny individual. He was also a real gentleman.
I had known Ze’ev since the mid-1980s. We had many, many long conversations about defense affairs. Often we disagreed. But that did not interfere with the high regard and friendship in which I held him or the serious consideration that he always gave to me and my work.
In 1991, when I was working at a Washington DC-based conflict-resolution organization called Search for Common Ground, helping them set up their first project in the Middle East, Ze’ev was one of the first people I invited to join the project; and he was immediately eager to do so. I had already, sometime before that, introduced him to Ziad Abu Amr, the serious Palestinian political scientist and public intellectual who was the Foreign Minister in the Palestinians’ recent unity government (and prior to that, Culture Minister in the government that Mahmoud Abbas headed as PM, back in 2003.) Ze’ev and Ziad proved to be two very important pillars of the project as it became launched.
In spring 1993, I felt obliged to leave SCG because of a serious breach of trust committed against me and the integrity of our project by the organization’s president. (This, in an organization in which trust-building was the essence of our work…) After my resignation was announced, Ze’ev was almost immediately on the phone to me, pleading with me to stay in the project. To my regret, I did not feel able to.
Anyway, I kept in as good touch with Ze’ev as both of our busy schedules would allow, and would certainly always call him whenever I was in Israel. When I was there in early 2004, I really needed to get Gaza, because I was doing some pro-bono consulting with a US-based aid organization that was active there. The Israeli military maintained– then, almost as much as now– iron controls on all entry of persons into Gaza, and they wouldn’t give me permission to go. Ze’ev was extraordinarily generous and persistent in calling all the relevant military people on my behalf. (But even then, it didn’t work.)
When I went back to Israel and Palestine in February 2006, I spent a couple of hours one morning having coffee with Ze’ev, in one of the malls in the fairly luxurious strip of developments north of Tel Aviv. One of the nice things about Ze’ev was that he would often introduce me to some of the extremely interesting people he knew who would happen to be passing by. (Israel is, after all, a fairly small place.) In 1998, I remember, he introduced me in the lobby of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv to Fouad Ben Eliezer, now a lynchpin of Olmert’s government and always a solid rock of the Israeli center-right. In 2006, Ze’ev introduced me to a guy who had been a key Mossad hit-squad organizer back in 1973.
Anyway, on that occasion, I told Ze’ev I was once again planning to visit Gaza. Indeed, since this time I had an Israeli “foreign press” pass, I knew I’d have a better chance of getting in, which I did. “Send my regards to Ziad,” Ze’ev said. Then he leaned forward… You have to remember this was in the weeks immediately following Hamas’s victory in the January elections. It was before Hamas had formed their government. They were still eager to have it be as broad a national unity government as possible. The American and Israeli government were agitating hard against that: from that point, it was already very evident that they really, seriously, wanted the Hamas-led political order in the PA government to fail. Ziad, who had always been a key bridging personality between Abu Mazen and Hamas, was widely rumored to be in the running to be named Foreign Minister in the Hamas-led government…
So Ze’ev, who has always been extremely well connected with the Israeli authorities, leaned forward to me over the open-air table at the coffee-shop and said, “Tell Ziad not to do it! Tell him, if he does, he will face the most serious consequences.”
Later, in a phone conversation we had while I was on my way to Gaza, Ze’ev repreated that warning, in even more urgent terms.
It was my clear understanding that this was the transmission of (or very well informed reporting of) a death threat from the Israeli authorities. Ze’ev Schiff was not a person prone to exaggeration.
Personally, I felt uncomfortable at the prospect of being party to the continued transmission of this threat. I figured if the Israeli authorities really wanted to communicate a serious death threat to Ziad Abu Amr at any time, they had hundreds of ways to do so and were not reliant on me to do so. On the other hand, I figured Ziad deserved to at least know about it. So yes, I did raise it in a conversation I had with him.
(In the end, some combination of threats and and inducements were successful at keeping Ziad and all other independent Palestinian politicians of note out of the Hamas-led government at that point.)
But back to Ze’ev Schiff. No doubt about it, for the last few decades of his life he was very much more than “just” a reporter of the Israeli defense scene. He was a canny behind-the-scenes player in Israeli politics. Among the community of Israelis whom I encountered and worked with in various portions of the “track-two” diplomatic scene, he was definitely not a dove-ish visionary. He was a hard-nosed realist. But as such, he was very interested in testing out the intentions and views of the “other side”; and he worked hard to build relationships of mutual respect with Palestinians and other Arabs on a professional and collegial basis so that all of them could jointly explore the various options for their peoples’ futures. And yes, actually, to do this does require a degree of vision, self-confidence, and empathy that all too often seems lacking in strategic “thinkers” who imagine that all problems can be solved by force and by trying to delegitimize dissenting voices and views and exclude them from the discussion.
I should also note that, in a field in which the contributions of women are far too often either ignored, expropriated by guys, or otherwise sidelined, I always felt that Ze’ev took my work seriously, and valued my views on strategic and regional issues.
So for a large number of reasons I shall miss Ze’ev Schiff. I think Israel and the region will be diminished and just a bit less stable in the absence of his hard-nosed realism, his decades’ worth of experience of regional defense matters, and his gut understanding of the fact that Israelis really do need to build decent, respectful relationships with their Arab neighbors– even those they disagree with– if they are to have a stable and assured future in the region
I send my deep condolences to his wife, Sarah, and their children and grandchildren. I’m sure they will all miss him much more than any of us outsiders.

In Portugal, in 1974, it was the country’s conscripts and junior officers who– questioning why they had to spend long years ruling distant colonial outposts rather than enjoying the good life they saw their youthful peers elsewhere in Europe engaging in– went home from those outposts and toppled the fascist-military regime that had been (mis-)ruling their country since 1926.
In South Africa, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, young “Whites” who were similarly disaffected with the burdens of conscription and militarism that the apartheid system imposed on them started to question the moral worth of the apartheid system from within.
In Israel, student groups from throughout the country (who have their own specific gripes with the government) have now joined with residents of the painfully close-to-Gaza town of Sderot and disaffected army reservists in a nationwide anti-Olmert protest that is expected to converge in Tel Aviv on Thursday.
Remember that in Israel, most young men and women who go to university to study do so after they’ve spent their required time as conscripts in the military. That’s 36 months for men and 24 months for women. This fact has a number of consequences:

1. The students are very close to the slightly younger men and women who are still serving and have a close understanding of all aspects of the military life. This is notably different from the situation of most students in today’s US or UK.
2. Most Israeli undergraduates have considerably more experience of the world and personal maturity than their counterparts in the US or UK. (Especially since a large proportion of them have also taken a year off between army service and university to go travel the world.)

Remember, too, that there is a close link between Israel’s levels of defense spending ($7.69 billion in 2006, of which only $2.26 billion came from Uncle Sam) and its ability to underwrite either a decent eduction for university students or decent social services and support systems for the residents of socially marginalized towns like Sderot.
The politics of this week’s gathering protests are– and will most likely to continue for a while to be– mixed and fairly fluid. Some of the groups participating (including the Tafnit movement, founded by a former national-security adviser to both former PMs, E. Barak and A. Sharon) seem to be politically centrist or even rightwing. Others are probably more clearly pro-peace. But the country’s formerly big, almost “mainstream” pro-peace organization, Peace Now, is still reeling from the hasty decision some of its leaders made last July to support Olmert’s extremely escalatory, lethal– and also, as it turned out, deeply dysfunctional– war effort. (The Winograd report once again underlined the fact that, in the war’s early days Olmert and Halutz’s decisions were supported by a strong majority of Israel’s public and political elite. Not that that should be seen as removing for one moment the burden of constructive leadership from those individuals.)
As I noted here yesterday, the strongest, best-organized force in the anti-Olmert camp is currently the Israeli right wing. But I think the politics are fluid. There is a deep war-weariness in much of the country. That, too, was alluded to in the Winograd report, when it talked about weaknesses in “the national ethos”. I see that Ze’ev Schiff referred to that, as well, in this column in HaAretz today. When I sat and talked with Ze’ev in Tel Aviv in March last year, he talked quite a bit about this development, which he– unlike me– saw as a cause for deep concern.
So the politics in the gathering anti-Olmert protests will most likely be very mixed, and potentially very fluid. For the immediate future, that fact will most likely allow Olmert to succeed in his plan of hanging on in office in spite of everything.
But over the three or four years ahead, which broad direction is the Jewish Israeli public going to take? Let’s all try to figure out how to persuade them to follow the route taken by the Portuguese junior officers 33 years ago: No more colonial occupation of other people’s lands with all the wars, oppression, and suffering that situation entails for everyone concerned!
(Maybe the Portuguese democrats and their “White” South African counterparts could think about sending delegations to Israel to talk to people there about their experiences??)

The Winograd Commission, established by Israeli PM Ehud Olmert to investigate Israel’s notably unsuccessful performance in last summer’s war against Lebanon, today issued a first “Partial Report” in Jerusalem. The report covered only the period leading up to the war and the first six days of what turned out to be a 33-day war. It attributed “primary responsibility” for what it described as “very serious failings” in Israeli decisionmaking in this period to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the defense minister Amir Peretz, and the then-Chief of Staff Dan Halutz.
Paragraph 10 of the report’s Executive Summary detailed the main strategic failings thus:

a. The decision to respond with an immediate, intensive military strike was not based on a detailed, comprehensive and authorized military plan, based on careful study of the complex characteristics of the Lebanon arena…
b. Consequently, in making the decision to go to war, the government did not consider the whole range of options, including that of continuing the policy of ‘containment’, or combining political and diplomatic moves with military strikes below the ‘escalation level’, or military preparations without immediate military action — so as to maintain for Israel the full range of responses to the abduction. This failure reflects weakness in strategic thinking, which derives the response to the event from a more comprehensive and encompassing picture.
c. The support in the cabinet for this move was gained in part through ambiguity in the presentation of goals and modes of operation, so that ministers with different or even contradictory attitudes could support it. The ministers voted for a vague decision, without understanding and knowing its nature and implications. They authorized to commence a military campaign without considering how to exit it.
d. Some of the declared goals of the war were not clear and could not be achieved, and in part were not achievable by the authorized modes of military action.
e. The IDF did not exhibit creativity in proposing alternative action possibilities, did not alert the political decision-makers to the discrepancy between its own scenarios and the authorized modes of action, and did not demand – as was necessary under its own plans – early mobilization of the reserves so they could be equipped and trained in case a ground operation would be required.
f. Even after these facts became known to the political leaders, they failed to adapt the military way of operation and its goals to the reality on the ground. On the contrary, declared goals were too ambitious, and it was publicly stated that fighting will continue till they are achieved. But the authorized military operations did not enable their achievement.

The report detailed four specific ways in which Olmert had failed and concluded that, “All of these add up to a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.” Of Peretz, it said, “the Minister of Defense failed in fulfilling his functions. Therefore, his serving as Minister of Defense during the war impaired Israel’s ability to respond well to its challenges.” And of Halutz it concluded, “the Chief of Staff failed in his duties as commander in chief of the army and as a critical part of the political-military leadership, and exhibited flaws in professionalism, responsibility and judgment.”
Of these three men who stood at the top of Israel’s national command and decisionmaking apparatus during the war, only Halutz has so far resigned.
This evening, as widely predicted beforehand, Olmert once again vowed to hang on in office. In a brief televised statement he said, “It would not be correct to resign… and I have no intention of resigning.” In a very non-committal way he admitted that “mistakes were made” and promised to start work this week on implementing some of the Commission’s procedural recommendations.
The harsh judgments made by this will add significantly to the pressures that have been building up on Olmert. A police enquiry into the terms on which he transacted a profitable property deal some years ago intermittently threatens to bring him to the brink of resignation. But prior to running in last year’s national elections Olmert (and his political mentor Ariel Sharon) had cleverly re-configured Israeli politics by establishing a new centrist party that split Labor down the middle. Now, the strongest opposition to him comes from his right-wing– former comrades in the Likud Party and their allies even further to the right.
But a large proportion of Israel’s political elite has been in a funk since the unexpected defeat of last summer’s war. Neither Olmert’s Kadima Party nor any of the smaller parties in the present ruling coalition wants to risk forcing the country into a fresh general election by leaving the coalition.
Last July’s decision to escalate very harshly indeed in response to Hizbullah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers was taken by Olmert and Halutz according to the concept that Israel’s use of massively destructive and lethal force against Lebanon would rapidly force Hizbullah to cry “uncle” and agree to the dismantling of its very experienced militia force. (For more details, see here.) That concept built on the alleged effectiveness of stand-off– primarily airborne– firepower, which some hawkish strategic thinkers had seen demonstrated by US military operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But in none of those three other theaters did the “decisive” early records of the US war effort led to stable, and stably pro-western outcomes. And in Lebanon, the massive application of stand-off firepower for 33 days did not even succeed in its first-stage goal of either decapitating Hizbullah or forcing the organization to bow to Israel’s demands.
For the advocates of stand-off firepower, the “promise” of this approach had always lain in the idea that using hi-tech gadgetry from high altitudes could enable the military to cut down, in particular, on the enormous burden that maintaining a ready ground-combat capability imposes on the manpower of a country. (This is the case even with a heavily reserves-reliant force, as Israel’s is, since the reserves do have to be trained and retrained every year or so.)
Now, Jewish Israelis as a group are faced with the momentous choice of whether they want to continue to live as an embattled, isolated outpost within a predominantly Arab part of the world, and an outpost that is prepared to pay the heavy costs– particular in terms of the conscription burden for young people– associated with that… Or, are they prepared to look to other, more creative and potentially long-lasting ways to assure their security, primarily through building relationships of peace and cooperation with their neighbors in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon?
The peace initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002, and recently re-committed to by all the Arab states and parties, including the Palestinians, provides one very worthwhile route to explore. But with Washington’s Arab-Israeli policy still firmly controlled by unreconstructed neocon Elliot Abrams it is very unlikely that the Bush administration– which does, after all, also have quite a few woes of its own– will do anything to help Israelis to decide to “Make love not war.”

Somebody seems to be spinning the line to AP’s Matti Friedman that Olmert’s response to the Arab Peace Plan is generally positive. But it is quite weird for Olmert either to hail the Arab states’ current restatement of their support for this five-year-old plan as marking a “revolutionary change”.
It is also bizarre that Olmert should try to claim that the proceedings of the Arab summit now underway in Riyadh– to which the Iranian Foreign Minister has also been invited– show that the Arab states now judge they “may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem.”
Does Olmert not have information at all about what has been going on in Riyadh? And wWhy on earth would an ASP reporter not seek to insert a little fact-based reality of his own into his reporting of the PM’s spin?
Anyway, it is interesting that Olmert, who along with the rest of the Israeli political elite damned and/or ignored as quite irrelevant the Arab Peace Plan when it was issued back in 2002, now feels obliged to try to find something faintly positive about exactly the same plan.
So I’ve been reading the English-Haaretz version of the current Olmert pressathon. Basically, he’s been giving long interviews to the major Israeli print media, “to mark the first anniversary of his tenure as PM”– but also, presumably, to try to reverse the sag in his political fortuned that has taken his ratings down to around 3 %.
Olmert expresses some basic confidence in the stability of current governing coalition. And Israeli friends whose judgment I respect generally agree with this assessment… the argument there being that most of the other, smaller parties that re in Olmert’s current coalition have so much reason to fear the outcome of any imminent holding of another election that they prefer to hang in there with Olmert.
There is this:

Olmert opened the policy section of the interview with an optimistic declaration: “Gentlemen, I believe that in the next five years, it is possible to arrive at a comprehensive peace agreement with the Arab states and the Palestinians. That is the goal. That is the effort, the vision.”

But then, almost immediately, this:

This week Olmert hosted the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He rejected ideas of making rapid progress in negotiations with the Palestinians, of a shortcut to the final-status settlement, and committed himself only to biweekly meetings with the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), at which confidence-building measures will be discussed. Rice had hoped to leave Jerusalem with a dramatic declaration on the revival of the peace process, but had to make do with a lukewarm statement.
“There was no real disagreement between us and the Americans,” the prime minister explains. “There were very interesting and very productive discussions. All told, we said that there is no point in a bypass route, and that we have to confront the Palestinians and oblige them to fulfill commitments.”

“Confidence building measures”!! After 40 years of military occupation, this is all they are discussing? (While the Israeli concrete mixers and bulldozers continue their relentless work of transforming the human geography of the entire West Bank… How about the question of fulfilling past promises– or holding to the requirements of international law– as being equally applicable to both sides, Ehud??)
Then, this:

Olmert believes that various factors in the past year – the Second Lebanon War, the growing fear of Iran, and extremism – have pushed Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into a different perception of the regional reality. “A bloc of states is emerging that understands that they may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem, and that maybe it is worthwhile to reach an understanding that includes acceptance of Israel’s existence,” he says. “I very much hope that the conference of Arab states will contribute to this.”

Does he have any idea of history and causality? The very same Arab Peace Plan that without a doubt will be endorsed and reconfirmed by the current Riyadh summit is five years old. So how, exactly, does he conclude that the events of the past year have pushed the Arab states into any kind of a downgrading of the priority of the Palestine question??
The journalists there, Aluf Benn and Yossi Verter, press him a little on the fact that nothing his government has done militarily regarding Gaza– either taking military actions or refraining from taking them– has yet stopped the firing of Qassam rockets from northern Gaza into Israel…
Then, there is this:

Did you miss an opportunity to renew the talks with the Syrians?
“I want to make peace with Syria. Unequivocally. But we all know – and the Palestinian experience also shows us – that there is a disparity between declarations and a credible process, which can also bring about a correct outcome. It is not enough for someone to make a vague declaration through some court journalist. I want to arrive at the possibility of peace with the Syrians, and when I believe that the conditions are right, I will not miss the opportunity.”
What are those conditions?
Olmert is mysterious: “Conditions that make negotiations possible, and everyone with any experience of negotiations with the Syrians knows about them.”

“Mysterious” is one word for it. “Evasive” would be another.
More intriguingly, Olmert clearly implies that it was soon after he assumed the acting premiership, four days after Sharon had his debilitating strokein January 2006, that he started orchestrating the changing of the strategic plan for Lebanon to focus it on the “massive retaliation” approach we saw in July:

“I have dealt with the Lebanese issue since January 8, 2006 – four days after Arik [Sharon] fell ill and I assumed office. We deployed for the possibility that what happened in the end, would happen. Throughout these discussions, there was total across-the-board agreement, by all the security elements and by the civilian echelon, that it would be impossible not to respond differently from the way we did in the past. Some said that the absence of a response would cause strategic damage to Israel.
“All these processes led to determination of a position well before July 12. When I was asked by the army why I wanted to see the plans, and why I wanted to consolidate a clear position far in advance, my answer was very simple. I didn’t want to reach that day and then start from scratch. I wanted to know where I stood, the considerations for and against, what was on the agenda, what the damage would be in each scenario – and then to reach a conclusion.
“All these matters were presented to the cabinet in great detail, and the entire cabinet, 24 ministers, voted unanimously in favor. It is true that I am the prime minister and I bear supreme responsibility, but still, there were 24 ministers there, and they voted unanimously in favor. What they told the Winograd Committee later, what they said or didn’t say, I don’t know.

Anyway, lots of interesting points there… But I don’t have time to comment any more.