The EU is an Obstacle to Peace

The claim that Israeli “settlements” constitute “an obstacle to peace” has become a self-evident European dogma. The truth, of course, is that there was no peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors when none of those “settlements” existed (between 1949 and 1967); that the Palestinian leadership rejected twice Israel’s offer to dismantle most of its settlements (by Ehud Barak in July 2000 and by Ehud Olmert in September 2008); and that when Israel unilaterally dismantled all its settlements in Gaza in 2005, it was “rewarded” by thousands of rockets.

Rather than settlements, one of the major obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the so-called “right of return.” By this euphemism, the Palestinians want to flood Israel with about 7 million immigrants who are the descendants, or alleged descendants, of the 600,000 Arabs who left their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. This would turn Israel into a bi-national state with an Arab majority. Except for a minority of post and anti-Zionist Israelis, even the most dovish members of the Israeli Left consider the “right of return” a non-starter.

While the Zionist Left generally pooh-poohs the “right of return” as a mere rhetorical tool in which the Palestinians themselves don’t actually believe, the fact is that the Palestinian refusal to give in on that issue is what caused the rejection of Barak and Olmert’s peace proposals. Moreover, neither Arafat nor Abbas ever tried to educate their people into admitting that the “right of return” is unrealistic; on the contrary: both leaders have made the “right of return” a central tenet of Palestinian nationalism and an issue whose abandonment is an act of high treason.

The fantasy of the “right of return” is kept alive and indeed nurtured by UNRWA, the United Nations Agency created in 1949 to handle the issue of Palestinian refugees. There are two main reasons why UNRWA is perpetuates and even aggravates the “Palestinian refugee problem.” First, the mandate of UNRWA (as opposed to the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR) is not to integrate refugees into their host countries but to support them and to subsidize their lives as second-class citizens in camps. Second, UNRWA applies the definition of “refugees” to the descendants of the refugees, while UNHCR limits this definition to the refugees themselves. Hence has the world’s number of refugees decreased from 60 million in 1947 to 17 million today, while the number of “Palestinian refugees” has increased from 600,000 in 1948 to 7 million today.

UNWRA is thus a major obstacle to peace. Had UNHCR been in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNHCR handles all the world refugees except Palestinian refugees), the issue would have been solved a while ago. First, were Palestinian refugees defined as such according to UNHCR criteria, about 100,000 Palestinian refugees would still be around today, most of them elderly. Second, UNRWA collaborates with the discriminatory policies of countries such as Lebanon and Jordan by subsidizing the confinement of Palestinian refugees in camps instead of integrating them into countries with which they have no language, ethnic, and religious differences.

Dismantling UNRWA and transferring the fate of the remaining actual Palestinian refugees to UNHCR would thus remove a major obstacle to peace.

The EU has just decided to do the very opposite by granting UNRWA a €72 million donation. This decision is not only an affront to the Palestinian refugees themselves, since it contributes to the perpetuation of their status of segregated and pauperized minorities among their Arab brothers. It is also an affront to the cause of peace. The EU, in effect, has just signed a big check that will fund a major obstacle to peace.

While the EU did somewhat realize the Kantian vision of democratic peace within its borders (although with a little help from the United States, whose army protected Europe from the Soviet Union during the Cold War), Europe’s contribution to peace outside of the Old Continent’s borders has been dismal. From Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia, the EU has been powerless at best and part of the problem at worst. The EU (formerly EEC) promoted the PLO in the 1970s and did not welcome the Camp David Agreements of 1979. Although the Oslo Agreements were technically not made in the EU (Norway is not a EU member), the European recipe for peace in the Middle East has failed miserably and tragically.

The EU’s recent decision to fund UNRWA belongs to a long history of counter-productive efforts. But, mostly, it confirms the fact that the EU is an obstacle to peace in the Middle-East.

The West Bank Robber

The day after Israel’s iconic journalist Yair Lapid announced he was quitting his lucrative job at Channel 2 to run for Knesset, former soccer star Eric Cantona declared he was throwing his hat into the ring for France’s upcoming presidential election. While Cantona is only running for PR purposes and will probably gather 1% of the votes, Lapid is expected to conquer 15 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and thus to be the next government’s kingmaker.

Besides his anticlerical views (which he inherited from his late father Tommy, himself a journalist turned politician), Yair Lapid has no platform. The fact that in Israel a prospective politician does not need a clear platform in order to become major player in the Knesset goes to show what is wrong with Israel’s voting system. Israel has no district elections for the Knesset. The entire country itself constitutes a single district. Voters don’t select district representatives but political parties whose number of seats in the Knesset is proportional to the amount of votes received by the parties at the polls (which is why this voting system is known as “proportional representation”). Because Israel has no district elections, providing viable solutions to constituents’ daily lives is not a criterion for gathering support. Rather, the most critical ingredient for getting voters’ attention is simply fame (hence did Noam Shalit, the father of Israel’s most famous kidnapped soldier, also announce this week that he would run for Knesset).

Yair Lapid’s meteoric rise in the polls is yet another confirmation that Israel should replace proportional representation with majority representation based on district elections. Rather than cowardly trying to prevent Lapid from running for Knesset with a tailored-made law that would impose a one-year cooling-off period to journalists who decide to go into politics, our lawmakers should better reform a voting system that encourages populism and eschews accountability.

But the “Lapid Effect” also confirms the parochialism of the Israeli electorate and the hypocrisy of the Israeli Left.

Why, after all, vote for a “Lapid Party” that would merely be the repetition of past failures? Israel has had many “centrist” parties that attempted to challenge both Likud and Labor: “Dash” in 1977, the Center Party in 1999, “Shinui” in 2003, and even Kadima in 2006. None of those parties lasted, because they did not provide an ideological and practical alternative to the authentic divide between Right and Left –a divide that stems from two opposite readings of human nature, as well as of man’s ability to change reality.

As for the Left’s warm welcome of Lapid’s decision, it goes to show what the Left in Israel really cares about. After all, Lapid is no peacenik and no socialist. He is even an avowed Zionist. A Tel-Aviv bourgeois, Lapid is economically conservative. Though he favors withdrawing from the West Bank, he no longer believes that doing so will bring peace. In a column he wrote for Yediot Aharonot on June 13, 2006, Lapid admitted that the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza had nothing to do with peace or with demography. Rather, its purpose was “to teach the settlers a lesson.”

So if Lapid does not believe in peace, in socialism, and in multiculturalism, why is the Left so excited about the power he would likely wield in the Knesset? Because what the Israeli Left really cares about is not peace, nor socialism or multiculturalism. What it really cares about is getting out of the West Bank. And Yair Lapid may help attain that goal. This is why Yediot Aharonot columnist Sima Kadmon wrote on January 9 that “Lapid must be the man who will manage to put an end to the prominence that the Right has enjoyed for too long.” The same way that Tommy Lapid’s 15 MKs enabled Sharon to “teach a lesson” to the Jews of Gaza, the Israeli Left hopes that Yair Lapid’s expected 15 MKs will force (or enable) Israel’s next Prime Minister to “teach a lesson” to the Jews of Judea and Samaria.

As the Hebrew saying goes: “We’ve seen that movie before.” And there is a reason why the Israeli Left wants to watch the movie again. Rather than becoming a politician, Yair Lapid would in fact turn into a film actor –just like Eric Cantona after he left Manchester United.