Did Ehud Barak do a Reverse Weizman?

No, the concert pianist and renaissance general has not taken up Olympic figure skating or diving. He has not even entered the World Wrestling Federation. I'll explain what a reverse Weizman is, but first I need a little background.

For nearly the first three decades of Israeli independence, military politicians stuck to the main Zionist parties--mostly on the socialist labor side for the first two decades. In 1969 Ezer Weizman went overnight from the number two position in the IDF to the cabinet. In July 1973, Ariel Sharon was finally forced to quit the army as he had reached the maximum age with little prospect of promotion to chief of staff. So he engineered, with the help of Weizman, the creation of the Likud as a common list from four right-wing parties. Unexpectedly Sharon entered the Knesset on the last day of 1973 from the Liberals--a group of middle-class businessmen with little interest in security or foreign affairs--rather than the Herut. He didn't want to compete with Ezer.

But Sharon's real ambition was still to be chief of staff. So he got an appointment as the commander of a reserve armor division from Rabin. And he also served as Rabin's security advisor (as if Rabin--a former chief of staff--needed one). Labor MKs passed a bill in the Knesset that forbade MKs from holding command positions in the reserves. Sharon made the decision and resigned from the Knesset. By 1976 it was evident that Sharon had no chance of advancing militarily. Liberal leader Simha Erlich made it clear that he wasn't willing to take Sharon back and there was opposition to his inclusion on the Herut list from both Weizman and traditional Herut MKs. So Sharon invented the concept of the general's party--a list headed by a general and a group of loyal followers. Sharon took positions all over the political map. He adopted the name Shlomzion--the peace or wellbeing of Zion--for the party's name. But former chief of staff and world-famous archeologist Yigael Yadin had also started his own list chock full of former generals and industrialists. On election day in May 1977 Shlomzion won only two seats to Yadin's fifteen. Sharon promptly entered into talks with Begin to enter Herut. Begin used Sharon as a foil to play against Weizman and allowed Sharon in as agriculture minister in the government while Weizman, who had been a loyal Herut supporter the whole time he was in the IDF, was made minister of defense. Less than three years later Weizman resigned from the government and the Knesset after he became upset with Begin's approach to the autonomy talks, which he thought endangered the peace treaty with Egypt.

Weizman spent four years in the private sector earning money in the import-export business with Ya'akov Meridor, a former head of the Irgun Zvai Leumi before Begin and Weizman's connection with Herut during the latter's army career. In 1984 Weizman cobbled together a general's list, which included Fuad Ben-Eliezer. Yahad, not to be confused with Yahad-Meretz, won four seats. A year later it became part of Labor and Weizman entered into a second political career, which, including his time as president, lasted longer than his first. Both Sharon and Weizman had successfully engineered mid-career political transitions by means of the general's party.

Barak now appears to be engineering such a transition, but in the opposite direction politically from Weizman's transition--hence, the name reverse Weizman. Political opinion has been shifting from left to right in Israel since 1973 and much more sharply since 2000. Barak is no doubt hoping that he can arrange either his future inclusion high up on the Likud list or the creation of a new centrist party with Netanyahu. In the past Ha'Aretz has written about the possibility of a "zipper party" consisting of alternate MKs from Labor and the Likud in a common list. This seems increasingly unlikely considering the trajectory of Labor. But an inclusion of Barak and former general Matan Vilnai, who followed Barak into Atzmaut, within the Likud appears quite possible.

South Africa and Israel

In recent years it has become almost compulsory for those on the Left to speak of Israel in terms of either apartheid or South Africa or both. This has reached the point where Jimmy Carter, who ran for president as a conservative Evangelical Christian, entitled his book Palestine: Peace or Apartheid. Carter admitted that he was deliberately attempting to be provocative; it's a pity that he was also not analytical as he nowhere in the book explains what he means by the title. In interviews he explained that he was referring to the Palestinian territories and not to Israel. In this case the natural comparison would be with South West Africa/Namibia, the former German territory conquered by South Africa in World War I, a defensive war on Britain's part. After the war South Africa was awarded a class C mandate from the League of Nations, which entitled South Africa to rule the territory as part of its own territory as long as it provided regular reports to the League. After the League's demise in 1946, the UN began to challenge South Africa's application of apartheid to South West Africa on behalf of Ethiopia and Liberia. Eventually in the 1970s the UN and the International Court in the Hague revoked the mandate. After a twenty-plus-year war of liberation by SWAPO, backed by Angola and Cuba, Pretoria finally agreed to withdraw from the territory in December 1988. But SWAPO never said that it would use Namibia as a springboard from which to liberate South Africa. And in any case there are hundreds of miles of barren desert wasteland between the border and South Africa's closest major cities. This is a major difference with Israel/West Bank where the PLO and Hamas have both spoken of liberating all of Israel and Israel's capital--the city in which its government is located--is on the border of the West Bank with half of the city claimed by the Palestinians.

In my opinion there are three valid bases on which to compare Israel with South Africa:

1) both had similar regional defense policies stemming from a similar geopolitical situation of being isolated siege societies;
2) both had a system of migratory labor from conquered territories that were/are economically integrated into the economy of the labor-requesting country;
3) both had major roles for military politicians in elected politics (see my previous post on this subject).

Jerusalem developed a policy of raiding and occupying neighboring countries or territories and supporting ethnic minorities in these countries in order to survive in the region. This strategy was then copied, with some advice from Israel, by South Africa in the period from 1975 to 1989 when P.W. Botha was the leader of South Africa. Israel first developed this strategy under David Ben-Gurion in the mid-1950s from 1953 to 1956 and applied it to Egyptian-ruled Gaza and the Jordanian West Bank as well as Syria. Then from 1972 to 2000 this strategy was applied in Lebanon. And Israel has over the decades supported rebels in Sudan, Lebanon, and Iraq while allying itself with non-Arab countries like Iran and Turkey.

South Africa applied a similar strategy to Southern Africa under Botha. Pretoria first intervened in the Angolan civil war on behalf of the U.S. and France in October 1975. Then in 1978 Pretoria copied the Rhodesians and began raiding SWAPO base camps in Angola. Finally in 1981 South Africa invaded and occupied southern Angola. There are many parallels between Israel's Lebanon policy and South Africa's Angolan policy. The SADF also carried out against SWAPO and ANC base camps in Zambia, Mozambique, and Lesotho. Pretoria supported rebel movements in Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

The main strategic lesson that comes from all of this activity over fifteen years is that at the end of the day Pretoria had to deal with the political problems stemming from apartheid and white minority rule. All its military activities did was to buy it time to negotiate with the ANC in a situation that was favorable to Pretoria--after Angola had expelled the ANC's armed wing from its territory and after the Cold War had ended. When applied to the Middle East this means that Israel after regularly beating the Arab armies will still have to deal with the Palestinian problem. All the IDF can do is buy it time to do this under favorable circumstances. But this lesson should have been obvious without reference to South Africa in the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon thought that he could redesign the politics of the region by defeating the PLO and Syria in Lebanon. The PLO, after its defeat by the IDF and a Syrian-sponsored rebellion within Fatah, was forced to withdraw completely from Lebanon in 1982-83 and no longer had a viable military option. Yet Israel soon found that there was no more moderate Palestinian negotiating partner. The main effect of the war (besides sending Sharon into political obscurity for 15 years) was to possibly speed up the PLO's thinking in regard to negotiating with Israel.

Since 1967 Israel had reshaped its economy to become dependent on Palestinian manual labor in the construction and agricultural sectors among others. It was only with the serious Islamist terror of the mid-1990s that Israel had second thoughts about the utility of this labor source. Israel began importing labor from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe to replace many of the Palestinian workers who were increasingly seen as potential terrorists. Thus, this common feature is increasingly an historical one.

As mentioned in my previous post, Israel's class of military politicians can most usefully be compared to the Indian-fighter politicians of the antebellum period in America and to the Union of South Africa. From 1840-60 the United States had a three-party system in the North (the South only developed a three-party system from 1854-57). In antebellum America as in Israel the military politicians were native-fighter politicians who had fought the indigenous population and this fighting continued into the late 1850s in Florida and Texas. But the United States has never had coalition governments. By contrast South Africa had two two-party coalition governments in the Union period (1924-29, 1933-34). But the two governments were so stable that in the first instance the National Party stole the electorate of the Labour Party and in the second merged with the South Africa Party to form the United Party. And its military politicians were not native-fighter politicians during this period and the African population was quiescent then. Also, I would argue that the Whigs were closer to the Israeli Labor Party than was the United Party for purposes of comparison. The United States was also very corrupt in the 1840s and 1850s like Israel today (by Western standards) and from 1846-50 had a debate over occupied territories. And South Africa completely lacked a liberal party during this period. Although with the collapse of Meretz this last point is less relevant. But overall, I would argue that the United States of the 1850s is marginally a better case for comparison with contemporary Israel than was the Union of South Africa. Apartheid South Africa is useful for comparing with Israel at the regional level, but not at the internal level.

The main problem with comparing Israel and South Africa is that although the latter has many of the features of the former they are spread out over several time periods. The Boer republics had many African-fighter politicians and an ongoing conflict with the native population. The Union of South Africa had a genuine multiparty system with competitive white political parties. And apartheid South Africa had an interventionist regional defense policy. But South Africa never had these three major features at the same time.  Apartheid

South Africa's main utility to analysts of Israeli politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as a warning of the international isolation that is the fate of a racially-European population that rules a territory by force in which it is a minority. This is much more relevant for Israel's future than for its present.

Are Zionists settlers?

Zionists have traditionally seen Israeli Jews as "returned natives"--a people that has reconstituted itself as a nation and returned to its homeland after two millenia starting in the early 1880s. Arabs and their supporters have simply seen them as settlers, no different morally or even conceptually than the white settlers who have settled around the world from Europe since the early 16th century. In this post I will demonstrate that Israel has the characteristics of a modern settler society and then offer my perspective on the returned native vs. settler controversy.

In the summer of 1998 I went to Belfast to examine what was taking place there after the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement. I was fresh off a tour in the Army in Kosovo and finally had the savings for research and writing. After spending some time in the Linenhall Library's political collection reading up on the history of The Troubles--the period of Northern Ireland history from late 1968 that was then still continuing--I saw many similarities with both Israel and South Africa. I ended up writing my first book, Native vs. Settler, which examined the three conflicts in a range of categories. My book, published in 2000, joined a growing literature that had compared the three conflicts since 1989. Mine was I believe the first to compare all three conflicts on a settler/native basis.

In 2002 after my second book, Indispensable Traitors, was published, I was thinking about what to write about next. I decided to write about Israel's military politicians and I started looking for cases to compare them with. This is how I began researching antebellum America, about which I will write further in my next post. It was not until 2004 that I wrote an article, published in 2005 in The Journal of Conflict Studies in New Brunswick, Canada that I set out systematically to demonstrate that Israeli politics were settler politics. What follows is the essence of that article.

Israeli politics in 2004-05 exhibited six salient features:
1) Because of the proportional representation--list franchise system, Israeli elections result in multiple parties and all governments are coalition governments, most of them weak and unstable.
2) Israel has powerful religious parties that are more akin to the system Islamist parties found in Turkey and Indonesia than to parties found in Western Europe or North America.
3) Former senior military officers have played a major role in electoral politics since at least 1954.
4) Both the Labor Party and the Likud have paramilitary roots to their parties--both have one component party at the time of their formation (1968, 1973) with paramilitary origins.
5) Since the June 1967 Six Day War the territorial question has been the dividing line between parties of the Left and the Right, rather than economic policy. Before 1967 other aspects of the Arab question were the main dividers between the Revisionists/Herut and Mapai.
6) Israel has a legal differentiation in status between Arabs and Jews.

The first two features are the subject of most texts on Israeli politics (at least in English--I own three of them). Traits three through six are traits typical of self-governing or autonomous settler societies such as the United States, Northern Ireland, and South Africa under white rule. It is not a single one of these traits but their combination that makes it possible to speak of Israeli politics as settler politics. Although all three of the above mentioned societies had traits five and six, they either had traits three or four but not both. Thus, Israeli politics are more settlerlike than most settler societies.

Because Israel's multiparty system is so defining of the Israeli political system, comparisons should best be made with settler societies that have a similar party system. Unfortunately, however, most British settler colonies used the first-past-the-post franchise resulting in two- or three-party systems. Only Northern Ireland is a settler society that has a form of proportional representation. Its party system, however, is normally made up of five parties: two unionist British Protestant (settler), two nationalist Irish Catholic (native), and a small liberal non-sectarian party. So normally when examining settler politics in Northern Ireland one is looking at a two-party system. But when the system is put under pressure by pressure from London to reach a solution to the Irish question, a breakdown in unionist unity results. Unionist politics were multipolar from 1973 to 1978 and from the mid-1990s to 2003. Fortunately the latter period was during the peace process and resulted in a weak two-party coalition that can be usefully compared to Israeli governments.

Northern Ireland has five of the six salient features of Israeli politics. It is only missing a major role for former senior military officers. This is because Northern Ireland is a province of the United Kingdom rather than a sovereign entity. Although throughout the 19th and 20th centuries unionists from Ulster contributed greatly to the senior ranks of the British army, they did not go on to serve as politicians after Northern Ireland became autonomous starting in 1922. This is because there is no tradition of former senior officers having a second career in politics as there was in the United States in the 19th century or in South Africa among Afrikaners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To make comparisons on this very important feature of Israeli politics we will have to turn to these two societies, and that will be the subject of my next post.

Many Jews for ideological reasons, and many Arabs as well, are incapable of seeing Israeli Jews as both returned natives and settlers--they must be one or the other. About 90-95 percent of Israeli Jews are descended from at least one parent whose ancestors arrived in Palestine/Israel after 1880, most after 1917. After 1917 Palestine was administered first by the British army and then by the Colonial Office. Palestine was de facto a British settler colony with some loose supervision by the League of Nations. The Palestine mandate was run for its first two decades until 1939 primarily for the benefit of the Zionists--to encourage immigrant absorption and Jewish economic development, although adjustments were made periodically to assuage Arab resentment and resistance. During the last decade the mandate was run on a more equal basis as Britain backed away from its commitments to Zionism under the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations mandate. This is the period that is largely used by the Zionists to create an anti-colonial mythology.

So are Israeli Jews only settlers? DNA testing has established that they have ties to the Holy Land and are related to the Palestinian population. The only other group of settlers that claims to be returned natives are a few of the Ulster-Scots of Northern Ireland who claim that they are the descendants of the ancient Picts who were driven out of Ireland by the Gaels in about 1,000 AD and then returned some six hundred years later. And this is very much a minority position among unionists raised some 350 years after the original Ulster plantation.

Arabs and anti-Zionists take two different, and contrary, positions on Israelis as returned natives. First, some say that their exile from the land resulted in the Jews losing any political rights to the land as a separate people. Among Arabs and Muslims this is made easier by the belief that Jews cannot be both a religion and a people (or nation) and so are only the former. This ignores the traditional Jewish religious position on this question. The second position is to simply deny any connection to the land. In July 2000 at Camp David Yasir Arafat denied that there had ever been a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. He claimed that the temple had been in Nablus. After all, he was an expert on Judaism. Palestinian children are taught in Palestinian schools that the Jews have no historical link with the land.

So, if the historical connection is irrelevant, why go to great lengths to deny it? This is the question that anti-Zionists must answer.  The League of Nations and the British certainly thought that it was relevant. Americans as a whole continue to believe that it is relevant.

The other question is: Are all settler societies automatically illegitimate? Zionists certainly seem to believe that this is the case, which is one of the prime motives for denouncing any talk of Zionists as settlers. Yet we find settler societies throughout the world: Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific; Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in South America; Costa Rica in Central America; the United States and Canada in North America. In many other countries in Latin America the descendants of settlers constitute a large minority of the population as in Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Cuba. All of these countries are considered legitimate.

I believe that by engaging solely in a hasbara campaign on this issue, the Jewish Right is foregoing much valuable analysis that can be used in the struggle for peace. Maybe this is because the Right does not believe in the possibility of peace.

Blog Introduction: Who am I and what this blog is about

This is a blog devoted to discussing foreign affairs and in particular foreign affairs and politics dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East.

The immediate impetus for this blog is that it is a requirement for a journalism degree that I'm pursuing. But I've been considering it for some time as for the last five years I've been a regular contributor to a number of blogs on this subject (APN's The Conversation by Leonard Fein; Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove; the MeretzUSA blogspot; Michael Lame's Rethink the Middle East; and the Promised Land). I've written several guest blogs at both the Realistic Dove and MeretzUSA.  Although I'm quite aware that one doesn't need qualifications in the blogosphere, I think that I should lay out mine for my readers so that they can judge them for themselves. I have a doctorate and masters degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree in the same subject from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I have had five books published: three dealing with comparative politics comparing and contrasting Israel, Northern Ireland and South Africa; and two with antebellum American politics. Over the last dozen years I've focused on researching conflicts and societies that I believe can cast light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on Israeli politics.  I've focused on looking at settler societies--and I'll explain my rationale for doing so in detail in my next post--not in order to delegitimize or stigmatize Israel but rather in order to learn from other conflicts that have already reached a stage that Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not, and thus learn from them. As a student of history, I believe that it is possible to learn from the past, but that few people rarely do because most people see history as an exercise in self-validation and legitimation rather than as a means of learning. This is because this is the way it is normally taught in school and in popular works.  It is also because much of what we learn from the past is not really very flattering.

The name of my blog comes from a combination of the two reflexive "insults" that the Israeli and Jewish nationalist right use to shutdown any discussion that is outside of their box. The terms are: self-hating Jew and anti-semite. Thus one can either agree with them or be dismissed as either an anti-semite or someone who hates one's own cultural background or ethnicity. Over the years I've been labeled both based on whether the name-callers thought that I was a Jew or a Gentile. Some thirty years ago I was labeled a self-hating Jew by Midge Decter after I wrote a letter in to Commentary magazine disagreeing with an article that attacked Shalom Akshav/Peace Now. More recently I've been called a Jew hater for asserting that Israeli Jews can be most objectively seen as BOTH returned natives and settlers. I'm a Hebrew-speaking gentile who admires Jews for their cultural achievements and learning over the centuries. Also in Italian gentile means nice and kind, and I like to think that that meaning also fits me.

Most of my comparative work has involved comparing Israel to four different societies: South Africa, Northern Ireland, antebellum America and the French Fourth Republic. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on internal settlements in Southern Africa (Namibia, Rhodesia, South Africa) and I conducted doctoral and post-doctoral research in Natal, South Africa in 1988 and 1990. I also served as a volunteer in the Rhodesian Guard Force and Rhodesian Ministry of Internal Affairs leading African troops in the bush war in 1978-79 because I believed then that no good could come from a self-proclaimed Maoist ruling the country. I believe that Robert Mugabe's performance over the last thirty years has more than proven my instincts correct. I conducted research in Belfast, Northern Ireland on The Troubles and on the Northern Ireland peace process during the summer of 1998 and the summer of 1991. I availed myself of the opportunity to collect a small library of books on the sectarian conflict there. When the Northern Ireland peace process collapsed between 2002 and 2006 I took advantage of the opportunity to research Indian-fighter politicians in American history and then anti-slavery parties in antebellum America. Incidentally, the term antebellum America refers to the North as well as the South, and it was mainly the former that I compared Israel to. I have also read about the party system during the French Fourth Republic, but have not published anything on the subject.  During 2010 I researched the process by which Dublin renounced its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, but I have yet to publish on the subject.