IRIS Blog

Incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must understand the traps being set for him and their sources. And as he builds his government, he must appoint ministers capable of working with him to extricate Israel from those traps and discredit their sources...

The Obama administration has opted for a political fiction. The president and his aides have decided that a Hamas-Fatah government will moderate Hamas, and that therefore such a government will not only be legitimate, it is desirable. Whereas when the first Hamas-Fatah government formed in March 2007, the Bush administration refused to have anything to do with it, today the Obama administration is actively backing its reestablishment.

For Israel, a US-supported Hamas-Fatah government is a hellish prospect. The political support such a government will lend to the terror war against Israel will be enormous. But beyond that, such a government, supported by the US, will likely cause Israel security nightmares.

THE OBAMA administration's ability to disregard the will of the Israeli voters and the prerogatives of the incoming government owes a large deal to the legacy that the outgoing Olmert-Livni-Barak government is leaving behind.

The outgoing government set the conditions for the Obama administration's policies.... By not defeating Hamas in Operation Cast Lead, and then agreeing to negotiate a cease-fire with the terror group, the government paved the way for Hamas's acceptance by the US and Europe as a legitimate political force...

DUE TO the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's legacy, when it enters office the Netanyahu government will lack the vocabulary it needs to abandon Israel's current self-defeating course with the Palestinians and defend its actions to the international community in the face of the Obama administration's use of dishonest terms like "peace processes" and "moderates" and "humanitarian aid" to constrain Israel's ability to defend itself. To surmount these challenges, Netanyahu must move immediately to change the terms of debate on the Palestinian issue.

Despite his great rhetorical gifts, Netanyahu cannot change the terms of international debate by himself. He needs two seasoned public figures who understand the nature of these challenges at his side. If Netanyahu appoints Natan Sharansky foreign minister and Moshe "Bogie" Ya'alon defense minister, he will have the top-level support he needs to overcome his predecessors' legacy and change the nature of contemporary discourse on the Palestinians and on Israel's strategic significance to the West in the face of staunch opposition from Washington.

Like Netanyahu, Sharansky and Ya'alon understand the basic dishonesty of the current international conversation relating to the Palestinians. Both men have come out publicly against the false policy paradigms that have guided both the outgoing government and the US and Europe. Both are capable of working with Netanyahu to free Israel from the policy trap being set for him.

Following the rocket fire, the Ashkelon Municipality reactivated its emergency command and control center, situated in a bomb shelter adjacent to city hall...

"In light of the situation, we can say with certainty that the school struck by a rocket will not be open tomorrow. We will have to find an alternative solution for students. The remainder of the schools will open on Sunday," Deputy Mayor Shlomo Cohen said.

Cohen added that the municipality "shared the concerns of parents in light of the deterioration of the situation, but we must remember that carrying on in a routine manner means bolstering the education system and the whole of the city of Ashkelon."

One of the most oft-repeated mantras about the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict is that there is no military solution; the only solution is to talk with our enemies. This mantra also has a popular corollary: Because we must ultimately negotiate with the Palestinians, decisive military action is counterproductive - it merely sows hatred that makes the inevitable dialogue that much harder.

...The obvious counterexample: The Allies never negotiated with the Nazis either during or after World War II; they destroyed Nazi Germany and executed its leaders. The same went for Tojo's Japan.

But World War II was a state-to-state conflict fought by regular armies; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not. And many people deem that difference crucial. That is why I found David McCullough's history of an earlier nonstate conflict, America's War of Independence, so illuminating.

McCullough's 1776 describes the war's first year, when America's Continental Army was a ragtag collection of men with almost no military training or discipline, few uniforms, only the most basic weapons and insufficient ammunition for them. George Washington recognized that given this reality, frontal combat with the well-trained, well-equipped British army would be suicidal, so he essentially conducted a guerrilla war: lightning strikes followed by swift retreats rather than capturing and holding territory.

What was noteworthy, however, was Britain's attitude toward the war. The British commanders, Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe, believed that their goal was not to defeat Washington's army, but to promote reconciliation with the American colonies. They even worried that killing too many American soldiers might foment hatred that would impede reconciliation. Hence at several critical junctures during that first year, the British army failed to exploit opportunities to destroy Washington's forces, preferring instead to dialogue.

IN SEPTEMBER 1776, for instance, the British had completely routed American forces on Long Island, forcing the battered remnants to retreat to indefensible positions in New York City. But instead of pursuing and wiping out the Continental Army, Richard Howe decided this was the perfect opportunity for peace talks.

The peace conference achieved nothing for Britain, McCullough noted, but it did buy Washington time to regroup: "The British had suspended operations during what could have been a golden opportunity to attack, as one perfect, late-summer day followed another." ....At numerous points along the way, when a final push could have destroyed Washington's army, William Howe held back, because he did not see defeating the army as his goal. He simply wanted "to keep the Americans on the run," ...in the hope that chasing them out of more and more territory "would bring the deluded American people and their political leaders to their senses and end their demonstrably futile rebellion."

You can hear Howe echoing down the ages in Israeli leaders who explain that the goal is not to "defeat" the Palestinians, but to "sear their consciousness" and make them understand that dialogue is preferable to terror.

ULTIMATELY, HOWE'S STRATEGY gave Washington time to achieve two militarily insignificant but morale-boosting victories, in Princeton and Trenton... And that preserved the army to fight another day.

Moreover, as the war dragged on without Britain achieving decisive victory, its European enemies, who had initially sat on the fence, decided that helping the Americans made sense. First came desperately needed financial aid from both France and Holland, and then assistance from the French navy, without which the final defeat of British forces at Yorktown in 1781 would have been impossible.

In 1776, the British could have ended the revolution. But they wasted numerous opportunities to decisively defeat the Continental Army, and that army, as McCullough noted, was "the key to victory." Thus what should have been an easy win over the American "rabble" became a humiliating defeat - not because Britain could not have won, but because it repeatedly chose not to, since its goal was not victory but dialogue and reconciliation.

The crucial point that Britain failed to understand was that dialogue was not possible without first achieving victory, because the Americans had no interest in dialogue as long as they had any hope of achieving victory themselves...

THE PARALLELS to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are obvious. Over and over, our leaders have refrained from seeking a decisive defeat of hostile Palestinian forces... This began with the First Lebanon War in 1982, when we had a chance to wipe out the entire PLO leadership but instead let it escape to Tunis due to American pressure. And it continued right through the recent Gaza operation, when the IDF was ordered to stop well short of destroying Hamas forces.

But by refusing to seek victory, Israel has also effectively prevented dialogue - because as long as Palestinians believe that they have a chance of achieving victory, meaning the eradication of the Jewish state, dialogue and reconciliation will be impossible...

Hence if this country... truly wants an Israeli-Palestinian peace, the necessary first step is not negotiation, but victory - because, as America's history shows, only decisive victory by one side can convince the other to concede its own dreams of victory. And until the Palestinians concede their dreams of destroying the Jewish state, no compromise will be possible.

The government in Israel has great power; sometimes it is even exaggerated. The most blatant and terrible manifestation of this was of course the expulsion of 8,000 innocent civilians who lived in Gush Katif... This move was undertaken by great use of force, without any limitations imposed on it by the Knesset or Supreme Court.

Examining the actions of the outgoing government makes the same thing clear. This government was premised on a relatively solid majority and did almost anything it wanted. It initiated... wars, engaged in indirect peace talks with Syria and direct negotiations with the Palestinians, embarked on Supreme Court reforms, and of course, ran the country’s day-to-day affairs.

The whining over the short terms in office accorded to Israeli governments is exaggerated. The Olmert government did not collapse against a backdrop of coalition problems, but rather because of criminal affairs. The overwhelming majority of the various Israeli governments managed to survive for more than three years.

In Israeli politics, three years are an eternity when it comes to the burning issues on the agenda. The problems faced by Israel’s leadership are among the most difficult in the world, and therefore it is very important that decisions are taken by agreement of several parties, and not heaven forbid by a one-man decision, as is the case in a presidential system of government.

The survival efforts of every government are part of the checks and balances required in a democratic regime, and even they are not effective enough on occasion in the face of a determined and too-powerful government.

Despite the broad public concurrence that Knesset members are motivated by their desire for power, governments were toppled and elections were held here against a blatantly ideological backdrop. The Barak government fell when he decided to make peace at Camp David at any price. Golda’s government fell against the backdrop of the Yom Kippur War, and the first Rabin government because of the Shabbat.

...When a prime minister decides to ignore the ideological red lines of his coalition partners he may lose his job, and that’s a good thing.

Therefore, it is difficult to ignore the sense that the apparent “governability problem” is no more than an internal code-word by the losing leftist camp, which is again complaining that “its country had been stolen.” The Rabin government endorsed the Cairo Agreements, as part of the Oslo Accords, with a one-vote majority, yet it did not sense any governability problems at the time. Yet when the traditional-Jewish majority stops the mad rush of the enlightened minority trying to make peace at any price, again we see the governability problem emerging.

This governability problem can be resolved relatively easily, should the elected prime minister decide to deal with the issues that do not face polar disagreements, while dedicating most of his energies to economic and social issues instead of to peace agreements and withdrawals. Dealing with these issues will serve to blunt the ideological disagreements that topple governments and enable him to rule for an extended period of time.

Had Netanyahu conducted himself this way in 1998 instead of signing the Wye Accord... his government could have completed its four-year term in office with no problems...

"I lie awake at night," Arad confided, "fretting over Israel's mishandling of the present danger from Iran. We have wasted precious years doing little about this danger; many in our political elites are ignorant, are in denial and cynical. They are deluded by a false messianic fervor, an irrational pursuit of peace. This prevents them from tackling the real dangers facing us."

...The media did not even bother to report Arad's dramatic warning and his assertion that the right steps may still save the day. His assessment that decision makers are paralyzed was given added credence by an earlier Herzliya conference panel devoted to governability.

Governability can be first assessed by a formal yardstick, the percentage of government decisions that are implemented, and then by how full and timely the limited implementation is. The government's ability to govern is strongly limited by external constraints imposed by our political structure, such as the width of coalitions, their cohesion and the accountability of Knesset members. However, these are problems that can only be resolved by electoral reform, Strum noted.

But there are also internal constraints that can be removed. Strum emphasized the overwhelming role of bureaucratic barriers and bottlenecks created by the Treasury and the Justice Ministry, aggravated by the growing tendency to "legalize" every problem. Coordination between the legislative and the executive branches, and establishing greater accountability by mid-level management, could solve some of these problems.

Strum also analyzed some of the conflicting values and principles that bedevil government. Governability - the right of our elected representatives to implement policies - is at the heart of our democracy. Yet it is constrained by conflicts between good principles of management and a restrictive administrative law. Managers cannot set priorities, enforce discipline or reward those who excel. They have no flexibility in using resources and manpower. Critical decisions depend on hard-to-achieve agreement among several bodies, such as the Treasury, the Justice Ministry and various agencies. There is a separation between management and budgetary control and little ability to measure outputs. Administrative law also empowers bureaucrats to decide "the reasonable way" to implement policy, enabling them to finesse ministerial decisions.

The result was no less than administrative paralysis and government impotence. Strum proposed to legally sanction orders of priority and accountability so that bureaucrats could be replaced if they failed to implement policy; to establish a regulatory roundtable entrusted with national decision-making; to require the prime minister to decide in cases of disagreement between ministries; to increase the budgetary flexibility of various ministries...

Even the minimal, legitimate role of government - protecting us from internal and external violence and enforcing contracts - is immensely complicated and difficult. So how can we expect that government, disorganized by nature, could succeed in its many undertakings, that it can provide us with security, a good living, excellent education, health services and even manna from heaven.

In fact, as long as we saddle government with such impossible tasks, it will not be able to discharge its legitimate duties. Until we liberate governments from their excessive burdens and allow them to do the minimum required, all of us, not only Uzi Arad, better not sleep peacefully at night.

Five people were wounded in the earlier Katyusha attack, as the rocket fired from Lebanon exploded near a home in a Western Galilee town.

Three people who were inside suffered light wounds from flying glass and shrapnel, and were hospitalized in Nahariya. Magen David Adom paramedics treated two others for shock...

The IDF responded immediately by firing artillery rounds at the source of the fire in southern Lebanon.

The IDF would not comment on who was behind the rocket attack or what measures, if any, Israel would take beyond the artillery response.

On January 8, three Katyusha rockets struck Nahariya, one slamming into a retirement home. Two people were slightly hurt. On January 14, three more rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon.

Also Saturday, two Palestinian gunmen were killed in an explosion in Gaza close to the Israeli border, reportedly as they were preparing explosives for an attack on IDF border patrols.

The IDF said there was no engagement by soldiers in the area at the time.

Egyptian authorities have started letting students, third-country residents and medical patients stranded in Gaza cross the usually closed frontier...

The opening of the terminal appears to be in direct opposition to last week's Israeli security cabinet decision not to fully open the Gaza Strip's borders until Hamas freed kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.

Following the security cabinet decision, Egypt had offered harsh words of criticism for Jerusalem's handling of the cease-fire negotiations that Cairo is brokering between Israel and Hamas, warning that "Israel is undermining its credibility"...

On the Right, the results were an object lesson in the perils of short-changing democracy. And on the Left, they were an object lesson in what responsible voting can accomplish.

...Likud... lost seats by scorning their voters. ...The drop was particularly dramatic: It shrank 25 percent in a mere two months, from a high of 36 seats in a poll taken the day after its primary to 27 seats in the election. All these seats clearly migrated rightward, since the overall rightist-religious bloc did not shrink. And that is the key to understanding what happened.

Likud's primary produced a list attractive to rightists; hence many who had deserted the party in 2006 initially returned. But then, in a disgraceful and anti-democratic move instigated by chairman Binyamin Netanyahu, party institutions reordered the slate's reserved slots three days after the primary to demote some of the hawks and promote left-leaning candidates, as Netanyahu wanted a "centrist" list. And disgusted rightists, unwilling to support a party whose leader so clearly did not want them, jumped ship.

...Primary voters... read the political map more accurately than Netanyahu. He thought the battle was over the Center, so he wanted a list that would appeal to Kadima voters. But the battle turned out to be over the Right - and primary voters had given him precisely the list he needed to win it. Thus had he honored their will, he would now head a larger, stronger faction and be better placed to form a stable, functional government.

Instead, he woke up only belatedly, as Likud's edge over Kadima in the polls steadily narrowed even though Kadima was also shrinking. He then tried to break right, but it was too late: Rightists refused to vote for someone who had shown them the door just two months earlier. Hence he is now in an impossible situation: Instead of being the obvious candidate to form a government, Tzipi Livni is in position to challenge him, enabling smaller parties to launch an extortionate bidding war.

THERE is the lesson of Kadima. According to pollster Rafi Smith, fully 40% of Kadima's voters chose it just days before the election. They came overwhelmingly from the Left: Smith says Kadima took one-third of Labor's voters and even more of Meretz's. And they came for one reason only: As the gap between Likud and Kadima in the polls narrowed, leftists realized that supporting Kadima offered their only hope of forming the next government. So they held their noses and did so. As one such voter told Ha'aretz: "For years I've voted Meretz, but this year, since I'm no great fan of Netanyahu, I decided to vote for Tzipi Livni. I think her party is atrocious... but I had no choice... she's the only answer to Netanyahu."

The results are unfortunate: a Netanyahu-Livni stalemate in which neither can easily form a government. But given that Netanyahu had for months appeared unstoppable, it was a stunning achievement, and it very nearly succeeded. Had Kadima beaten Likud by somewhat more than a mere one seat, Livni's claim to be the people's choice might have been convincing.

....Even if Netanyahu manages to form a coalition - which is still uncertain, given Kadima's ability to play spoiler - a government comprising six separate factions, with... no one party large enough to dominate, will be too dysfunctional to do anything useful and will ultimately collapse prematurely.

These, then, are the election's lessons: Give the voters a say, honor their will after doing so, and unite behind a party that could actually form a government instead of dissipating your electoral power among numerous small factions. And if Israelis learn them, our political system may even start producing governments capable of governing.

The images of a chemical weapons facility identified as al-Safir.... obtained by DigitalGlobe's WorldView-1 satellite shows that
extensive construction has taken place at the facility, as well as at an
adjacent missile base, the group wrote. In addition, the images showed that the site contained a number of the "defining features of a chemical weapons facility."

Al-Safir is home to a chemical weapons production facility and a missile
base that holds a significant part of Syria's long-range Scud D ballistic
missiles, according to foreign reports. The Scud D has a range of 700 kilometers and al-Safir is reported to have several dozen underground
fortified bunkers where the launchers and the missiles are stored.

Iraq became the 186th country to become a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention on 14 January. This may assuage regional concerns over unconventional weapons, but developments elsewhere in the Middle East suggest prevention of chemical weapons development is failing.

The most emblematic distortion of the death toll in the Gaza war relates to the deaths near the UN school in Jabalya on Jan. 6. Palestinian medical officials claimed that some 40 Palestinians, many of them women and children, were killed at the school by IDF shells.

These claims sparked condemnation from the UN, widespread allegations of a "massacre" against Israel and escalated international political demands for an urgent end to the fighting.

The IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA) reported on Sunday, after careful checking, that the Palestinian death toll in that incident - which involved Israel returning fire against Hamas gunmen outside the school facility - caused 12 fatalities, nine gunmen and three noncombatants.

CLA head Col. Moshe Levi acknowledged on Sunday that all this information - on both such specific incidents as the UN school and the overall classifications of the dead - would probably be largely ignored today, since it was being made available so long after the fighting ended. But Levi explained that the IDF was not prepared to issue information unless and until it was confident of its accuracy, no matter how grievous the damage to Israel's image, and the consequent political pressures caused by the delays in contesting inaccurate facts and figures.

Levi remarked that, in future conflicts, the IDF might need to bolster the resources it allocates to establishing, in real time, facts as basic as the number and identities of the dead.

"Large secondary explosions were noticeable following part of the strikes, proving the presence of weapons and munitions," IDF spokesmen said.

In mid-January, as Israel ended Operation Cast Lead against the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni signed a Memo of Understanding with the United States. She said at the time, "For a cessation of hostilities to be durable, there must be an end to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza."

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the time that the memo "provides a series of steps that the U.S. and Israel will take to stem the flow of weapons and explosives into Gaza."

Mark Regev, spokesman for outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, pointed out Saturday night that an end to weapons smuggling was not a condition to the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead and that the Sabbath eve bombing of the tunnels was Israel's answer to Hamas.

An IDF spokeswoman said it could not clarify for publication if the Air Force knew ahead of time that the targeted tunnels were being used to transport more arms into Gaza at the time of the bombing.

Overnight, two weapons manufacturing facilities were destroyed in an aerial attack in the Jebalya refugee camp in the northern Strip. The IDF confirmed the strike.

Terrorists also fired two Kassam rockets and a mortar shell on Gaza belt communities during the Sabbath.

A bomb exploded on the Israel-Gaza Strip border on Saturday afternoon, narrowly missing an army patrol vehicle which was passing by.

Nobody was hurt in the attack, and no damage was reported. Immediately following the explosion, IDF troops began searching the area for the gunmen who planted the device.

The Gaza crossings will not be re-opened for normal traffic until kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit is returned to his home and family, according to an Israeli government spokesman.

Regardless of media claims by Hamas terrorists on an Egyptian-brokered truce agreement, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev said Friday morning that no deal has been finalized. "You know we don't comment on every thing that Hamas says," Regev said.

According to the report, which claimed the truce would be announced by Saturday or Sunday, once Hamas had "consulted" with allied terror groups, the Egyptian-brokered deal focused on reopening the crossings as well as an end to rocket fire and arms smuggling.

"If Hamas ceases all aggressive action against Israel, including arms smuggling, Israel is ready for total and complete quiet," Regev said. However, he said, that did not mean Israel had closed on a deal. Nor did the statement address the issue of whether the kidnapped soldier, languishing in terrorist captivity since June 25, 2006, would be included in a truce agreement.

"Gilad Shalit is a different issue," said Regev, noting that the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza has focused much of its efforts in the negotiations on opening the crossings.

"Hamas knows well that we can't have anything close to normal functioning of the crossings as long as Gilad Shalit remains hostage."

Whereas in the past, Arab parties tended to lose a mandate and Center-Right parties like Likud tended to gain one, the late-counted ballots this time did not... break the deadlock.

The Central Elections Committee said Thursday evening that a total of 3,373,490 legal ballots had been tallied, after committee employees weeded out blank ballots, illegal ballots, and ballots that had been placed in envelopes together with other ballots.

According to the committee's computations, each mandate was worth 27,246 votes. One party - The Green Movement-Meimad - technically had enough votes to pick up a mandate, garnering 27,737 votes, or around 0.8 percent of the valid votes cast; however, it fell short of the 2% minimum required to enter the Knesset.

None of the other small parties came close, with the Gil Pensioner's Party edging out the Green Leaf Party by 4,000 votes for the dubious title of second-largest loser.

The votes of the armed forces usually tilt to the nationalist and religious parties, and are likely to create at least a tie and may even put Likud in the lead. The votes of diplomats overseas and soldiers changed the results in the last election by taking one Knesset seat away from Kadima. The number of Arab MKs also will likely be reduced after the soldiers' ballots are counted.