Over at the Times of Israel, I argue that the Jews are not a religious or racial group, but an ethnic community. This discussion has implications for Israeli citizenship laws, and for the relationship between American Jews and Israel.
Mr. Krauthammer, in your article, can we get a few things straight about Israeli history?
First, yes, the Israeli public was quite fearful in May 1967. But inside the Israeli government, Israel had intel it could win in a relatively short war. On June 1, 1967, Maj. General Meir Amit, director of the Mossad, told Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense, the war would be over in two days (see Oren, Six Days of War, p. 147), though perhaps he only meant the Egyptian front. In 1992, Amit said at a conference that he told McNamara at that meeting that the war would last seven days. Also, as the U.S. notetaker recorded in 1967, Amit “informed the Secretary that there were no differences between the U.S. and the Israelis on the military intelligence picture or its interpretation.” [Aside: note that the web version of document #124 contains a formatting error where a note is included in the body of the text. This error becomes clear if one looks at the scan of the actual page from the paper version of this FRUS volume. I have linked to both and emailed State to suggest that the historians correct the formatting error.]
The next day, June 2, 1967, at a high-level Anglo-American meeting, McNamara spoke: ”the Israelis think they can win in 3–4 days; but he [McNamara] thinks it would be longer—7 to 10 days.” The British response: “Both sides agreed that an Israeli military success would take more than a few days and possibly a week plus. Certainly it would take longer than it took in 1956 and it would be bloodier.” (This still classified memo from the CIA director to LBJ might also help with this discussion. But on May 23, the CIA reported Egypt had improved since 1956 but, “Nevertheless, we consider that the Israeli forces have retained an over-all superiority.”)(Here is a detailed NSC analysis of the war and its likely outcome, an Israeli victory.)
Second, the military mobilization did create pressure on Israel. Military mobilizations often affect the national political clock. But I think it is a huge leap to go from there to, “The country was dying.” Israel’s mobilization would have been psychologically and financially difficult to sustain (which lends credence to the idea that Israel would not let various diplomatic fishing expeditions run their course), but it could have done so for longer. Dying suggests capitulation, surrender, starvation, suicide, and/or impending Arab victory. None was in the offing. Or if it was, can you please make that case?
Third, you cannot say that today for Israelis “it is May ’67″ and then proceed to undercut your argument by pointing out all the differences between 1967 and 2012: “The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms.” So less dread + less despair + different time clock + war not four days away somehow still equals 1967? It makes no sense.
I’ll leave more on Krauthammer’s faulty Iran comparison to Matt Duss.
Last night, before I read the Council on Foreign Relations’ Task Force report on US-Turkey relations, I had a lengthy Twitter conversation with Michael Koplow, Steven Cook (the director of the report), and Laura Rozen. It turns out I agree with much of the report’s recommendations; but in some ways I don’t think it goes far enough.
Koplow is right to warn that the US should be careful about tying its interests and policies too closely to Turkey. But I think the American-Turkish relationship can be made stronger, and closer, without letting Ankara drag Washington along to places it would rather not go.
Turkey and the US have a long history of tense moments in their relationship, and it would be fair to say that most of them involved American insensitivities to Turkish interests. In the 1960s it was over Cyprus (particularly US President Lyndon Johnson’s outright threat that he would not defend Turkey from the Soviet Union over the island) and Turkish poppy production (which the US wanted banned). In the 1970s it was again Cyprus, lack of US diplomatic support, an American arms embargo, and consistent criticism over Turkey’s domestic policies.
The 1980s were better, but the end of the Cold War and bipolarity in the early 1990s prompted many in the US to question whether Turkey (like Israel) was still a strategic asset. Such questions were soon put to rest with the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis and war, and the turn by many US analysts to recognizing Turkey’s regional importance.
This turn was the beginning of a series of regular “discoveries” of Turkey’s importance. Located in the middle of several strategically important and/or volatile regions, Ankara was argued to be key to US and Western policy. Simon Mayall, writing in 1997 for the Institute for National Strategic Studies, best represents this view:
[i]n a bipolar world Turkey had had the luxury of an uncomplicated security policy in which, broadly speaking, it aligned with the West, opposed the Soviet Union, and ignored the rest….In the new security environment, Turkey’s geographical position and its military strength now made it a European, Balkan, Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, Caucasian, Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Sea power. Sharing borders with Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, Turkey’s control of the Bosphorus Straits and the Dardenelles also made it a Black Sea neighbor of Russia, the Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. Turkey’s ethnic roots lay in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, influencing its interests, concerns, and sympathies. Its Muslim identity demanded a community of interest in the Middle East, through Pakistan, and across to South East Asia. None of the immediate and demanding post-Cold War issues of Bosnia, the Middle East Peace Process, Iraqi sanctions, Operation Provide Comfort, Trans-Caucasus separatism, Russian activities in the ‘Near Abroad,’ CFE flank issues, NATO enlargement, Cyprus, Central Asia, and energy pipelines could be discussed without reference to Turkey.
Today, some of these issues have passed from importance, and others have been resolved. But think of how we might replace those that have with: Iran, the Arab Spring, Afghanistan, Syria. Add in Turkey’s growing economic strength, a dynamic AKP government, and concerns over a decline in US influence in the Middle East, and Turkey remains no more or less important to US interests and policy than when it was so discovered to be in the 1990s.
My point is not that Turkey shouldn’t be considered relevant: it clearly is. Instead, I would argue that the American-Turkish relationship needs to be normalized. Rather than regularly highlighting its position and what it can do for US interests, make the relationship like the American-British one: treat Turkey like a brother, not the strange cousin we invite for supper every once in awhile. Don’t speak of its indispensability every few years; make it a standard assumption.
Ties should be strengthened, in the manner set out in the CFR report. But these should be routinized, made mundane. Not only will this enhance the American-Turkish relationship, by creating a set of expectations and norms on both sides; it will also help reduce the over-heated rhetoric coming from US analysts and Turkish columnists and politicians that we heard in the 1990s and in the wake of the Arab Spring. These create false expectations, and subsequent disappointment, and waste time.
A normalized relationship will help sensitize Washington to Turkey’s needs and interests, particularly while Turks themselves figure out their foreign policy directions. It will allow the US to call upon Turkey when it needs to, without having to make it seem like a major favor. And it will construct an underlying, stabilizing platform in the relationship—and by extension in other arenas, like NATO and Europe.
The benefits for Turkey are clear: a healthy, stable relationship with the world’s most powerful country; a status as an understandable “regular” country among more American policymakers and the public (this is, in my view, one of the most critical recommendations of the CFR report); and the ability to disagree with friends over differences of opinion without having to suffer a negative backlash.
Clearly the two countries will continue to disagree over issues, and—again, similar to Israel—there will be different expectations given their different locations and positions in the international system. Canada and the US have had severe disagreements over issues (softwood lumber, Iraq), but that relationship remains strong and healthy. Much work remains to be done, on both sides; but it’s certainly a goal worth pursuing.
Like other Israel-watchers, after the bombshell news that Benjamin Netanyahu suddenly crafted a new coalition government to avoid early elections, I now have to change what I originally intended to write about Israeli politics.
But I’m going to continue with the broad theme—that of the dysfunctional nature of Israel’s political system—because it matters beyond this short-term development, and because it’s this very troubled system that allowed Bibi to pull off what is clearly a stroke of genius.
First, though, a few words on who won and lost. Bibi is the big winner: he avoided the uncertainty of elections and having to fight off a renewed Labor, still-relevant Kadima, and fresh Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid’s new party).
Ehud Barak also won big. Michael Koplow over at Ottomans and Zionists has a nice explanation why, but in a nutshell he staved off the strong possibility that his faction, Atzmaut, would have disappeared in the election without enough votes to enter the Knesset.
Shaul Mofaz also comes out a winner: he managed to enter the government without having to worry about an election; he did what Tzipi Livni was unable to do (join the coalition); and as a former senior general will now help shape the discussion over Iran and the peace process (he doesn’t care that much about the social justice issues sparked by the J14 protests).
The biggest losers are: Tzipi Livni (having never met the expectations set out of her, she lost the leadership of Kadima to Mofaz, who then did what she couldn’t do and took the party into government); public confidence in the political process (since Mofaz had railed against Bibi’s leadership and insisted he wouldn’t join a Bibi-led government); and Yair Lapid (because he had his legs completely cut out from under him).
Beyond this, it’s hard to predict at this point how things will go. Much depends on whether the coalition partners can keep it together; on the American elections; on developments in Iran; and so on. We need a little more time to make durable arguments about the future.
Now to Israel’s political system. In some ways, it’s a bit of a surprise that it hasn’t collapsed of its own weight. The thing that keeps saving it from doing so is developments like tonight: when individuals and parties put aside their mutual antipathy, their electoral promises, and sometimes even their principles to jump into the government.
Here are four major issues that weaken the system.
Hyper-democracy: Israel is a hyper-democracy, by which I mean a multitude of parties—and a party can mean no more than a tiny handful of individuals—always compete in elections. Barring a platform that negates Israel as a Jewish state, incites racism, or supports armed struggle against Israel, any party can register. It’s normal for tens of parties to compete in each election, and for over 10 to be represented in the Knesset, provided they pass a threshold of 2% of the national vote.
Because of this, no party has ever gotten a majority of Knesset seats (61 out of 120). Every government has, therefore, been a coalition of several parties. Until the 1970s this wasn’t a major problem, but as Labor’s dominance in the political system waned and Likud grew stronger, this system encouraged these two big parties, the ones closest to the center of the political spectrum, to forgo a governing alliance with each other in favor of fighting over the support of the multiple small parties (except for a brief—and successful—national unity government from 1984-1988). This, in turn, dilutes policy as the senior coalition partner “sells” its preferences in return for small parties’ agreement to join its coalition rather than the opposition’s.
Voting system: Closely related is the voting system: proportional representation, with the country designed as a single district. This has strengthened the role of the party in elections and policymaking, and undermined the relevance of individual candidates.
At the same time this has been coupled with the rising power of central committees in the major parties. Here, influential party officials are able to barter for votes for party leadership and to determine which candidates will be placed where on the party’s electoral list (the higher up on the list, the more likely that candidate will make it into the Knesset). Politicians and policy platforms, then, are determined more by the rough-and-tumble politics of bargaining than serious policy discussion.
Power of the religious parties: A “religious” party has served in almost every government since the establishment of the state. For a long time it was the National Religious Party (NRP), a staunchly Zionist party. In the 1980s, the non-Zionist Shas party burst onto the scene, determined to trade its political support in return for resources for its religious and Sephardic electorates (funds for social services).
As Labor and Likud tried to avoid sharing a government, they each sought to buy the support of Shas, so that they could form the coalition. This pushed both the NRP and, later, the third religious party, United Torah Judaism (itself a merger of two other parties) to follow Shas’s example, strengthening the centrifugal forces in the political system. Moreover, both NRP and its contemporary off-shoots (National Union, Jewish Home) and UTJ take a harder line on settlements and relations with the Palestinians, posing a constant threat to a government in which they sit and which advocates more movement on those issues.
Personalization of politics: An over-focus on individuals has undermined normalization, stability, serious policy debate, and institutional memory. In the non-religious parties, personalities have come to play an out-sized role in determining party politics, particularly in terms of stability and coalition bargaining. Since the 1980s, but especially the 1990s, party leaders have faced struggles to maintain their position in the face of consistent challenges from would-be leaders. Labor is the worst: between 2001 and today, the party had six leaders. All of them were forced to defend their tenures in the face of challengers’ efforts (usually successful) to unseat them.
At the same time, party leaders have made it their priority, in the face of party principles and public declarations, to enter government. Hence Mofaz’s agreement tonight; Ehud Barak’s splitting off from Labor in 2011 to form a smaller faction so he could take up Netanyahu’s offer of Minister of Defense; and so on.
The religious parties are not run by central committees but rather subject to the individual authority and direction of their prominent rabbis. And, of course, there is the tendency to form new parties around individuals, rather than ideologies or policy goals: Lapid, Barak, Yitzhak Mordecai, Ariel Sharon—they’ve all believed that they represent something new in politics, and can drive, by sheer force of their will and their appeal, their parties and their goals. Their record is primarily one of weakening the bigger parties, by siphoning off their votes; typically they don’t last more than an election or two. Freud would have had a large pool of subjects to study.
There are reports that the new coalition is working to change the political system, presumably to strengthen the big parties and undermine the smaller ones. If so, this would go a long way to stabilizing and de-politicizing the system. If that happens, tonight will have been worth it.
At the Times of Israel, I argue that we need to re-think the meaning and future course of Zionism:
On re-invigorating the World Zionist Congress as a genuine place for discussion.
On alternate parameters for discussing Zionism.
On detaching the concept of exile from Zionism, which has relevance for the debate about Israel in the United States and elsewhere.
An exploration of Zionism isn’t only about Israel, but it does have critical relevance for that country and its position in and policies toward the Middle East.
It has become conventional wisdom that international relations theory and policy have little in common. So someone like Stephen Walt tries to argue that realism, a major IR theory, would have led to different policy choices since the end of the Cold War and he gets criticized for not realizing that policymakers don’t care about IR theory.
That contention is wrong: scholars and policymakers share much more information than is usually acknowledged. Policy choices and the policy record is the grist for scholars to do everything from cases studies to coding data sets. And policymakers do not ignore the academic world as a more nuanced understanding of the policymaking-academy nexus demonstrates.
I am not here to defend realism. I am here to defend the idea that there IS greater overlap between the policy and academic worlds than is usually acknowledged.
Part of the problem is the tendency to use IR theory as interchangeable with all academic scholarship in general when in reality it is just one element in the study of politics or, more specifically, the study of international affairs. Maybe Walt underemphasized the importance of domestic politics and bureaucratic politics in shaping U.S. foreign policy – as Adam Elkus suggested – but plenty of other scholars have been studying such factors for decades.
Elkus seems to accept this last point in his conclusion:
Walt’s own significant analytical confusion about what a “realist” approach to US national security would constitute is strong evidence of the fact that policy analysis in practice tends to be a grab bag of multiple theoretical traditions and theory’s primary role is to increase the analytical tools available to a policymaker.
Policymakers do incorporate theory, in this view, just not any single theory or school of thought in the sense of how we teach the “isms” in graduate-level IR field seminars.
I think we should consider at least four other possible links:
1. On occasion, we see the policy world explicitly adopt ideas from academia. Think Bill Clinton and his references to democratic peace theory or the Iraq Study Group’s references to groupthink. But I readily admit this tendency is not the crux of the policy-university link.
2. A number of long-time academics have served in government, e.g. Graham Allison, Ashton Carter, Thomas Christiansen, Stephen Krasner, Joseph Nye, Condoleezza Rice, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Philip Zelikow. Am I supposed to believe that they suddenly forget years or decades of scholarship? I understand the clock changes and very short-term thinking is the norm in government and that you probably don’t win arguments by referencing your 1987 article in Security Studies, but all that previous knowledge never seeps into or informs their thinking on short-term matters? Given what we know about human psychology, that seems hard to believe.
3. Many, many, many U.S. government officials who work on foreign policy have a BA, MA, and/or PhD. What political science or *gasp* IR theory courses did they take as students? Again, am I supposed to believe that they learned and retained absolutely nothing in those courses? Even if 90% of the books, journal articles, lectures, and discussions were worthless academic food fights or boring drivel, what about the other 10%?
4. When I hear U.S. officials talk, I hear them make judgments about matters that directly relate to political science and, yes, IR theory. For example, compare John Bolton to Madeline Albright on the importance and effectiveness of international institutions like the United Nations. A policy statement may be rife with links to academia even if, as is the norm, policymakers do not make explicit references or offer footnotes to a single peer-reviewed journal article. (!)
In general, it is a mistake to assume that because academic ideas and writings are not mentioned explicitly that they play no role in how policymakers think. Along with bureaucratic, domestic political, and psychological influences, our working assumption should be that officials have different underlying beliefs about how the world works.
Popular commentary in the US in recent weeks has drawn attention to the very public bickering in Israel between former security/military leaders and civilian politicians. Many seem surprised at such a development: Daniel Drezner argues that “it’s a sign that there’s a problem with Israeli democracy” when ex-military leaders assert privilege over policymaking.
My guess—since I haven’t read them all—is that few of the reports on the issue contain reference to the fact that this is a longstanding pattern in Israeli politics. Certainly it may well cause problems for Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election—but because Bibi has tried to build his appeal on keeping Israel secure, and not because it’s senior security officials engaging in political commentary.
Lest we think that the current round of dissent is anything new or even drastic, it’s worth recalling that during the nerve-wracking crisis leading to the 1967 war, in the face of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s perceived wavering, some senior military officials mused about a temporary coup in order to press ahead with a military strike on the Arab states. In his 2006 book, Generals in the Cabinet Room, Yoram Peri argues that Netanyahu himself was defeated in 1999 in a “democratic putsch,” as a result of a concerted effort by serving and retired officers who feared his anti-peace policies were endangering the country.
It defies the normative expectations of Western liberals and democrats, but Israeli politics and society is heavily securitized. Israel’s second Chief of Staff, Yigael Yadin, famously said that “every civilian is a soldier on eleven months annual leave.” Indeed, the distinction between civilian and military leaders is hard to determine: many of the latter move quickly into politics once their service is finished; and which political party they will join (or form) becomes an open discussion long before their tenures in the security establishment are over. A partial list would include Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, Shaul Mofaz, Yitzhak Mordechai, Moshe Dayan, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Rafael Eitan, Moshe Ya’alon, and Rehavam Ze’evi.
In the early years of the state, the IDF also played a critical role in the processes of state- and nation-building in the country, functioning as an ostensible civilian institution. It taught Hebrew to new immigrants to the country and socialized them into emerging Israeli norms, built homes for citizens, and set up and populated new settlements around the country.
David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first Prime Minister, best reflected this practice when he pronounced that defending the state was not the only function of the military: it must also “serve as an educational and pioneering center for Israeli youth—for both those born here and newcomers.”
Thus the deep involvement of the military and security agencies in Israeli life led to the incorporation of “security” as a premier value at the individual and the collective level. 64 years after the creation of the state this continues to be the reality of the country.
