Israel's Challenges from the United Nations to the J Street Lobby

Harold Evans

Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times in London from 1967 to 1981, published his autobiography, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times - An Autobiography.

You can now swallow a pill that will painlessly transmit 14 photographs a second for hours from deep within the gastrointestinal tract. It's amazing and great news for the 30 million or so Americans (and millions beyond) who visit a doctor's office with conditions that require this kind of scrutiny. But what is almost as surprising as the innovation is where it came from: a huge missile.

The classic guns-or-butter antithesis was resolved by a former rocket scientist, one Gavriel Iddan, who got the idea from examining the optics technology of a guided missile. He took a chance on setting up a company to explore the idea that everyone told him was out of science fiction--"OK, you can make a tiny camera, but you'll never find a way to cram into a small pill all the light, energy, and gear to transmit a workable image." That's what happens to many innovators; their resilience is as relevant as their brain cells. Iddan persisted. Now his Given Imaging company is on the way to selling a million pill cameras.

Here's another part of the story to invoke reflection. The pill camera didn't originate in Silicon Valley, or Boston or Tokyo, London or Dusseldorf. It came from a tiny country under the constant threat of extermination--Israel. I wrote a book and TV series on American innovation, and I follow the subject. Yet I was stunned to read how much innovative leadership is now coming from Israel. I owe this further education to Dan Senor and Saul Singer, who have combined their talents to write the short but impressive volume Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle.

It's depressing that almost the only news you get about Israel is so determinedly negative. If you asked nearly anyone about Israel, it's a good bet nobody would say, "Oh, yes. What intrigues me about that place is how they manage to have more companies on the Nasdaq technology index than the combination of all the European countries, Korea, Japan, Singapore, India, and China." Indeed, the Senor-Singer book that makes such a point comes out on the heels of two typically negative stories.

First, there was the report just approved by the United Nations General Assembly that singles out Israel for its conduct during the Gaza war earlier this year. The report had been prepared for the U.N.'s Human Rights Council by a commission headed by the South African judge Richard Goldstone. Poor Judge Goldstone now apparently regrets how his report is being portrayed. He should never have accepted leadership of a commission whose terms of reference were designed to excuse the aggressor, Hamas, and punish the defender, Israel. The Human Rights Council's announced decision was to "investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory."

The Swiss newspaper Le Temps reports the judge complaining, "This draft resolution saddens me . . . there is not a single phrase [in the U.N. resolution] condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope the council can modify the text." Fat hope. The General Assembly approved a resolution submitted by about 20 members of the Arab League distinguished by a common revulsion for two things: Israel and democratic elections in their own countries.

In signing on for the U.N. mission--with others who had already condemned Israel--it seems to have escaped the judge that Hamas is committed not just to fighting Israeli soldiers but to pursuing genocide plain, simple, and evil. The terms of reference he accepted gave a free pass for the torment of Israeli civilians. Hamas launched thousands of rockets, each one of which was intended to kill as many people as possible, then contemptuously dismissed repeated warnings from Israel to stop or face the consequences. (Ironic, too, that the U.N. vote came as Israel revealed that it had discovered a massive supply of thousands more rockets and other arms hidden among Iranian containers on a ship bound for a Syrian port.)

The Goldstone report won the gold standard of moral equivalence between the killer and the victim.

The second assault, which may yet be the more difficult for Israel, is from its own friends in the United States--from Jewish liberals. Upset by what they characterize as the unthinking knee-jerk support of everything Israel does, epitomized in their eyes by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the liberals have formed a lobby of their own named after J Street (a street that does not exist in Washington). They recently held their first conference. Most members of Congress gave it a miss, but the Obama administration blessed it by sending Gen. James Jones, the national security adviser.

Who could argue with J Street's call for "peace and a two-nation solution"? Israel itself has now formally accepted that there may be an independent state of Palestine, partly based on occupied land Israel will have to yield. Its leaders--even its much-denounced new right-wing government--acknowledge that Palestinians suffer humiliations. Israel is ready to negotiate in earnest with a stable Palestinian leadership. It's the Palestinian leadership that is letting down its people by obduracy. Long-corrupt Fatah on the West Bank is working sensibly with Israel to improve security, but Hamas, controlling Gaza, is still dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish people. Hamas rejects Fatah calls for a new election for the good reason that the people of Gaza are sickened by violence.

The J Street lobby, for all its good intentions, is not much help. Take Goldstone and the Gaza war. If Goldstone wins the gold medal for moral equivalence, J Street's Isaac Luria must win a crown for circumlocution. Here is what he said about Gaza: "While there is nothing 'right' in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing 'right' in punishing a million and a half already suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them."

Agreed. So what? What would Luria and others who speak as he does have the Israelis do?

The Hamas rockets were war crimes and ought to have been universally condemned as such. Would the J Street lobby have stayed on its perch, as the rest of the world did? While new rockets hit Israel over many months, there was no rush by the world's moralizers to pass censure on Hamas, none of the urgency that we saw from "world opinion" when Israel finally responded. Then Israel was immediately accused of a "disproportionate" response without anyone thinking, "Now, what is a 'proportionate' response against an enemy dedicated to exterminating your people?" A dedication to exterminating all of his?

Israel risked its own forces by imposing unprecedented restraint. In personal testimony volunteered to the Human Rights Council (and ignored), British Col. Richard Kemp, a former commander in Bosnia and Afghanistan, stated: "The Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare." Indeed, the "collateral damage" was less than the NATO allies inflicted on the Bosnians in the conflict with Yugoslavia.

No doubt there were blunders. A defensive war is still a war, with all its suffering and destruction. But Hamas compounded its original war crime with another. It held its own people hostage. It used them as human shields. It regarded every (accidental) death as another bullet in the propaganda war.

There is an air of unreality about the J Street lobby: hope engendered by amnesia.

The Israeli withdrawal was a wonderful chance for Gaza to be the building block of a new Palestinian state. Hamas had a chance to do what the Israelis did--take a piece of land and build a model state. It didn't. Instead of helping the desperate Palestinians, Hamas conducted a religious war. Israel withdrawal was rewarded with missile attacks.

And what do J Street's lobbyists think about the way Hamas plundered the greenhouses left by the Israelis that might have been a foundation for new Palestinian businesses? When Hamas took control of Gaza by violence, it didn't do anything for the desperate Palestinians. Millions of dollars of international aid money was diverted to circumvent the U.N. and dig hundreds of tunnels, bringing in material for rockets. Before the Gaza war began, thousands of rockets had landed.

Does the J Street lobby think it should have stuck it out to the last Jew? Maybe, but that's easy to say if you are not in Sderot, traumatized by the daily indiscriminant firing of rockets--killing Arabs as well as Jews. Should Israel have built the infamous wall separating it from the West Bank? Maybe not, but if you have lost children, wives, fathers in the years of suicide bombings, you want the state to protect you. Is J Street advocating a one-way pacifism? And might it at least speak out about the way the conflict is seeded for the future by the appalling propaganda in the Palestinian (not Israeli) schools, which teach "kill a Jew" lessons?

Some of the J Street lobbyists echo President Jimmy Carter about Israel being an apartheid state. Have they never heard the Israeli peace activist Ben Pogrund on the subject? He knows the evil of apartheid in a way the theorists never will. He lived and fought it in South Africa as a brave editor before moving to set up the Yakar center in Jerusalem where peace-minded Jews and Arabs meet.

What a difference there might be if the two peoples could make real peace. The Palestinians rid of occupation in a state of their own, prospering with and through the extraordinary innovations of a surging Israel.

Available at Amazon.com: My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times - An Autobiography

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