During the current election campaign, two of the most popular party leaders identified with the center-left have done almost everything in their power to avoid saying anything left-sounding on the Palestinian topic. Yair Lapid, leader (and personification) of Yesh Atid, and Shelly Yechimovitch, head of the Labor party, have often tried to position themselves to the right of this issue (Yachimovitch saying nice things about settlements, Lapid opposing division of Jerusalem and favoring a free hand for the IDF).

Three weeks before the elections, the past few days have witnessed a rare break in this trend. The occasion was a speech by the supposedly non-political head of state, President Shimon Peres, before Israeli ambassadors to foreign nations. Peres presented his well-known position, that the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is willing and able to make the concessions necessary for an agreement on a two-state solution with Israel. He criticized statements to the contrary, made by Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Foreign Minister Lieberman (both of the Likud-Beitenu party).

His message apparently resonated with the audience who, later in the same conference, complained that defending Israel abroad is made more difficult by the government’s intransigent positions and actions (a point reaffirmed by a recent think tank report). They were promptly told by Israeli National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror to keep their opinions to themselves or resign and run for political office.

The president got only a slightly milder treatment. Likud-Beitenu issued a statement expressing disappointment in the president, blasting him for being “disconnected,” causing damage to Israel’s image abroad, and calling Abbas a “peace refusenik.”

Lapid and Yachimovitch could have settled for defending the popular president, an octogenarian who in two-thirds of a century of political activity has gone from defense-establishment hawk to hated symbol of the left to quintessential consensus figure and elder statesman. Instead, they both chose to combine their spirited rejection of the attacks on Peres with a relatively strong defense of the two-state solution, arguing that it is the only Zionist solution with a national consensus behind it.

The latter point is confirmed by a recent poll, showing a majority support for a two-state solution – including the division of Jerusalem – among the general public, and even among more than 50 percent of right-wing Likud-Beitenu and HaBayit HaYehudi (The Jewish Home) voters. Indeed, it may explain the response of Yachimovich and Lapid, 90 percent of whose voters support this solution.

Yet the two-state position (tepidly supported by Netanyahu as well) was not the main point of contention in the uproar over Peres’ remarks. Right-wing ire was raised by the contention that Abbas, the Palestinian leader, was a genuine partner for peace talks.

That is the crux of the matter. The real debate among Israel’s major parties is not about the two-state solution. It is about how to best avoid it. Peres, Lapid, Yachimovich and Israel’s ambassadors all prefer the method of endless negotiations, backed by ceaseless proclamations of good faith and willingness to make concessions, which was government policy for most of the last two decades (including Peres’ tenure as prime minister in 1995-1996). The current version of Likud, on the other hand, believes that the best way to achieve pretty much the same goal is to constantly decry any credible Palestinian interlocutor as a fraud.

Abbas is a problem for them because it is hard to pin this label on him. Under his leadership, the Palestinians have boosted security cooperation with Israel, and he has made unprecedented remarks regarding concessions on Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and on recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

In response, Lieberman, when he was still Israel’s Diplomat-in-Chief, called Abbas “a liar, a coward and a weakling,” accusing him of “diplomatic terror” (which is apparently “more serious” than “conventional terror”) for harshly criticizing Israel, promoting an economic boycott of the settlements, and trying to gain recognition for a Palestinian state  in the UN.

The weakness of these charges exposes the precarious position of the current Israeli government (which, nonetheless, has suffered very little internationally for it). Yet is the opposition any better? Yachimovich and Lapid, as mentioned, are trying to stir clear of this topic, except when they need  to show their base they haven’t gone completely off the deep end, as had happened following the attack on Peres.

But even Tzipi Livni, the one leader of the “center-left” bloc who has focused her campaign on negotiations with the Palestinians, is not really credible on this issue. After all, we have now had nearly two decades of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the last round (under the government of Ehud Olmert, in 2008) involving Livni herself as foreign minister.

These negotiations have made it clear that Palestinian leaders understand that the hope of a mass return of Palestinian refugees to Israel is unrealistic. But they have also shown that Israeli governments, of all political stripes, do not show the same realism regarding the second core issue of borders, including in and around Jerusalem.

On this issue, the offer that has been labeled the most “generous” by an Israeli leader was made by Olmert in 2008, included the annexation of 6.4 percent of the West Bank to Israel (with land swaps in other places to compensate for that territory). That proposal, while entailing the eviction of many settlements, would have kept in place towns such as Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel, slicing the West Bank into several isolated enclaves, making any Palestinian state completely non-viable.

Olmert’s offer came on the heels of a Palestinian proposal which suggested annexing 1.9 percent of the West Bank to Israel, keeping in place 63 percent of the settler population, while calling for the eviction of the large settlements that sit at the heart of Palestinian territory.

That is the real issue at stake. Not the two-state solution, nor Abbas’ character as a potential partner for peace. It is a bit more than 4 percent of the West Bank, settled by less than 3 percent of Israel’s population, and necessary for the making of a viable Palestinian state. This is the 4 percent that Livni is not willing to give up (she even thought that Olmert’s offer went too far), not to mention Lapid or Yachimovich.

If the choice is between that 4 percent of territory or a one-state solution based on Jewish supremacy (the status-quo ante), they prefer the latter. As long as that is the case, their main contention with the right is, and will remain, over diplomatic tactics rather than substance.

In response, Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar (Likud) argued that “[o]ur connection to Ariel is at least as strong as the UK’s connection to the Falkland Islands.” This comparison is quite apt because Ariel, like the Falklands, is the product of a colonial enterprise, meant to place a metropolitan population amidst a weaker people.

Furthermore, Ariel and the Falklands are both islands. Whereas the Falklands are surrounded by an ocean of water, Ariel is surrounded by Palestinians. It is at the very heart of the West Bank with very little geographic contiguity with Jewish areas of residence inside the Green Line, or even with other settlements in the West Bank. That is why any map that attempts to include it as part of Israel within a two-state solution ends up looking like it was drawn by a cubist painter.

There are distinctions, of course. Most importantly, the other claimant for sovereignty over the Falklands – Argentina – is a sovereign and independent nation. The Palestinians, who have been uprooted to make room for Ariel, are a stateless people living on lands inhabited by them for generations, kept in this position by the very Israeli power that founded and recognized the “university” in Ariel.

Perhaps the most revealing part of this comparison is that Saar, like many of my compatriots, probably sees very little difference between the actual human beings that surround Ariel and want it gone, and the indifferent seawater that surround the Falklands on every side. That might be a greater obstacle to peace than the settlement itself.

By Lisa Goldman and Mairav Zonszein

For decades, the settler movement and Israel’s secular, largely Ashkenazi urban elite have been playing a game of “pretend.” The secular political elite claimed the settlers were religious ideologues, obstacles to peace and not representative of mainstream Israeli society. The settlers, meanwhile, charged that an effete minority ruling class ignored their contributions and commitment to the state.

But all the while, successive governments headed by secular, purportedly liberal leaders tacitly expedited settlement growth even as the secular, purportedly liberal judiciary handed down rulings that effectively sanctioned settlements, which are built in contravention of international law. The settlers, meanwhile, became increasingly confident as they rose to occupy important positions at the highest levels of the state’s key institutions – the legislative branch (Knesset), the executive branch (the governing coalition), the judiciary and the army.

In 2012, the game became reality: The settlers are the new ruling elite of Israel.

According to all the polls, Israelis will elect an unprecedented number of Members of Knesset (MKs) from far-right parties, even as Likud’s relative moderates have been ousted and replaced by settlers and ex-settlers with radical political agendas.

A settler was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2012, while a former justice declared that the West Bank was not actually occupied territory.

Israel’s fourth estate, too, is partly “occupied” by the settlers. This year, Shlomo Ben-Zvi, a far-right publisher and settler who owns the frankly nationalist daily Makor Rishon, bought Maariv – one of Israel’s three veteran daily newspapers. While Maariv took a right-of-center editorial line in recent years, for decades it was Yedioth Ahronoth’s chief competitor for the title of Israel’s most mainstream daily newspaper.

Throughout the year, over and over, settler violence – price tag attacks on Palestinian property, unprovoked violence against Palestinians, even flat-out murder – has gone unpunished. Worse, it rarely elicits public condemnation or even, except for a few high-profile incidents, extensive media coverage.

The settlers have influenced the national narrative to the point that politicians who talk about peace, the two-state solution and negotiations risk becoming irrelevant.

For all these reasons, +972 Magazine has chosen The Settler as its Person of the Year for 2012.

The judiciary

In 2012, Judge Noam Sohlberg was appointed to the Supreme Court; he was the first settler to be elevated to this position. Eyal Clyne wrote in an article for +972 that Sohlberg “has a proven record of controversial anti-liberal rulings in lower courts, some of which were later reversed.” His appointment resulted from “… sustained pressure on the Judicial Selection Committee, the body responsible for appointment of judges in Israel.” The right-wing coalition brought the committee to a deadlock, all-but forcing it to select conservative judges.

Also this year, a committee headed by former Supreme Court justice Edmund Levy concluded in its report on the legal status of the West Bank that it was not occupied territory but rather administered territory. The report also stipulated that illegal outposts should be declared legal. The Levy Commission was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While the Levy Report does not contribute anything new to the Israeli discourse, it does offer the stamp of legitimacy to what was once considered an extremist narrative.

The legislature and the government

Leader of the National Religious Party (“Jewish Home”) Naftali Bennett. Bennett, and not the leaders of the moderate center, is now seen as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s main rival (photo: Yotam Ronen / activestills.org)

According to all the polls, when Israelis cast their ballots on January 22, they will send an unprecedented number of elected representatives from the far right to the Knesset – settlers, former settlers and supporters of the settler movement. These include Moshe Feiglin, who led the anti-Oslo disobedience campaign in the Knesset, and Naftali Bennett, former head of the Yesha council and today head of Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home), the party of the national religious settler movement. Bennett, and not the leaders of the center or the left, is seen as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s main rival in these elections.

Avigdor Lieberman, who recently resigned as foreign minister after it was announced he would be indicted for corruption, is still head of Yisrael Beiteinu, which has merged with Likud. In other words, Lieberman, resident of the settlement of Nokdim, is now the deputy leader of Israel’s ruling party.

In the upcoming elections, a party called Otzma LeYisrael (Strong Israel) is running on a platform rooted in ideals of racism and violence. With a list of candidates that includes Aryeh Eldad and notorious Kahanists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Michael Ben-Ari, at least half the polls show the party is expected to pass the threshold and gain two or three seats in the Knesset.

With Likud-Beiteinu polling at about 35 seats and the far-right parties at 15 or 16 seats, and given that Netanyahu is all-but guaranteed to win the coming election, it is very likely that he will form his next coalition in the 120-seat Knesset with the far-right parties, rather than the center and center-left parties — like Hatnuah, headed by Tzipi Livni, and Shelly Yachimovich’s Labor Party. But even if Netanyahu ends up with a more centrist government, the far right will be the dominant ideological force in the next Knesset.

Politics and the national narrative

Labor leader Shelly Yachimovich won’t criticize the settlements publicly (photo: Yotam Ronen / activestills.org)

The success of the settler movement is reflected in changes to the national conversation. Labor leader Yachimovich, who was elected to lead a putatively liberal-left party, will not touch the issues of the occupation and negotiations with the Palestinians. Nor will Stav Shaffir, one of the faces of the J14 social justice movement, who is now running for a Knesset seat on the Labor list. Both women know that the national narrative has swung so far to the right that mentioning the occupation will make them politically irrelevant. Yachimovich, a former journalist, a social democrat and a feminist, once voted for Hadash. Now, after entering political life, she says she supports the accreditation of a university in the settlement of Ariel, wants the budget for settlements to remain untouched and announced she would not rule out joining a government coalition headed by Likud.

Shaffir has not taken a public position on the settlements. The J14 movement that she helped lead in the summer of 2011 refused to draw a connection between Israel’s wealth gap and the funding shifted to the settlements, lest they make the movement “political.” She continues to focus on issues of domestic social injustice, completely ignoring the conflict.

Yet the traditional focus on the center seems somewhat irrelevant, as a new role model of the Israeli Sabra emerges in figures like Bennett, who has been receiving quite a bit of publicity lately, including a feature in the New York Times. The cherubic, youthful-looking Ra’anana resident is a former director general of the Council of Judea and Samaria; prior to that he was Netanyahu’s chief of staff, when the Likud was in the opposition. Born in Israel to American parents, Bennett served as an officer in an elite combat unit before going on to make his fortune in hi-tech, which is practically an Israeli Everyman story for men of his background. But Bennett, the Zionist patriot, recently said in a television interview that as an army reserve officer he would refuse orders to evacuate settlements.

Refusing orders has long been a red line that few dared to cross; politicizing one’s army service was considered a taboo in mainstream Israeli society that many thought made one unelectable. Yariv Oppenheimer, the former director of Peace Now, continued to serve his annual reserve duty in the West Bank even as he devoted his career to ending the occupation and eyed a career in politics. Oppenheimer ran unsuccessfully for a place on the Labor party list this year but was sidelined by internal party politics; if he had been a refusenik, his candidacy would have been unacceptable for a mainstream center-left party. But while leftists are marginalized for vowing to refuse service in the occupied territories — and are handed jail sentences for making good on their promise — Bennett’s popularity and poll numbers seem unaffected by his controversial statement. If anything, he has become more popular. The ground has indeed shifted.

Settler violence and an atmosphere of impunity

With Israelis from Tel Rumeida settlement looking on from above, Israeli soldiers arrest two Palestinians and an international volunteer after confrontations between settlers, the Al Azzeh family who had just harvested their olives, and the military, October 22, 2012. The arrests followed the first time the Al Azzeh family was able to harvest their olives since 2007. (photo by: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

The past year saw a precipitous rise in settler violence against Palestinian civilians. Some of the more egregious attacks received wide media coverage, but the settlers seem to operate in an atmosphere of impunity. Only a handful of indictments have been filed for uprooting olive trees, vandalizing and burning mosques, firebombing cars or accosting and beating Palestinians so badly that they require hospitalization – for no reason other than their being Palestinian.

In August, settlers threw a firebomb at a Palestinian family traveling in a taxi near the settlement of Bat Ayin. The entire family was wounded and required hospitalization, including an infant. The parents and driver received third-degree burns. That same week, a mob of Jewish teenagers assaulted and beat unconscious Jamal Julani, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy from East Jerusalem,  while he was walking on a popular downtown pedestrian mall in West Jerusalem. Other reported incidents of violence committed by settlers this year include the severe assault of an Israeli Ta’ayush activist in the South Hebron Hills. The activist testified to being blindfolded and beaten by a group of settlers. Just this week, five settlers accused of tracking IDF activities in order to thwart evacuation of outposts were let off with just community service and up to three months in jail.

According to reports published earlier this year by EU officials in Jerusalem, settler violence more than tripled over the last three years. Yesh Din, a human rights organization, reports that since 2005, fewer than 9 percent of police investigations into Palestinian complaints of settler violence have resulted in indictments.

The consequences of the rise of the settlers as the new elite

Construction of the new settlement of Leshim on the lands of the West Bank village of Kafr ad Dik, near Salfit, December 7, 2012. (photo: Activestills)

With the rise of the settlers, the once-radical idea that Israel should annex or maintain its military occupation of the West Bank indefinitely has gained new currency in relatively mainstream circles. Government approval for settlement expansion continues unabated. The taboo on discussing one state in liberal circles has been lifted. In 2012 we saw a flurry of op-eds declaring the two-state solution dead, with the writers making the declaration either with satisfaction or with regret.

Judea and Samaria Council leader Dani Dayan declared in a New York Times op-ed that the settlers’ “…presence in all of Judea and Samaria — not just in the so-called settlement blocs — is an irreversible fact.” Likud MK Danny Danon published a book called “Israel: The Will to Prevail,” in which he sketches out his solution to the conflict: annexation of the West Bank and no Palestinian state of any kind. One Haaretz columnist has declared the two-state solution dead and painfully admits the majority in Israel seek one state; the nature of that state remains unclear.

The emerging settlement reality has also reverberated within the American Jewish community. This is evidenced, among other indicators, by the fact that Peter Beinart, considered to come from within the mainstream Zionist, “pro-Israel” American Jewish establishment, made waves when he called for a boycott of Israeli settlement products. In a New York Times op-ed from March, Beinart argued that this is the only way to save the Zionist project.

This was the year the settler narrative regarding Israel’s control over the West Bank became institutionalized: the Education Ministry mandated school trips to Hebron for high school students. The next generations of soldiers and leaders is being taught that the territory once regarded by the majority as temporarily occupied pending a negotiated solution, is actually part of the Israeli birthright.

The rise of the settlers is a result of state policies. This has been the case since the 1970s, when the government began shifting funding toward Jewish settlement of the occupied territories, turning it into a major national enterprise that preoccupied successive prime ministers. In 1993, fewer than 100,000 Jews lived in the occupied Palestinian territories. Today, there are half a million; thus, almost one out of 10 Israeli Jews is a settler, and one out of five people living east of the fading Green Line is a settler.

The political power of the settlers has extended to the judiciary, the powerful security establishment, the media and the business elite. They will decide Israel’s future – or perhaps its fate.

Read Also:
+972 Magazine’s People of the Year 2012: Bloggers’ picks
+972 Magazine’s Person of the Year 2011: Woman activist of the Arab world
+972 People of the Year 2011: Bloggers’ picks
+972 Magazine’s Person of the Year 2010: Abdullah Abu Rahmah
 +972 People of the Year 2010: Bloggers’ picks

Last year’s social paradox

During last summer’s social protests, outsiders and curious journalists repeatedly asked me how to explain that Israel has such excellent economic indicators, but so much discontent.

Not being much of an economist, but knowing something about public opinion, I looked at how people experienced their lives here – micro versus macroeconomics. Despite apparently excellent macro indicators, most individual families weren’t feeling the love unless they were very rich. I checked and confirmed the finding that Israel is one of the most unequal societies in the OECD and recalled that some happiness studies indicate that economic inequality may generate greater unhappiness despite growth.

I was also somewhat critical of last summer’s social protest. The bulk of the protesters at the start seemed to be comfortable middle and upper-middle class types, or else self-entitled youngsters from the most privileged portion of Israeli society – Ashkenazi Jews from the center of the country who had served in the army. I felt that they were fighting in the name of social justice mainly because they wanted a greater piece of the consumerist, capitalist pie. There was little indication that they were really willing to address root causes.

Since I belong unquestionably to the privileged sector, hard work has enabled me to reach relative economic comfort – as a result, I did not share in the sense of economic desperation. And because my deep-roots approach to addressing economic oppression of others was considered too radical, “politicized,” or non-strategic, I personally felt quite marginal at the protests.

However, the movement spread and evolved, touching the more marginalized and even sparking the imagination of many Arab citizens. Once the summer ended,  the protest generated new forms of social consciousness and empowerment, including spin-off groups, proto-parties, new networks, initiatives, web activists, and ideas by all sorts of people. It seemed that many regular struggling citizens were finding hope and new roads to civic engagement.

Perhaps after the explosion of emotion, I thought, those people would hunker down for hard work, and register some concrete victories. Perhaps the government would implement some of the recommendations of the Trajtenberg Committee it established as a gesture to the protesters. Even a poor leadership, I reasoned, might implement some positive measures, and I lauded Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon’s bold move to break the cellular company monopoly.

A year went by.

What changed?

By May this year, the government had taken some steps. It established a committee to break up the concentration of wealth in the private sector, and began implementing some of the Trajtenberg recommendations. I wondered if Israelis were feeling any better about wealth distribution. This isn’t Tunisia, after all, and desperate fruit vendors weren’t setting themselves on fire. I took a poll for the Jerusalem Report; but the overwhelming majority (81 percent of the Jewish population) still believed that wealth in Israel was unfairly distributed.

I gathered that most citizens were not benefiting from the changes. The Trajtenberg recommendation that the state guarantee free education from three years old became a flagship for the government, because the ministers actually agreed on its implementation. But it wasn’t actually an innovation, just an existing law that (like so many others) wasn’t previously enforced. Other parts of the report simply fell by the wayside.

The wealth-concentration committee made recommendations too, about regulating the massive holding companies that control such a large portion of Israel’s wealth. But that had little direct effect on the lives of consumers.

Meanwhile, the global financial crisis began creeping in. Last month, my accountant asked me why 2012 has so far been such a slow year for me. I said it was partly my choice to invest more time in advancing my PhD rather than working; which included low-paid, time-cruncher teaching positions. But also, I told him, my civil-society clients can’t afford the research they want; instead they fund minimalist projects for which I’ve dropped my rates. That means I’m working as hard as usual, but earning less. Other clients planned projects, but the budgets fell through. My accountant nodded and related that all of the freelancers he serves have seen similar slowdowns, for similar reasons this year.

Desperation for all

Moshe Silman, who set himself on fire in protest just a few weeks ago, and died a week later, didn’t see any change on the horizon. It’s impossible to know which part of his suffering was the direct result of systemic injustice, or a sad story of one individual with too many problems for one anonymous bureaucracy to see. But the fact is that he was poor and indebted, and the state went after him. The state treated him not as a person to be economically rehabilitated but as a criminal element; it wielded a system of punishment and abuse in which his last dollars were worth more than his life. If it had shown mercy rather than blows, if he had been treated as a man who had fallen and sought to rise again rather than as an enemy of the state, it is conceivable that he may have become productive once again. He might eventually have contributed to state coffers again, unlike large swaths of the population that refuse to do so on principle.

Here’s one modest thing that I would have liked to see come out of the social protest: a government or quasi-governmental program for the economically fallen. There are NGOs who try to help – Pa’amonim, Yedid – and maybe others. But imagine they had a partner in the state. Imagine the state decided that it’s in our interest to reinvest in the unfortunate, not kill them. The start-up nation could devote its brilliance to rehabilitating its people.

That didn’t happen. Instead, more people began self-immolating in protest at economic desperation; another one died this week.

My business slowed further (or rather, the clients keep coming, but with ever-lower budgets) and I began to cut back on optional spending, then all spending where possible.  Still, I made plans to devote myself to the final year of my doctorate, and for the first time ever, asked for financial assistance.

It turns out that my university doesn’t have enough grants this year to fund all the PhD students with the practically symbolic $1000/month stipends normally offered.

So when the government announced that it planned to transfer NIS 100 million to Ariel University Center to transform it from a college to a university, I felt a debilitating wave of anger.

The government offers solutions

As I moved into strict budgeting for my weekly food and commodities, along with numerous people I know who were as established as I thought I once was, the government dropped the bomb – a full range of austerity measures, budget cuts and tax hikes to staunch the deficit.

The Prime Minister who prides himself on the myth of Israel as the economic miracle, shattered his own myth overnight (although Mitt Romney still believes it).

The state is no longer thriving. In fact, we’re in dire financial straits. So dire, that all other possible sources of cash have been mined and there’s simply no choice left but to turn to the people: the middle class, the working class, the poor, the economically alienated and marginalized.

The plan is full of blunt instruments: raising income tax (except for the absolute poorest and the absolute wealthiest) and a rise in VAT, which is none other than a flat tax. To his credit, Likud MK Kahlon (who is also Welfare Minister) voted against the package.

The plan involves taxes on consumer goods that, like it or not, are largely consumed by the poor: cigarettes and beer. I hate the thought of opposing cigarette taxes. If this had come as part of a multi-pronged governmental campaign to decrease smoking rates, I’d be the first to support it. But I cannot think of one leader, including the Health Minister, who has made any sort of anti-smoking public statement lately. Oh wait, Netanyahu is the Health Minister. Indeed, welcome smoking bans were introduced for restaurants, bars and cafes a few years ago. But smoking still tends to be higher among the poor. I’m willing to bet nobody’s implementing those bans in the Arab sector, and I also believe that smoking is higher among Arabs. After all, someone must pay to balance the budget.

So did the government really turn over all stones before turning to the weakest to bail out its debt?

Last weekend, the country’s economists, financial reporters, editors and columnists, lined up to tell us that this was not the case.

Economic commentator Nehemiah Shtrasler wrote in Haaretz that the Prime Minister himself ruined the economic miracle by doling out money without cutting, for example, the defense budget. It’s not just kumbaya-lefties saying that – Trajtenberg recommended it as a source for financing the provisions in his report. Instead, the defense budget burst its banks, so to speak, every year under Netanyahu (Yossi Gurvitz writes on this,  in Hebrew). At the last minute, a “surprise” defense cut was added to the package. But then, just a few days later, it seems that the Prime Minister canceled that cut after all.

An editor at Haaretz’s financial paper The Marker noted in a television interview that the government could have taxed luxury items, or the bonuses of the country’s top executives. Shtrasler also observed that the modest two percent tax on the rich isn’t expected to contribute much, and he viewed it mainly as a symbol of their participation.

And where was the money doled out? Well, the government continues to provide funding for ultra-orthodox yeshivot – a double economic whammy of direct funding, and the cultivation of a community that does not work or pay income taxes, but lives off national insurance.

Last year the government spent NIS 1.6 billion on the settlements – and Finance Minister Steinitz proudly told the religious publication Makor Rishon that this was an increase. The Prime Minister called that funding “negligible.”

In January, the financial paper “Calcalist” reported that the Finance Minister oversaw a raise in the salaries of municipal rabbis (in a closed-door, secret-protocol meeting that required no Knesset approval). It wasn’t a 10 or 20 percent raise. A rabbi who was earning NIS 18,900/month, more than double the average full-time salary, now earns over NIS 29,000 – a 54 percent raise. Rabbis who were earning NIS 7,500 saw a 143 percent raise. The total budget invested in state-funded religious services (all ultra-orthodox) in 2011 was NIS 620 million. Ironically, Calcalist reports (Hebrew) that even the Haredi sector largely uses its own private religious services. In American terms, this would be called “pork.”

Where else could the government have raised the money? One of the leaders of the social protest, Alon-Lee Green, posted a neat chart listing a range of alternative revenue sources that would have yielded a similar total to the needed funds. They include raising corporate tax rate incrementally from 25 to 31 percent as it once was, raising capital gains taxes, expanding taxes on the wealthiest – all items I’ve heard endorsed by reputable economists here.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist, I don’t believe in magic solutions, and I do approve of balanced budgets. But what are the country’s priorities?

Building the state, or mourning its destruction?

In the Jewish state, isn’t education a universal value that binds us far more than any one interpretation of religion? Isn’t there any funding for higher education that does not involve military or terror studies, or ultra-orthodox males? Do I really have to watch news items about crumbling concrete and exposed electrical sockets in public elementary schools, where sharp corroded iron beams stick out and water fountains don’t work? Surely if there is money to fund yeshivot, there is money to repair the nauseating bathroom facilities of the school in Sde Yaakov – which reminded me of the outhouses at a school I visited in rural Romania a decade ago.  If we are investing upwards of one billion NIS in the West Bank, does it have to be for a system of separation and discrimination?

Did the Prime Minister really have to announce the package the day before the weekend of Tisha b’Av, holiday of mourning? I can’t help but think that the timing was planned to head off the angriest immediate reactions. Or did the government simply hope to get two for the price of one with the holiday, thinking that people would mourn their economic woes together with the destruction of the Temple – and vent all the anger before the next elections?

And as the social protest gathers this evening, I wonder: did it work? Will the anger dissipate in a sea of perpetual despair? Will the public continue to view the revived protest as “politicized,” a phantom accusation of a failed government against the discontent of its subjects, as it laughs in their faces? Will people continue to be hypnotized by the Prime Minister’s chants of “Iran,” “existential threat,” and “we had no choice”? Can’t we do better?

Article has been updated, 4 August.

Along with the Ariel Cultural Center, this decision drives home Israel’s permanence in the West Bank. It also represents the bizarre military takeover of academia – since formally the IDF commander of the Central Command, the highest authority in the West Bank, has to approve the accreditation. For those who have never lived under occupation, there has rarely been a policy move that looked and felt so much like the actions of a military regime. Further, the new University will surely cater exclusively to Israeli citizens, as it does today. In other words, within the West Bank, it serves the minority and dismisses the majority – call that what you will.

As the school celebrated – animated fireworks burst cheerily on its website – a wide range of outraged public figures lashed out on both political and professional grounds. Earlier this year one thousand professors signed a letter opposing the move, concerned about the inability to fund Israel’s seven existing, cash-starved universities.  Remarkably, the head of the Weizmann Institute of Science said that he would boycott the college should recognition be approved, Haaretz reported. To face down this opposition, Finance Minister announced that he had personally earmarked NIS 100 million for the college so that the money would not come from the education budget. “He set that money aside some time ago,” said Beni Reuven Levy, Dean of the School of Architecture, proudly, in a phone interview Tuesday evening. It’s hard to imagine where that money did come from.

Manuel Trajtenberg, the erstwhile government emissary to the J14 protest, is the chairman of the government’s Budget and Planning Committee. He was so incensed at what he viewed as a purely political move devoid of all pretenses of professionalism, that he sent an angry memo to the head of CHE-Judea/Samaria, attacking its legitimacy and writing that the move would “fatally harm academia,” according to Haaretz.

Even the regular Committee for Higher Education opposed recognition. Luckily for the college, CHE’s authority does not extend to the West Bank. The Committee for Higher Education of Judea and Samaria was established in 1997 and stepped in handily. Education Minister Gidon Saar of Likud also gave the CHE-J/S full and public support.

Reporters from state-run media outlets could barely contain their excitement, treating the news as a sweeping national drama. “The Center has been waiting for this for years,” crowed the announcer on Reshet B radio, explaining without a trace of irony that the drive for recognition goes all the way back to 2005.

Dean Levy of the School of Architecture was in a very magnanimous mood Tuesday evening. He brushed aside accusations that the school is an exclusive institution for the ruling minority in the area: “It is 100 percent incorrect to say that.” He described the vast diversity of the student body, noting that the college has the highest percentage of Arabs of all Israeli schools, including some from East Jerusalem and surrounding villages. They all have blue Israeli ID cards. Palestinians? “The university is open to people from other places, but none of them ever applied. We assume that it’s because they are afraid of their neighbors, or for ideological reasons, but as far as we’re concerned, it’s open.”

Member of Knesset Zahava Galon, head of the Meretz party, scoffed at that. Ariel, she told me by phone, is off limits for Palestinians very simply because it is an Israeli-controlled settlement. Just as a West Bank Palestinian can’t go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv easily, they are equally unwelcome in Ariel. For her, the move reeked of hypocrisy. “It’s a higher education committee approved by people in uniform, so what is the substantive meaning? It’s unbelievable.” She called it a sign of the government’s true program of “creeping annexation,” and remarked that it would legitimize the global movements calling for the academic boycott of Israel.

****

Personally, I’m biting back my anger. I have spent years working towards my doctorate at Tel Aviv University. It’s dragged on because I’ve worked full time as a consultant to pay tuition and support myself, suspending myself during semesters when work was too intense. Despite my tuition payments, the university can’t afford enough security guards, so the gate near my faculty closes at midday. If I arrive after 12:31pm, I walk an extra leg uphill in the burning sun to the next gate, then walk all the way back to my building, which invariably makes me five minutes late.

As a freelance consultant, I also pay National Insurance. That’s the agency that drove Moshe Silman to self-immolate after tormenting him for a 15,000 debt. I avoid such debt by meeting steep monthly payments. Yet were I to have a slow year (say, because I was working on my thesis), there’s no unemployment insurance and therefore no quarter for me – the glitch of being a freelancer.

So now that I’m entering the last year of my program, I planned to immerse myself in research. For the first time, I looked for funding, but the departmental doctoral adviser said sympathetically, “it’s our weak link.” I pored over academic grants; most of them were for security-related studies. Finally, I applied for a “subsistence grant,” which covers tuition (about NIS 7000) and a maximum of NIS 4000/month – just over $1000.

Yesterday I was told there’s a good chance I won’t get it, because there just isn’t enough to go around. Today I know why – 100 million shekels are going to a new university as part of the permanent Israeli takeover of the West Bank. Now I know what I’ve been working for, and paying for – I didn’t want that, and I’m not celebrating.

But when the University of Ariel throws open its doors to the Palestinian and Israeli people of the West Bank, and wields its apparently unlimited political power to demand the immediate removal of all movement restrictions preventing any such resident from reaching the school – when it becomes a beacon of equal opportunity and rights for all people in deeds and not in Orwellian rhetoric, when the city of Ariel is transformed into a vibrant university town bubbling and bustling with the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and national diversity of the Palestinian and Israeli students and faculty – a model for the equality of human life inherent in the single state that it is, de facto, establishing – then I will celebrate.

Flush from the success of its third annual conference, J Street stands at tough crossroads. Its first two years of heady success as the receptacle for an emotional outpouring of long-suppressed liberal Jewish sentiment have run headlong into the unforgiving landscape of American-Jewish-Israel-politics.

The powerful Jewish establishment initially tried to swat down J Street like an annoyance, but as the buzz grew the establishment unleashed its anger, desperate to delegitimize J Street from the right. Over the last year or so, the fledgling lobby took a barrage of criticism over its position that the US should not oppose a UN resolution condemning settlements, only to be flogged by the left for opposing the Palestinian unilateral statehood bid last September. Critique of the harder, outspoken left now flows freely, on a lineup of issues.

The Obama Administration, which J Street originally hoped would usher in a policy paradigm shift, has stagnated dangerously on the peace process, perhaps capitulating to the vise-like grip of the established right-wing American Jewish lobby. Has J Street disappointed the left and been defeated by the Jewish-American right? Is it toeing a line too fine to make a difference? Or is it staking out a genuine ground and digging in to reach a deeper level of long-term  change?

Two days after the conference ended, I spoke with founder Jeremy Ben Ami about some of these issues. The conversation here has been edited for length and clarity.

———

If Jeremy’s energy level is any indicator, the answer is clear: J Street is single-minded and undaunted. Before I even managed to ask a question, he was gushing about the conference:

Attendance was up 25 percent compared to last year (to 2,500). The enthusiasm level seemed not all diminished despite realities on the ground. On the Hill and in politics, there are people we couldn’t get a meeting with two years ago, and one year ago we could get a staff person. Now they’re meeting and agreeing to put their name on letter, when two years ago we wouldn’t have even been allowed in the door. Person by person, office by office.

DS: As Obama’s first term draws to a close, how do you view the arc of his approach to the conflict? What do you see as his most and least successful moves?

One, he came into office with the clear recognition that resolving the conflict is an essential American national security priority. Two, he recognized that you can’t deal with this in year eight of a second term, but from day one. Three, you need to bring in some fresh people and ideas to do it.

…He had the right vision. He talked about the existential necessity for Israel of achieving a two-state solution, he understood that…that’s what it means to be a friend. He made the commitment to put it into action with a full-on settlement freeze and showed a real desire not just to speak but to act.

And that’s where the good news ends. The inevitability of an Israeli “no” to the concept of a settlement freeze was not fully [thought out]… The president backed down and became very defensive about its friendship with Israel rather than being on the offense and saying that friendship means pursuing a peace deal and providing military hardware, exercises and strategic operations – not just military aid.

At the end of the first term, the vision is unfulfilled, the tactics have not worked. If he is reelected, he has to press reset if he wants to achieve the vision he laid out at the beginning.

DS: J Street’s August poll of American Jews showed 57% who supported the broad outlines of a two-state solution package, but also 60% who feel favorably about Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has paid lip service, but not moved forward on the two-state solution. What’s going on among American Jews?

The biggest hurdle for the Israeli two-state camp and the American pro-Israel pro-peace camp is that people don’t believe there’s a way to get it done and a partner. But this is a far better situation to be in than the other way around. It’s a much harder task to change minds of the majority on the substance, than to mobilize people who agree with you.

The way to change the current situation is political leadership. Sadat changed public opinion overnight by speaking in the Knesset. Any one of the leaders in Ramallah, DC, Jerusalem stepping forward and leading on this issue will change the perception that [peace] is never going to happen. I have argued [this] to President Abbas …and to Israeli leaders who meet with us…to the White House, the President and will argue with whoever the American leader is after November. This is what will dissipate people’s doubts that [peace] can’t happen.

DS: J Street is committed to the two-state solution. Amos Oz said “[Israelis and Palestinian conflict resolution] is not a honeymoon, but a fair and painful divorce.” Isn’t this the old rhetoric? Is J Street being inflexible by not opening up different options?

This isn’t just a five or ten year old idea. For 80 years, there’s been no other realistic answer to how you resolve this conflict. You have two peoples, with an unbreakable claim on one piece of land. You have three options: a. one side wipes out the other, and controls all the land; b. you both continue to live there and continue to fight ad infinitum, with blood, tears, violence and war; c. you figure out a way to draw a line, and say you’re here, we’re there. For 80 years, it’s been really hard to figure out where that line is…but that doesn’t mean that we’re naïve to keep trying.

The other two outcomes are simply not acceptable. It may be academically interesting to debate…but the entirety of human history tells us that that’s not possible.

DS: Did J Street cut too far to the center/right? In trying too hard to please all, is its message getting diluted?

I am one-thousand percent convinced that two-thirds of Jewish Americans fall squarely in the middle of the political map which is the space that J Street is trying to claim. There is a very, very activist group on the right, a very, very activist group on the left, they are more passionate, they are louder, they are more intensely engaged in the debate, but ultimately, the power is going to belong to the center, which is rooted in Jewish values, committed to Israel, it wants peace….it [holds] liberal views on issues like human rights, civil rights, peace and democracy. That’s why we see our movement growing, expanding year to year.

DS: Why did you ask Obama not to oppose the UN resolution against settlements, but you opposed Palestine’s unilateral statehood bid? Were you influenced by the fallout against J Street following the UN settlement issue?

They’re completely different questions. If there was a United Nations resolution tomorrow on [settlement condemnation], we’d take the same exact position, which reflects American policy for over 40 years, to oppose the settlements over the Green Line.

The application for statehood is a separate question…This Administration was in line with United States policy, not against it, that the state of Palestine should be admitted [to the UN] as a result of a peace deal. We felt that jumping ahead to membership was just a symbolic statement. If Palestine had been admitted, today nothing would be different;[it] would not change the reality of occupation, of continued encroachment of settlements on land where they have to build their state.

DS: After inviting Peter Beinart as a central speaker at the conference, did you reject his views when they went too far?

I have absolutely no problem with his book. I am thrilled by the sense of urgency that he is infusing into the discussion, I am one-hundred percent supportive of his desire to rekindle a passionate liberal Zionism that unites our values and our love of the project of building a national home for our people. Does that mean that I’m going to agree with every single tactical recommendation he makes? No. Is he going to agree with all of ours? No, but that doesn’t influence the philosophical case we are making.

We are here to solve the broken dynamics of the American political system, and broken leadership of the established American Jewish community, which stakes out positions on Israel that are not in line with the American Jewish public,and represent a small hawkish part of it….We deserve to have all voices represented in the discussion.

It’s fine for some groups to [boycott settlement products], but it’s not our mission. Many people within J Street are not going to buy products made over the Green Line, spend a dollar or see a play in Ariel, because if you support J Street’s vision and you’re grounded in our values, you’re probably not going to buy those products, or attend the plays. But we’re not going to endorse that.

DS: You are both a political lobby but also committed to pushing the boundaries of the conversation among American Jewry. Is there any tension or contradiction between these?

We have a single mission – to advance American support for a two-state solution…The broader the conversation in the Jewish community on Israel, the healthier that community will be. I’ve never staked out any claim or made any pretense that J Street is left of center or far left, other people have tried to paint us that way or marginalize us, but since day one, we’ve been passionate moderates.

DS: What are your next steps?

In 2012, the campaign is the future of “pro-Israel”: to help define “pro-Israel” in American politics so that it doesn’t mean this downward spiral of ever-more hawkish pronouncements by politicians who think they’re currying favor and support from Jewish communities. We have to make clear that the future of “pro-Israel” in this country is to support the necessary moves to achieve a two state solution…We want Obama, or the next leader, to know that the politics support them in doing that.

DS: What would you see as short-term and long-term achievements?

This is a marathon [disclosure: Jeremy is a multi-marathon runner - ds]. When we created J Street, we thought there was a possibility that Obama would sprint forward and maybe get to a two-state solution within his first two years. We wanted to clear the political space, be the “blocking back” for him. That was J Street 1.0. When that didn’t work, it became very clear that we are absolutely in a marathon and to win we’re going to have to do the hard and slow work, community by community, synagogue by synagogue, member of Congress by member of Congress…

It’s amazing to see yearly growth, we have the 5000 students involved in J Street U after just two years; there were 650 students at the conference… The progress on Capitol Hill has been enormous. There are dozens [of members] today who are engaged and openly have a relationship with us. If you can continue at that rate, every year you add 10-20 more members, that’s real progress.

DS: Are there any possible ripple effects beyond the direct impact of J Street?

If voices to our left can get more organized and bring in more activists, that’s good for the Jewish community to have this argument about what their values mean. I hope people who disagree with us on the left won’t just confine their critiques to internet but get off their seats and do something.

That’s the hard work. It’s much easier to sit at home and lob criticism through blogs and tweets, and by posting that this isn’t changing the world overnight. But political change happens one step at a time, one foot in front of the other to reach the finish line of the marathon. If you’re sitting on the sidelines critiquing the runners, I have no respect for you. Get in the race, show you can run it faster, show you can get to the finish line, prove you have better ideas, but don’t put your energy into simply critiquing the form and style of other runners.

Read also:
Why I am proud of my work for J Street
J Street third annual conference marks shift to the right
What’s wrong with J Street – an open letter to members
WATCH: Why does a Palestinian speak at a J Street conference?

Take, for example, this meeting, in which the Palestinian side learns that the Israeli negotiators wouldn’t agree to use 1967 borders even as a starting point (h/t Matt Duss):

Udi Dekel (Israel):     As you know, our guiding principles are UNSC Res. 242, the need for boundaries that can provide security for Israel, and we’re talking about the situation on the ground, as per Pres. Bush’s letter.

Samih al-Abed (Palestinian):      Do you mean the situation as it was then, or now?

UD:     Reality now… But we’re not going to argue.  We can’t change reality on the ground.  We don’t see the 1967 border as a reference, first because we don’t even know exactly where the line is.

SA:      We have all the maps that were signed by you.

UD:     But that wasn’t exactly the line on the ground.

SA:      If not the 1967 line, then what is your reference?

UD:     We said already, the situation on the ground.

And here Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni insists on annexing the settlement of Ariel – which lies some 15 miles to the east of the Israeli border, deep in the West Bank:

Livni: The idea behind our desire to annex Ariel settlement was not to get more water but because thousands of people live there. We want to have an answer for those who have lived there for forty years.

Future borders will be complicated but clear. I have seen in Yugoslavia how areas can be connected. The matter is not simply giving a passport to settlers.

Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala): Having Ariel under our control means also that the water basin will be under our control.

Livni: We have said that even if we agreed to have Ariel under Israeli control, we have to find a solution to the water issue.

Abu Ala: We find this hard to swallow.

Rice:  Let us put Maale Adumim and Ariel aside. I am not trying to solve them here.

Or the now-famous Yerushalayim quote, in which Palestinian negotiator Dr. Sael Erakat used the Hebrew name when referring to Jerusalem:

Erekat: Israelis want the two-state solution but they don’t trust. They want it more than you think, sometimes more than Palestinians. What is in that paper gives them the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history, symbolic number of refugees return, demilitarized state… what more can I give?

——————————-

The obvious result of the massive leak of documents will be a blow to the Palestinian Authority’s credibility – most notably, to the public image of President Mahmoud Abbas and chief negotiator Saeb Erakat.

The documents, published by Al Jazeera and the Guardian, reveal the extent of concessions offered by the Palestinian leadership at those talks, and expose the PLO leaders to charges of betrayal of the Palestinian cause – not so much because of the offers themselves, but more due to the tone used by the Palestinian negotiators (Erekat calling Prime Minister Sharon “our friend,” using the Hebrew name for Jerusalem, and more), and due to their cooperation with Israel in the persecution of Hamas activists. It’s not clear yet whether the Palestinian Authority leadership can survive this crisis.

Evaluating the effect of the Palestine Papers on the Israeli side is even harder.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will probably not suffer any damage on the home front, at least in the short term. Netanyahu might even use the papers to claim that his government’s construction projects in occupied East Jerusalem pose no threat to the peace process, since the Palestinians have already agreed to give up most of the Jewish neighborhoods in this part of the city.

The Israeli government could also benefit from a renewal of the internal war on the Palestinian side. For years, Israel has tried (and for the most part, succeeded) to break Palestinian society into sub-groups with different political interests and agendas. When those groups fight each other, the Palestinian cause suffers.

Yet from a wider perspective, the release of the Palestinian offers during the 2008 talks serves as proof that Israel in fact had a partner for peace on the Palestinian side. Actually, the question from now on will be whether Israel itself is a partner for an agreement. Furthermore, after the steps Palestinian and Israeli negotiators took towards each other in previous rounds of talks, the current Israeli offers, such as a temporary state on half of the West Bank’s territory, will appear cynical and unrealistic.

For years, Israel has used the peace process as a way to hold back international pressure on the Palestinian issue. It will be harder to do so from now on.  This will be Netanyahu’s greatest problem.

As far as the Israeli public is concerned, opposition leader Tzipi Livni comes out fine from the papers. Unlike the Palestinian negotiators, Livni can’t be accused of double talk. She presented the same hardline positions both in public and in private. Yet Livni will soon try to position herself as an alternative to the right-wing government of Netanyahu, which was a catalyst for Israel’s increased isolation in the world and damaged relations with the US. Given her attitude during the 2008 talks, how would Livni convince the Israeli public and the international community that she can succeed in negotiating a deal with the Palestinians?

More than anything, it’s the very notion that Israelis and Palestinians can reach an agreement on the two-state solution that suffered another tremendous blow (some people in the US administration apparently gave up on this even before the papers were released). Many people believe that Israel went as far as it could in the offers that were handed in 2008 to the Palestinians; now they may think that the Palestinians did the same, and yet the distance between the two parties remains too wide. It seems that Israeli leaders are simply unable to deliver the minimum required to solve the Palestinian problem. No wonder that one of the first Israeli politicians to comment on the papers was Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said that the documents proved a final agreement was impossible to achieve.

Even for those who don’t subscribe to Lieberman’s ideas, it’s clear that a new approach is needed. Will it be the unilateralism president Abbas is promoting, the mounting international pressure on Israel, the “nation building” effort by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, or even another Palestinian uprising that changes the political dynamic? Only time will tell.

Culture Minister Limor Livnat (Likud) was present this week at the opening of the new theater hall at the settlement of Ariel. A couple of months ago, several Israeli theater artist declared their refusal to perform in Ariel, which sits deep in the Palestinian territories, some 15 miles east of the Green Line.

Livnat and other rightwing figures believe that Ariel is a part of Israel, and as so, its people are entitled to the same services other citizens receive. “Ariel is like any other community in Israel,” said Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud). The Culture Minister went even further and declared that the state would stop supporting theaters and artists who refuse to perform in any place in Israel, including the Occupied Territories.

Similar arguments were recently made by Israeli officials to explain the construction of hundreds of new housing units in Ariel.

But just a few years ago, it was the municipality of Ariel itself declaring that it is not a part of Israel, and even trying to prove it in court.

In December 2007, the Petach Tikva court of appeals issued a ruling (Hebrew) in the case of the municipality of Ariel vs. the State of Israel. In its appeal, the municipality demanded to be exempted from paying VAT to the state; its argument was that the settlement doesn’t fall under the legal category of an ‘Israeli citizen’ or ‘An Israeli resident’, and therefore cannot be required to pay VAT.

Alternatively, Ariel demanded to be exempted from paying taxes over the work of its Palestinian employees.

The Petach Tikva court ruled in favor of the state, and Ariel was required to pay its taxes.

The 2007 case shows again how Israel is trying to have it both ways in the West Bank: claim it as its own territory and reject all efforts to limit or question its actions there – and at the same time, never formally recognize it as a part of the state (that’s the loophole the municipality of Ariel was trying to use), since that would reveal the fact that there are 2.5 million people without rights within this territory, thus officially labeling Israel as an Apartheid state.

In 2007 the Petach Tikva court decided that for tax purposes, Ariel is a part of Israel. At the same time, many Israelis who have factories or businesses in the West Bank don’t pay their Palestinian workers minimum wage, claiming – as one company did before court a couple of months ago – that they are operating “outside Israel” and are subject to Jordanian regulations.

If Ariel and other settlements are indeed part of Israel – isn’t it time that their Palestinian neighbors and workers will have full rights as well?

—————————-

(h/t Y.N.)

This is one of the rare days when all four of the Israeli dailies lead with completely different headlines. Haaretz leads with Netanyahu’s trip to the United States; the PM is “set to discuss a package of benefits in exchange for extending the temporary settlement freeze.” Senior administration officials slovenly remind his highness that the benefits are still on the table. This, in a nutshell, is Obama’s “tough love” for Israel: When the carrot doesn’t work, try… more carrots. Haaretz notes in passing the PM’s flight will cost us taxpayer one million dollars.

Other headlines of interest include the police opening thousands of criminal cases for no good reason, just to rake up statistics – the information comes from internal correspondence between senior commanders obtained by the newspaper. A huge wildfire in the Golan Heights gets the third headline.

Yedioth leads with a sequel to the Ariel artists’ boycott: This time, the boycotting artists have called on the artists who do want to perform in Ariel to reconsider. The wildfire is also here, and Israeli composer Gil Shohat gets the third headline: The newspaper sent him to play in a train station, a la Joshua Bell. Bush’s disclosure of Israel’s bombardment of the Syrian nuclear facility three years back gets a tut-tutting headline: “Israel concealed, Bush uncovered.”

Maariv blows the Bush revelations sky-high with the main headline. The reason: Drooling over Israel’s performance; “Israel’s daring operation”, “the attack brought back my faith in the abilities of the Israeli army,” etc etc. The Ariel boycott get’s the tiny, by comparison, second headline.

In the Prime Minister’s Own Freesheet, Yisrael Hayom, the settlers launch a counteroffensive, calling for a counter-boycott and using counter-insults – referring to the distinguished signatories of the artists’ letter as a “marginal group” of which the public has had enough. Sadly, in terms of power-play, they are probably right. To add a bit of humour to the story, some of the settlers leaders slammed the artists’ petition as an “Apartheid letter.”

Summary: Except for the Haaretz cop story, not a an earth-shattering news day – and even the Haaretz story will probably pass unnoticed in the general atmosphere of weariness and escapism  prevailing in the country.