Have the latest revelations about a secret uranium-enrichment plant made an Israeli attack in Iran more probable, imminent even? Not necessarily. Such a plant might indeed mean that Iran is getting ever closer to obtaining nuclear weapons. But since all indications are that the Israeli intelligence already knew about this plant a couple of months ago, the genuinely significant development, in Israeli eyes, is Barack Obama’s, Gordon Brown’s and Nicolas Sarkozy’s signalling that this time they really mean business when it comes to the Iranian regime.
Nicolas Sarkozy in Pittsburgh (photo: Elysée Palace)
For years, Israeli officials have argued that an Iranian nuclear bomb is not like any other country’s nuclear bomb. According to most Middle Eastern analysts - Israeli, Arab and western - Iran’s official attempts to export the Islamic Revolution around the region have turned it into a source of great instability. Taking into account Israel’s tiny territory (75 times smaller than Iran’s), and the latter’s open and ongoing threats to “wipe Israel off the map”, it is not surprising that Israel considers a Iranian nuclear bomb as such a paramount concern.
As the months and years have gone by, the international community’s response to Iran’s nuclear project has seemed hesitant and slow. A fragmented Security Council, unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American intelligence failure leading up to the Iraq war, have repeatedly let Iran off the hook. Despite a few rounds of sanctions, Iranian leaders have sounded defiant as ever, firm in their quest to achieve nuclear capabilities.
And Israel has felt more and more cornered, with no real alternative but to act independently. While for most countries around the world believe that an Iranian nuclear bomb might pose theoretical questions about the effectiveness of the non-proliferation regime, for Israel it’s a question of life and death.
“This latest disclosure shows that the Israeli assessments were right,” says Avner Cohen, a University of Maryland professor and author of the book Israel and the Bomb. “The Israeli intelligence did not believe the American assessment of 2007, according to which Iran had halted its nuclear programme. Now it appears that Israel wasn’t just pessimistic or war-mongering. It is a game-changer as to future negotiations with Iran, especially those that will start just this coming Thursday [Group of Six meeting with Iran in Geneva].”
Therefore, Israel had been encouraged to see a decisive Obama and a grumpier-than-ever Sarkozy in Pittsburgh. An international commitment vis-à-vis Iran will probably yield better results than any other possibility, given the carrots and sticks Iran’s trading partners can offer and the difficulties in carrying out any military action. This is why ex-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s attitude was that Israel has to keep a low profile in matters concerning Iran.
So now the ball is again in the international community’s court. It remains to be seen if this is a serious attempt to solve the problem or just another photo-op. The EU, after all, is still Iran’s largest trading partner (with $25bn worth of trade in 2008). Maybe instead of waiting for Chinese approval of new sanctions, Germany, Italy, France and other European countries should start by giving their own example.
(Originally published in Monocle, September 28th 2009)
The somewhat odd celebrations on the first birthday of the financial crisis offered much remorse and only dim rays of hope. Standing in stark contrast, though, was the Israeli version of that anniversary, marked mainly by the feeling that the worst is already behind us, and that actually it wasn’t that bad.
Israeli New Shekels
This week, UBS joined Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital in projecting positive growth of 0.3 per cent for the Israeli economy this year. According to The Economist, this will make Israel the only developed economy in the world with a positive growth rate in 2009.
Earlier this month, Moody’s Investor Services concluded that Israel’s recession appears to be over, while HSBC economists wrote that Israel had shown “tremendous resilience to the global recession”. In August, Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer was the first among his colleagues in the West to raise the interest rate, thus proclaiming an end to the recession.
So what went so (relatively) well here?
First of all, Israel entered the crisis in a very different situation to others: with no toxic bank assets and no property bubble. Israeli banks have traditionally been conservative lenders, and “sophisticated” financial tools were far less in use. Public and private levels of indebtedness were also very low.
Crisis did hit eventually, exports shrank and around 2 per cent of the workforce (more than 60,000 people) joined the ranks of the unemployed - the rate now stands at 7.9 per cent.
The big star of the crisis is no doubt Mr Fischer, who took a few resolute steps. He cut interest rates, bought government bonds and spent some 100bn shekels (€18bn) to buy dollars in order to help exporters.
But it seems that his most useful asset as the crisis unfolded was his leadership skills, and his ability to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. On the one hand, he was much more visible than usual, sending the market and the citizens a clear message that someone’s taking care of things. On the other hand, he reiterated time and again his refusal to spend public money in order to bail out companies.
Another important lesson is the advantage of being small. Dan Catarivas, director of foreign trade at the Israeli Manufacturers Association, says that Israeli companies were very flexible this year, and managed to shift their activities to markets with high demands. “Israeli companies are no General Motors,” he says, “and they can easily shift from providing services to the car industry, for example, to selling components to electronic goods manufacturers.”
Israel, of course, is not comparable to the big players, but rather to medium-sized economies, such as Hungary, Greece, Portugal and the Czech Republic. In the Israeli case, the crisis showed that it’s sometimes easier to navigate a small speedboat than a huge aircraft carrier.
(Published originally in Monocle, September 24th 2009)
The Swedish daily Aftonbladet has set last week new journalistic standards by publishing a story about IDF soldiers harvesting organs from Palestinians. Editor in chief Jan Helin admitted that his newspaper ran the story with no evidence whatsoever.
Palestinian woman giving birth in Ashkelon (photo: Edi Israel)
But the thing is that there is evidence. Actually, a lot of evidences. They just point to a totally different story.
From information I gathered in the last couple of days, it emerges that dozens if not hundreds of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza are being treated daily in Israeli hospitals. Most of them are not casualties of the conflict, just patients in need for care.
Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon, for example, just 12km north of the border with Gaza, treated more than 400 Palestinians in 2008. The city of Ashkelon was hit many times by rockets coming from Gaza in the last war with Hamas in January 2009.
Barzilai’s spokesperson, Lea Malul, said that since January 2009, the number of Palestinian patients has dwindled significantly, due to Hamas authorities’ refusal to let patients go to Israeli hospitals. Malul said that right after the war, teams from Barzilai opened a medical clinic on the border, but they were sitting idle - again, because of Hamas’ refusal to let Palestinians leave Gaza for medical care in Israel.
Sourasky hospital in Tel Aviv treats 30-50 Palestinians daily, according to spokesperson Aviva Shemer.
Sheba hospital in Tel Hashomer (near Tel Aviv) treats daily a few dozens Palestinians. Sheba spokesperson Amir Marom said that 25 Palestinian children are currently being treated for chronic and severe diseases such as cancer. This week, a Palestinian woman went through a procedure of taking her cord blood in order to save the life of her child.
Palestinians are being treated regularly in other hospitals, such as Soroka in Beer Sheeba (also targeted with rockets in the last war), Hadassah in Jerusalem and Beilinson near Tel Aviv.
I also approached The Israeli National Transplant Unit. They said that in the last 5 years at least 2 Palestinians from the territories were cured thanks to Israeli donors - one was a case of a boy who received a lung, and the other was a case of a girl who received a kidney. They said that cases of donations inside Israel between Jews and Arabs are too numerous to count.
On July 30th I published an investigation into a report made by Freedom House about the freedom of the press in Israel.
In response to this publication, Freedom House notified me that the report, sent to me by them on July 14th (to view it click here), was a draft report. They attached a new and revised report (to view it click here), which is somewhat shorter and has the following changes:
1. All references to self censorship by Israeli journalists were omitted.
2. The reference to media outlets, which during the Gaza conflict “fed popular sentiment and prioritized nationalistic themes” was omitted.
3. The story of RAM FM, “a pro-peace radio station” that was closed by the Israeli police, was omitted.
4. The reference to the Israeli government, who “ignored the High Court ruling”, was omitted.
In addition to these, many wordings were softened so as to be less aggressive towards the State of Israel.
Nonetheless, the score of Israel on the Freedom of the Press Index (31) and its definition (”partially free”) did not change.
Here’s a story about how un-professional a pro-democracy organization becomes when dealing with the State of Israel.
On May 1st 2009, Freedom House, an international NGO that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, declared that according to its Freedom of the Press Index, Israel is no longer a “free” country, but only “partially free”.
Palestinians shooting rockets (photo: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi)
That was odd: if anything, the Israeli press might be blamed for over-aggressiveness, lack of respect for privacy matters and tendency towards sensationalism. Maybe much more so than many other Western media, the Israeli press is robust and boisterous, and far from not being free.
On the other hand, Freedom House is an extremely respected organization, quoted frequently in all major newspapers, as well as in academic papers and governmental reports.
I decided to check with Freedom House how did they arrive at that conclusion, and to my great surprise, I discovered I was the first journalist (Israeli or non-Israeli) to do that. No one before asked Freedom house what was the reason for downgrading Israel to be only “partially free”.
Freedom House publishes every year its Freedom of the Press Index, with scores running from 1 to 100. The lower the score is, the better the situation is in that country. Freedom House regards countries with 0-30 points as “free”, countries with 31-60 points as “partially free”, and countries with 61-100 points as “not free”.
Until now, Israel was regarded as “free” (with 28 points for 2007). But now, for the first time, Israel received 31 points and the title “partially free”. It was an obvious PR victory for all those who claim that the Israeli society is indeed not democratic. Now an important organization says just that.
I asked Freedom House the full report about Israel covering the year 2008. It is published here for the first time. The report notes that “Israel’s status declined due to the heightened conflict in Gaza, which was reflected in increased travel restrictions on Israeli and foreign reporters; official attempts to influence media coverage within Israel of the conflict; and heightened self-censorship and biased reporting”.
Freedom House’ report contains incorrect assertions, and claims with heavy political bias. For example, the report says that “On December 31, the High Court ruled in favor of a Foreign Press Association petition that the Gaza ban be lifted, but the government ignored the court ruling”.
That’s not exactly true. The Israeli High Court offered a compromise between the Israeli authorities and the Foreign Press Association, according to which a few foreign journalists would be allowed to enter Gaza. That did not happen, but the court said later that the governments’ acts were reasonable.
But that’s mainly semantics. Official attempts to influence media coverage, as the report states, are done on a daily basis in all aspects of life (by spokespersons for example). But the strangest part in Freedom House’s report relates to “heightened self-censorship and biased reporting”. Self-censorship is hard to prove: the only one who knows for sure if he was practicing self-censorship is the journalist himself. But you can’t ask him, because if he did, he would surely not admit it. So - who is to decide if “self-censorship has been growing in recent years in Israel?”
Freedom House also says that “many media outlets largely reflected and indeed fed popular sentiment and prioritized nationalistic themes”. That’s again a problematic assertion: most Israelis felt exactly the opposite, that too many journalists were demoralizing the troops and actually were feeding defeatist sentiments. As in many other cases of social sciences, this kind of judgement is difficult to make, especially if you are going to pin it down with numbers and scores. Exactly because of this there should be clear and professional criteria, which are not derived from the author’s political views.
With all these questions I approached Adam Werner, Freedom House’s representative in Israel and the author of its 2008 report. Mr. Werner is not familiar to most Israelis: he is not a journalist (except for some articles he published for the Jerusalem Post), and this is the first year he works for Freedom house.
He said he worked alone on the report, and that his sources were reports of international media watchdogs, such as “Journalists Without Borders”.
I asked him how he knew that there were cases of self-censorship. He said he based that on an interview with Mr. Yizhar Beer, former director of B’Tselem and the current director of Keshev, a watchdog group. Due to Beer’s well known political views, which are on the far left side of the Israeli spectrum, I asked Werner if he consulted anyone else. Jurists, for example, or specialists for communications law. Or, let’s say, journalists, or maybe ex editors-in-chief, or perhaps political scientists.
He said “no”.
The questionable assertion about heightened self-censorship (which actually led to Israel’s status decline) was based only on Mr. Beer. The problem of course is not of him being a leftist, but of him being the only source. Such a sensitive issue should have been dealt with much more prudence, and surely with many more interviews and sources.
I asked Mr. Werner about the High Court’s decisions. He said he didn’t know, and asked me to send him the rulings (rather late, I’d say). I asked him also about the studios of RAM FM, “a pro-peace radio station”, which according to the report was closed by the Israeli police. He said the studios were closed because they didn’t have a permit, and after the permit was obtained, RAM FM went back on air. Six months later they closed again, this time because of financial problems.
So - why is this case included in the report? And why mentioning that it’s a “pro-peace radio station”, rather than to deceivingly imply that there was a political background to it (when Werner admitted he had no information indicating in that direction)?
I wanted to know who other than Mr. Werner approved this report. According to him, the procedure is that after he sends a draft to the United States, Freedom House sends it to three Israeli professors of communications studies. Unless they sign the report, it’s not approved.
I asked Dr. Karin Karlekar, senior researcher and managing editor for Freedom of the Press Index, who were those professors this year. She admitted that this year, due to financial problems, the report was not sent to any professors at all.
To sum it up: an un-experienced person, who is not an authority in his field, writes a report based on an interview with one interviewee with a very clear political agenda. No body checks it. Freedom House headquarters decide to downgrade Israel from “free” to “partially free”, even though they declare that when a country is being downgraded, an additional check is made. Such a review did not occur.
So - a professional report? A mockery? Decide for yourself.