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July 9, 2023
Key Takeaways:
- It's too early to know if Israel's operation in Jenin was a tactical success but we do know that military action is no substitute for a two-state solution, which remains essential for Israel's safety and security--as well as for its future as a Jewish, democratic state.
- The Democratic Party supports a two-state solution; the Republican Party does not. Any "pro-Israel" organization that supports Republicans either opposes a two-state solution, has a definition of "pro-Israel" that does not include support for a two-state solution, or claims to support a two-state solution but attaches so little importance to it that for all practical purposes it might as well not support a two-state solution.
- Israel's democracy is also threatened by Israel's government. Most Jewish American voters view Prime Minister Netanyahu unfavorably and think his proposed judicial changes will weaken Israel's democracy. The protesters are fighting for Israel's democracy. That's pro-Israel, and we should support them.
- Any "pro-Israel" organization that supports Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results hours after Trump's violent insurrection failed is mocking and undermining the shared values that underly the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Read to the end for corrections, what you may have missed last week, fun stuff, and an in-person event in Highland Park and on Zoom with Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), candidate for U.S. Senate.
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Hi Steve,
Who doesn't want easy answers and simple solutions? Diplomacy and negotiating are hard work. Living with uncertainty and weighing probabilities makes us anxious. Accepting that the best answer is complicated and imperfect is frustrating.
Some policymakers love sanctions, but they rarely work. Others put too much stock in military action. It's understandable--why negotiate when you can bomb them into submission? Iran is a classic example: Sanctions have hurt its economy but have not slowed Iran's progress toward nuclear weapons or its escalation of non-nuclear deleterious activities. Iran war hawks think bombing is the answer but unless we are prepared to invade and occupy Iran indefinitely, military action will only convince Iran that it must acquire nuclear weapons to prevent further military action against it. Diplomacy remains the best option.
The pro-Israel community needs to internalize these truths. Israel's recent operation in Jenin was designed to degrade terrorist capabilities. No country would tolerate terrorist networks planning attacks on its citizens. Terrorism as a tactic is unacceptable regardless of the political objective. Most of us do not have access to intelligence reports that would validate the necessity of Israel's operation, but publicly available information indicates that Jenin is a hotbed of terrorism. Nevertheless, one of Israel's best analysts, Anshel Pfeffer, asks whether the Jenin operation was a military operation or a show for the settlers, who have been agitating for large-scale operations.
Arie Pellman, former deputy director of the Shin Bet security service, writes that "Palestinian terror and Jewish terror alike make it plain: illicit Jewish settlement in the heart of a Palestinian population, in the form of over 100 unauthorized outposts, creates a clear and present danger to the settlers’ personal security – but not only theirs. It also undermines Israel’s national interests and national security."
The consensus is that some military action was needed but how long can this go on? When terrorists are killed, new terrorists take their places. This is not to argue against military action per se; sometimes, especially against ticking time bombs, it is essential.
Yet as Pellman writes, "the [Israeli] military also knows quite well that employing tactics of destruction, killing, and constant pressure – the fruit of the fevered brains of politicians who mostly lack any real security experience – will only expand the ranks of terrorist recruits."
Some Palestinians will be satisfied with nothing less than all the land from the river to the sea. Some Israelis (including the settler terrorists committing pogroms against Palestinian villages and certain ministers in the current Israeli government) want nothing less than a Jewish state from the river to the sea. But a two-state reality, which would have to include formal renunciation of claims by both sides for more, would remove a major incentive for terror on both sides and would give Palestinians something to lose by continuing violence against Israelis.
When asked in 1998 how his life might have turned out if he had been born a Palestinian, former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak replied "At some stage, I would have entered into one of the terror organizations and fought from there."
Barak was clear in that interview that he abhorred terrorism, but he writes in his memoir that he "simply answered as honestly as I could, trying to imagine I'd been one of the Palestinian babies in Wadi Khaweret, yet with the same mind and approach to life that had defined me as an Israeli." That's called empathy.
In his memoir, Barak discusses Moshe Dayan's famous 1956 eulogy for Roi Rotberg, who was murdered by Arab terrorists. Dayan said that "For eight years, [the Palestinians] have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages where their fathers dwelt." Sounds like something you'd expect a naive lefty to say, but this is Moshe Dayan speaking in 1956, quoted by Ehud Barak in 2018. But you don't hear anything like that from legacy organizations that claim to speak for the Jewish community.
Pro-Israel is not anti-Palestinian. Pro-Israel does not mean denying the reality of the Palestinians. But pro-Israel does mean acknowledging the necessity of a two-state solution, not simply because it will make Israelis safer, not simply because it is important for Palestinians too to live in peace and with dignity, but because without a two-state solution, Israel will cease to be Jewish and democratic; it will become one state that is either Jewish and non-democratic or democratic and not Jewish.
Neither side has to give up its narrative or accept the other side's narrative, but both sides must realize that the only path forward, a two-state solution, requires both sides to give up sovereignty over land that they believe should be theirs and both sides to accept that previous sins of the other side may never be fully redressed. And everyone who cares about Israel has a duty to speak up, whether for or against the policies of whatever government is in power.
Yet only the Democratic Party remains committed to a two-state solution. The Republican Party removed support for a two-state solution from its platform in 2016 and the GOP nixed language supporting a two-state solution in the Israel 75th birthday resolution the House passed in April.
Pellman concludes that "at a time when Israelis are (rightly) focused on fighting the destruction of Israeli democracy, the threat to the Zionist vision posed by messianic extremists with control over policy in the West Bank is coming true. The pace of events doesn’t allow these twin threats to be dealt with sequentially. It’s essential to stop the irresponsible annexationists before they force us all into a violent reality from which there is no exit."
We should support the protesters in Israel. Failure to achieve a two-state solution is not the only threat to Israel's democracy. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis (the equivalent of millions of Americans) protest every week against the Netanyahu government's proposed judicial changes. Just as we don't have to support the current government of any country, including our own, to support that country, so too we can support Israel by supporting the protesters in Israel and opposing the policies of Netanyahu's government.
Polling in June from the Jewish Electorate Institute (JEI) showed that while the vast majority of Jewish American voters continue to feel emotionally attached to Israel, 62% hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu, and only 28% view him favorably. Among Jewish American voters who have heard about the proposed judicial changes, 61% think they will weaken Israel's democracy.
Shared values are the bedrock of the U.S.-Israel relationship. That goes both ways--read this short thread from Daniel Seidemann.
Corrections. I'm entitled to my own opinions but not to my own facts, so I appreciate it when readers bring errors to my attention. In last week's newsletter, the bullet about the Supreme Court should have read "have to unpack" instead of "have unpack." I take no responsibility for this error. I blame the Court for releasing key opinions on Friday, thus forcing me to add another section to last week's newsletter at the last minute. The second paragraph of the section on Israel's president praising Biden's plan contained "the the" instead of "the." No excuse for that one.
In Case You Missed It:
- The difference between the Democratic and Republican parties on antisemitism is that Democrats condemn and marginalize antisemitism but Republicans embolden antisemitism at the highest levels of leadership. If someone tells you "both sides" have a problem don't take the bait. If someone doesn't understand that Democrats are better on Israel, point them to the facts.
- Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) used his amendatory veto power to take language that originally applied a $325 per student school-funding increase for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years and veto the “20” and the hyphen to make the end date 2425, creating annual school funding increases every year for more than four centuries.
- Gabby Deutch: U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council makes the case for U.S. participation in the Council.
A few words about Twitter. Some of you had trouble accessing the tweets I linked to last week. Looks like Mr. Musk no longer allows access to tweets unless you are logged in on the device you are using. If you get an error screen, log in or sign up from that screen and you'll be able to see the tweet.
Some of you asked why I'm still on Twitter and sharing tweets. Twitter remains the platform where journalists, politicians, and policymakers share their content and make news. Not all of them anymore, but enough that leaving Twitter risks missing information not available or easily accessible elsewhere. Do you boycott the Wall Street Journal because it's owned by Rupert Murdoch? Or the Chicago Tribune because it's owned by the Ricketts family?
At some point Twitter will break or a critical mass will head to another platform, at which point I'll leave Twitter. Every week, a new alternative to Twitter launches but unless everyone, including newsmakers and journalists, migrate to the same platform it won't work. This week's new flavor is Threads. Threads might become the platform that beats Twitter, but not until it allows users to at least control their feeds and ideally send direct messages. Download the Threads app and follow me there at StevenRichardSheffey; maybe it will take off. Or maybe not--Threads has said it will not promote political content or hard news and some are concerned about Meta's data collection practices.
For now, I'll try to post content that isn't from Twitter if I see the same content somewhere else (but if I see a funny Tweet I'm sharing it) and I hope you understand that sometimes you will see content from Twitter here. This newsletter is a hobby; if you want it to be my full-time job where I have time to find alternative content, chip in some cash and help make that a reality (if you haven't done so already this year).
Tweet of the Week. James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet.
Video Clips of the Week. REM's first national TV appearance. And since we are going back to 1983, check out the Violent Femmes.
Upcoming Event. Politics with Dana and Steve was the first Jewish group in the Chicago area to back Elissa Slotkin when she initially ran for Congress in Michigan after working for the CIA as a Middle East analyst, serving three tours in Iraq, and holding defense and intelligence positions under President Bush and President Obama. Other groups said "no" or "maybe later" or "we're not sure if she's viable." But we knew she would never be viable unless someone gave her a chance. She beat the odds, she won, and now she is running for the U.S. Senate.
Join Dana Gordon, Steve Sheffey, and our amazing co-chairs for an in-person and on Zoom event with Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) in support of her Senate campaign in Highland Park, Illinois, on Monday, July 24 at 6:00 pm CT. You must RSVP to attend. This Senate race will be competitive, expensive, and critical to our efforts to hold the Senate. Early money is important because it allows Elissa’s team to hire staff, develop strategy, and buy advertising at discounted rates.
This is the newsletter even Republicans have to read and the original home of the viral and beloved 2022 and 2023 Top Ten Signs You're At a Republican Seder. If someone forwarded this to you, why not subscribe and get it in your inbox every Sunday? Just click here--it's free.
My most popular Times of Israel posts are How Not To Define Antisemitism and Pro-Israel Or Pro-Bibi? I periodically update my Medium posts on why Democrats are better than Republicans on Israel and antisemitism. You can read my most recent effort to define "pro-Israel" here (it's a work in progress, as am I).
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