The New Middle East (36 page)

Around 1 million people emigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s as it began to crumble. In January 2013 the Jewish population of Israel passed 6 million, so it’s easy to see how their number back then would have had a profound impact on society. The Russian-speaking Jews have often been at the sharp end of proclamations by rabbis over who qualifies as a proper Jew. The embodiment of what Bill Clinton sees as the negative influence of Russian Jews on modern Israel is the former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and his party Yisrael Beiteinu, which formed a joint ticket with Netanyahu’s Likud Party in the 2013 poll, serving neither one of them well.

The Moldovan-born Mr Lieberman is a man about whom people are not ambivalent. The
New York Times
calls him ‘thuggish’.
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The normally mild-mannered Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi told me she thought he was a ‘racist SOB’. He has also been called a racist by Jewish politicians. When he was in the government one of his more right-wing cabinet colleagues confessed to me: ‘I don’t like his style. I don’t think he’s an extremist . . . [but he] does us some harm when dealing with the West.’ The then Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak said of the country’s foreign minister in September 2012: ‘Lieberman’s comments about the Palestinian Authority and its president do not represent Israeli policy, and harm Israeli interests.’
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Mr Lieberman’s stint at the Israeli Foreign Ministry was catastrophic, spanning as it did the Arab revolts, because even before the first stone had been cast Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry destroyed Israel’s key strategic partnership with Turkey. In January 2010 Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, who was a member of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, invited the Israeli press to a meeting he was holding with the Turkish ambassador Ahmet Oguz Celikkol. He was calling the meeting to complain about a spy drama made in Turkey which often had the Israelis as the bad guys. Ambassador Celikkol did not know the press would be there and he did not know that Mr Ayalon was saying to them in Hebrew: ‘Pay attention that he is sitting in a lower chair . . . that there is only an Israeli flag on the table and that we are not smiling.’

The Turkish government was furious. A few months later the anger was compounded by the botched raid on the Turkish activists’ boat the
Mavi Marmara
, which was trying to break the blockade on Gaza. The timing of the nosedive in relations with Turkey, which led to the withdrawal of ambassadors, could not have been worse, coming as it did just months before the Arab revolts that would replace Mubarak with the Brotherhood. It took almost three years, and the confluence of the absence of Lieberman – who was by then facing criminal charges of fraud and breach of trust – and a presidential visit from Barack Obama to resolve the damaging diplomatic row between the two nations. The fact though that Netanyahu made the call to his opposite number, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from a trailer at the airport while Air Force One was sitting on the runway ready to leave suggests that Obama had to put pressure on him to make the call and thus give the US president something to take away from his state visit in 2013.

When it came to running foreign policy during Obama’s first term Netanyahu kept the American brief largely to himself, but the rest of the diplomatic toolkit he left with Lieberman. For four years the only instrument the Foreign Ministry seemed to know how to use was a sledgehammer. The sidelining of the foreign minister from foreign affairs burst out into another row when he became the first man in his job to sever ties with his country’s own intelligence service, Mossad.
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Mr Lieberman complained that Mossad was going behind his back to deal with countries outside their remit. And so they were.

Many times during Lieberman’s period as foreign minister I was told privately by government officials that comments he was making did not represent the views of Israel. As foreign minister he took Henry Kissinger’s comment that ‘Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic political system’ to its absolute extreme. Lieberman played only to his domestic political gallery. His every utterance was made with them in mind. The impact on Israel’s foreign policy seemed a distant second concern. Yisrael Beiteinu had fought the previous election in 2009 on the slogan ‘No citizenship without loyalty’, which was an attack on Israeli Arabs but also came to be seen in the campaign as directed towards the ultra-Orthodox.

But the social and political differences between Jews from the former Soviet Union and the communities they joined are generational. The children of the new immigrants see themselves as Israeli, not Russian. Hebrew is their first language. Russia might be part of their heritage but Israeli is their identity. Israeli political parties have a habit of coming and going. Yisrael Beiteinu might have a short shelf life. There is barely any difference any more in terms of education, income, religious observance or political opinions between the children of native-born Israelis and the children of those born in the former Soviet Union.
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Yisrael Beiteinu means ‘Israel our Home’. That notion is blindingly obvious to the generation born here. If the party continues to define itself by its past it will simply cease to exist in the future.

The issues raging within Israeli society are widely debated within the country but, as Hadassa Margolis found out from her ex-friend, there is a general reluctance among many to air their nation’s divisions in public. The Israel Democracy Institute’s 2012 survey showed that a majority of the country’s Jewish population think people should ‘be prohibited from publicly voicing harsh criticism of the state’. Many Israelis think the country is much maligned and misunderstood by the rest of the world, and so there is often a very prickly reaction to any criticism of the state of Israel from outside too. Right-wing Israelis often equate Israel with Judaism and consider an attack on the former to be a veiled attack on the latter. Many in the Jewish diaspora do not see Israel in that way, and they sometimes find themselves subject to the slur ‘self-loathing Jew’.

There is a ‘commonly held belief that Israel has a “hasbara problem”, especially when it comes to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict,’ said a report published by the Israeli think tank Molad. ‘Hasbara’ is Hebrew for public diplomacy. People in Israel and parts of the Jewish diaspora think the Israeli government just isn’t good enough and doesn’t try hard enough to make the country’s case to the outside world. Not that individuals don’t try. A diplomat’s wife told me over lunch one day in Jerusalem how minutes before she was wheeled into the operating theatre for a Caesarean section at a local hospital her surgeon asked her why her country’s policies were so negative towards Israel.

In fact the Molad report concludes that ‘the “hasbara problem” is a myth that diverts focus from Israel’s real problems which are the results of problematic policy, not flawed hasbara of appropriate policy.’
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Many Israelis I’ve met though would disagree with that conclusion, because they perceive widespread but subtle anti-Semitism in the outside world.

At the root of this is a fear about the survival of the Jewish nation. David and Yoel believe this fear is because the Zionist majority have put their faith in men, not God, to protect them. Either way that fear is very real. It is hidden behind what many outsiders, even Jews who have made aliyah, find to be an often belligerent and aggressive society to live in.

In my first month here, while I was getting my accreditation from the Government Press Office I got an unprompted diatribe from an Israeli official who had recently moved from England. He waxed lyrical about his love of Zionism and how he would take up arms against the UK if necessary because he felt like this was really his home. Then he asked me how I was finding it. I almost finished saying something polite before he jumped in with: ‘But doesn’t the driving send you mad? And the pushing in?’ And then he launched into another even longer diatribe about all the things about Israel that offended his very English sensibilities.

But he knew why he was here. It wasn’t just his politics. Despite the neighbourhood, the Jews who live in Israel generally feel safe. Their fear is very real, because it is founded on the world’s worst atrocity. It has seeped into their bones. They feel safe in Israel because after generations of persecution their continued existence as a people is no longer entrusted to the goodness of others. They are responsible for their own security and their own survival. It is not a polite society, but people believe that when the chips are down the stranger born in another land who just barged past them in the bread queue would, in a war, protect them and their state with his life. I once asked one of my Israeli colleagues to explain to me the significance of a particular Jewish festival. ‘It’s basically like all the others,’ he said. ‘They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!’

The world has tended not to understand modern Israel because it has looked at it through the prism of the conflict with the Palestinians. The Israelis do not see their society in that way any more. The last election was fought on issues about Israel’s relationship with itself, not with the Palestinians. Like the rest of the New Middle East, God and the role of religion in society and politics is at the heart of the debate in Israel too. Israel is becoming more religious and more nationalist, and those two things put it at risk of becoming less democratic. When it comes to the issue the outside world cares about, the peace process, Israel has swung sharply to the right, and it is not going to swing back again.

The areligious European Zionists were needed to create the state of Israel, but they no longer define it. They were an aberration. Israel is a Middle Eastern country. It is not a little piece of Europe that has somehow found itself in the wrong place. One day the prime minister of Israel may look and think more like Mr Klausner than Mr Netanyahu. The coming years will see internal struggles in Israel which, while not as violent as those with the Palestinians, will be equally passionate. Israel has radically changed, is still radically changing, and the world has not caught up with that fact yet. When it does it can start dealing with Israel as it is and not as it used to be. The nation that must face up to the fact first, as it struggles with all the other profound changes in the Middle East, is America.

5

America’s Pillars of Sand

My ears were working perfectly so I could hear him screaming: ‘Made in the US, look! Made in the US.’ It was my eyes that were having trouble focusing on the metal tube he was holding in his hand. I simply don’t understand why tear-gas canisters have their country of origin proudly emblazoned upon them. It’s like saying: ‘This vomit-inducing moment was brought to you by Uncle Sam. Now you have a nice day!’ During the Egyptian revolution the experience was courtesy of Combined Tactical Systems from Jamestown, Pennsylvania. The state motto is ‘Virtue, Liberty and Independence’, though their export wasn’t fostering any of those things on 28 January 2011, the ‘Day of Rage’. Instead the 6230 ‘pyrotechnic grenade’ had been ‘discharging smoke and irritant agents through multiple emission ports’. As it was doing so, on TV the chief American diplomat, Hillary Clinton, was saying: ‘We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protestors’.
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These solemn words were being spoken as I joined others spluttering in the backstreets of Cairo from American-made tear gas, paid for by American military aid, which was playing a big role in the use of that violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters.

When you live in the Middle East it is not hard to understand why people here often find the things America says at odds with the things America does. And in ‘the timeless city of Cairo’ in particular, the United States just couldn’t get its message right. It was here that a US president sent his secretary of state to apologise to the Arab world for the past actions of almost every American administration since the Second World War. Then the current American president came personally to issue another apology, this time for the administration that had delivered the last one.

On the day the Egyptian people began their revolution, Secretary of State Clinton announced: ‘our assessment is that the Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.’
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She could be forgiven for the beginning of that statement, because not even the protesters believed then that they would bring the regime down. But there was absolutely nothing in the three decades of Mubarak’s rule to suggest that he might have any intention whatsoever of responding to the cry for freedom with anything other than another volley of American-made tear gas. It was disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Or perhaps it was the moment America’s old and decrepit foreign policy in the Middle East found itself caught in the headlights, just before the juggernaut driven by a generation of young Arab youths turned it into roadkill. The US has not yet found a replacement.

‘We don’t have a new foreign policy for the new Middle East,’ Anne-Marie Slaughter told me. She was the Obama administration’s director of Policy Planning at the State Department from January 2009 until February 2011. ‘We have a set of principles that are guiding us . . . but I do not think we have taken the full measure of the historical turn and developed a coherent policy across the region, and that may just be impossible.’ It may be impossible because the next foreign policy will never again be able to assume the luxury of the ‘perverse simplicity’ of dealing with dictators.