«Pon tu bandera a media asta, / recuerdo. / A media asta / el día de hoy y siempre». En la penumbra de la biblioteca y en voz alta, releo el Shibbolethde un Paul Celan siempre acosado por la fuga de muerte y humo que danza sobre la música más alta o la más alta poesía. Y es Israel lo que retorna en la herida enigmática del poeta. Y en la mía, y en la de cualquier hombre de nuestro siglo que no apueste por ser asesino o imbécil. No es política. Es la áspera teología de un ateo, que trata de entender el absoluto, sin ceder a sentimiento ni afecto. Y sin en nada creer. Y nada amar, a no ser clandestinamente. Ni ante nada aceptar nunca cerrar los ojos. Por más que puedan doler. Y pueden mucho.

Todo el que por allí pasó evoca la luz de Jerusalén como un prodigio de pureza geométrica. A mí me desasosiega. Las pocas veces que estuve en la Ciudad fue por obligación y me sentí extranjero; más aún que en cualquier otro sitio, que ya es mucho. Hay demasiados dioses que, bajo ese cielo de cristal tallado, sobrevuelan la explanada, que unos llaman del Templo y otros de las Mezquitas. Y todos ellos son el Dios único que a todo otro excluye. A los otros Dioses únicos, antes que a todo. A quien en nada cree creer, ese fuego cruzado le es fatal. Infaliblemente. Y huye de tal angustia lo antes que puede. Como debiera haber huido Rilke del ángel aquel de las Elegías de Duino, ángel demasiado bello para no ser homicida. Así fue para mí. Pero no es cosa mía. Sólo. Los filósofos somos los últimos huérfanos del politeísmo. Uno solo de esos Dioses únicos nos aniquilaría, al modo en que aniquila la excesiva poética del ángel rilkeano. La inmortal guerra a muerte de los tres únicos hace, a quien la mira a los ojos, naufragar en la melancolía de no haber entendido, al cabo, que el saber nada cura. Tanto pensar, para esto.

Cualquier rincón umbrío, cualquier calleja, la más mezquina plazuela que el sol inunda, pueden pedir cuentas al descreído. Se las piden. Mucho más que las gentes, al cabo presas de su cortesía, las piedras, arrumbadas o en perfecta sintaxis, hablan todas de lo mismo: perseveramos. Nosotras. Y aquellos que, en nosotras, ponen un sentido al mundo: aunque sea un sentido horrible. La ingenua pretensión de dejar en el umbral de lo humano toda creencia, que hirió al griego inventor de esa disciplina vuestra, en la cual se soñaba descifrar «el estupor ante lo uno y lo múltiple», es tan vana cuanto las fantasías de mundos luminosos que trajeron el infierno en el siglo veinte, sin siquiera el consuelo con el cual nosotras, piedras sagradas, revestimos a quienes por fidelidad nuestra mueren, matan.

A ninguna de esas fidelidades al absoluto yo sobreviviría. No puedo amar, pues, a sus oficiantes. Soy impermeable al masoquismo, y lo sacrificial me conmueve tan sólo en literatura. En lo real me desasosiega. Pero a ningún discípulo, hoy, de San Pablo se le va a ocurrir —salvo excepción psiquiátrica— venir a exigirme que retire del Areópago mis dioses precarios o bien perezca. Pero a ningún estudioso talmúdico va a turbarle el espíritu —salvo excepción psiquiátrica— conversar sobre lo en-sof con un educado discípulo del Epicuro al cual la Misnácondena a ser aniquilado. Jerusalén, como Roma, es hoy eso: la exigencia de que a nadie se imponga una creencia; de que a nadie —y eso es lo que de verdad importa— le sea arrebatada una no-creencia. Eso separa a los dos primeros monoteísmos del tercero. Y de la barbarie. Que hoy lo amenaza todo. Y, frente a esa barbarie, se dibuja la línea última de resistencia que Maurice Blanchot exige a aquel que escribe, a aquel que, «en la retaguardia de la política, no se aparta ni se retira, sino que trata de mantener esa distancia y ese impulso de la retirada para instalarse en ella (precaria instalación), como un centinela que no estuviese allí más que para vigilar, mantenerse despierto».

¿Amo a Israel? Ni más ni menos que a otro sitio. O que a ninguno. Nadie ama sinceramente a un país. Ni siquiera al suyo: menos que a ninguno al suyo. Ama, a veces, muy pocas, a las ciudades. En las que fue feliz o desdichado: que, en la vida de un hombre, es diferencia escasa. En cuya luz deseó morir o ser eterno; no mortal, en todo caso. Ciudades, las más de veces leídas, porque es en la escritura sólo en donde las ciudades revisten la luz cegadora de lo sagrado. No amo a Israel. Como no amo casi nada. Sé —y saber tiene más peso que amar alguno, por intenso que ese amar sea— a Israel una de las muy pocas apuestas necesarias del que fue mi siglo. Y puede que la única moralmente irrenunciable. Sé que hay verdad primordial en las líneas de Emil Ludwig Fackenheim que vaticinan cómo «en la historia en la que Auschwitz es accidental Dios ha muerto, y en la historia en la que es esencial está vivo»; aunque sea con la paradójica vida moral del pensar ateo. Y sé que toda batalla para evitar que Israel sea destruido es justa. Y que, en esa batalla, contará conmigo. Sin que haya en esa apuesta mía generosidad alguna. Puro egoísmo necesario: la fría certeza de que Israel es nosotros, hombres libres.

No amo a Israel. Amo la razón. Y si Israel es la razón hoy en el Cercano Oriente, enhorabuena. Aunque esa razón haya tenido que pagar el precio más horrible que haya pagado jamás pueblo alguno: la Shoá, el proyecto bien planificado de la aniquilación completa durante el nazismo. Y el no creyente que soy piensa, como el rabino, que toda la historia contemporánea se juega en esa atroz paradoja: que «el marco midrásico ha sido destrozado para siempre por Auschwitz, que el Dios de la historia ha muerto». Y que, después de Auschwitz, judíos somos todos. Todos los que, aún hoy y a pesar de todo el peso aplastante de nuestro siglo y contra él, nos llamamos libres. «Ni un solo francés —escribía Jean-Paul Sartre en 1946— estará seguro mientras un solo judío, en Francia y en el mundo entero, pueda temer por su vida». Donde Sartre escribe «francés» nosotros escribimos «hombre»; donde Francia, mundo. Es todo. Y hoy en Jerusalén se juega ese envite.

No hay otra teología posible, después de Auschwitz, que no sea esa lucha sin esperanza contra el mal que renace siempre. Israel cifra esa lucha. Lo siento, pero no es cuestión de afectos. El día en el que Israel caiga, habremos caído todos. Como cayó Centroeuropa el día en el cual la solución final fue una hipótesis factible. Eli Wiesel lo da en el cruel relato del niño que, en la formación del campo de exterminio, ante los cuerpos de los tres judíos que acaban de ser ahorcados por los SS frente a sus compañeros de martirio, pregunta: «¿Dónde está Dios? ¿Dónde está?» Y una voz, tras él, susurra: «¿Que dónde está? Está aquí, colgando de esa horca». En esa respuesta cabe, con precisión exquisita, el enigma ineluctable del absoluto: el único que tiene valor para el que piensa.

Existiremos como hombres mientras Israel exista. Tal ha sido, tal es, la indigente certeza de un politeísta, anclado en sus anacronías griegas, que en nada cree y que nada espera. Y que desea ya tan pocas cosas. No es política, desde luego. Es la áspera teología de un ateo, que trata de entender el absoluto, sin ceder a sentimiento ni afecto. Y sin en nada creer. Y nada amar, a no ser clandestinamente. Ni, ante nada, aceptar nunca cerrar los ojos. Que, en la penumbra de la biblioteca y en voz alta, relee el Shibbolethde un Paul Celan siempre acosado por la fuga de muerte y humo que danza sobre la música más alta o la más alta poesía: «Pon tu bandera a media asta, / recuerdo. / A media asta / el día de hoy y siempre».

In the end it will come down to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His senior officials will make their cases, but he alone will have to make one of the most critical decisions inIsrael’s history: whether to attackIran’s nuclear program. I do not envy him.

There has been much media speculation lately about possible Israeli military action, largely from those who have never borne the crushing weight of momentous national decisions. Israel has made many controversial decisions over the decades, some mistaken. One thing that cannot be said is that it has taken major military action lightly. Rarely if ever have the stakes been higher.

The debate in Israel over the Iranian nuclear threat is narrow but critical nonetheless. No one in Israel disputes that a nuclear Iran would pose a dire threat to its security and that Israel should go to great lengths to prevent this from happening. Some believe that Iran is an extremist but essentially rational actor, and can thus be deterred. Others believe the threat to be truly existential — that Iran’s theocratic commitment to Israel’s destruction may lead it to take unimaginable steps and risks — and thus that Israel must do everything it can to prevent that.

Neither side can afford to be wrong. Netanyahu, by all indications of the existentialist mind-set, certainly cannot.

In this case, as in no other, it behooves critics of Israel generally and Netanyahu specifically to approach the issue with caution and humility. If one can legitimately argue whether a nuclear Iran truly is an existential threat to Israel, Netanyahu’s perception of it as such is sincere.

Imagine him alone in his office, prior to the final decision: on the one hand, a threat to Israel’s very existence, and the Jewish people have already undergone one Holocaust in recent history. Israel was established so that the Jewish people would never again face the threat of extermination. Never again.

Conversely, the consequences of acting are also potentially dire, even assuming a successful attack. Iran already has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb, and an attack could set the program back by no more than a few years — of value in itself but not a solution.

Moreover, according to Israeli estimates, Iran has hundreds of Shahab missiles capable of striking Israel. And along with Syria, Iran has provided Hezbollah with an almost unfathomable arsenal of more than 50,000 rockets, designed precisely for this scenario, which can blanket all of Israel from Lebanon.

There is no reason to believe that Hezbollah will not use this arsenal. During the 2006 Lebanon war, Hezbollah fired 4,000 rockets at Israel, about one-third of its 13,000-missile arsenal at the time; if it were to employ a similar ratio today — and it could be far larger — the results would cause a level of destruction Israel has never before experienced. Hamas too has a large rocket arsenal in waiting, but “just” thousands.

Furthermore, the destabilization of the regimes in Egypt and Syria, following the Arab Spring, greatly increases the dangers that they too might be drawn into the confrontation. Syria, because it may have an interest in deflecting domestic unrest by focusing public attention on an external enemy. Egypt, because the new Islamist-based government will, at very best, be far less committed to peace with Israel. An explosion of popular fury on the Egyptian and Arab street may force it to act.

The international community, which is finally beginning to take serious measures to deal with the Iranian threat — nearly 20 years after Israel and the U.S. first began warning of it — will undoubtedly respond harshly to an Israeli action and in some cases even impose sanctions. The Obama administration has made clear that it firmly opposes military action, although its own measures have failed to address the threat. Israel has lived with international recriminations before, but it cannot afford an overly severe response from the U.S., its one major ally, on whom it would be even more dependent in a post-attack period.

So herein lies the dilemma: a potential risk to the nation’s existence versus the uncertain results of military action, the likelihood of a devastating Iranian/Hezbollah response, the risk of an end to the peace with Egypt and even a military confrontation and regional war, severe international opprobrium and a partial rift with the United States.

Netanyahu alone will have to make the final decision. May he choose wisely.

Aparentemente, la situación política en Israel es tranquila: tres años de gobierno de Beniamin Netanyahu gracias a una coalición de partidos no muy grande pero estable. Al menos, eso demuestra el hecho de que la mitad de sus miembros se siente en los consejos de ministros del mayor gobierno de Israel en toda su historia y no tengan prisa en abandonarlo. Estamos hablando de un gobierno, formado por personas de la derecha conservadora y por religiosos ultraortodoxos, con un elemento en común: la falta de iniciativa en cualquier terreno. Ehud Barak, que abandonó el Partido Laborista, siendo él el líder, para formar junto con cinco diputados un partido llamado Independencia, no obtendría ahora –según las encuestas– ni un solo diputado. Así que depende de la buena voluntad del primer ministro Netanyahu, que le otorgó cuatro ministerios a su partido. Pero si mañana cayera el Gobierno actual, el partido Independencia pasaría a la historia.

Sin embargo, pese a este aspecto de estabilidad, lo cierto es que pronto puede darse un cambio político en Israel. El causante sin duda es el propio Netanyahu, que queriendo aprovechar su popularidad en su partido ha decidido promover unas primarias para elegir al líder y futuro candidato para las próximas elecciones. Su idea era plantear ahora las primarias y posponer las elecciones generales para noviembre del año 2013. Pero las cosas no van como se esperaba. Si bien ha conseguido convencer a su partido para que dentro de unas semanas se celebren las primarias en el Likud y tener así la victoria asegurada, su decisión ha hecho que en Israel ya se haya generado un ambiente preelectoral.

El popular periodista Yair Lapid ha decidido dejar la televisión para anunciar que se lanza al mundo de la política. Las encuestas ya le dan hasta 15 escaños de los 120 que componen el Parlamento israelí. Sus votantes, en su mayoría, vendrían del partido Kadima, fundado por el ex primer ministro Ariel Sharon y que ganó las elecciones en el año 2006 bajo el liderazgo de Ehud Olmert, aunque en el año 2009 ya no volvió a ganar cuando se presentó con la candidatura de Tzipi Livni.

A raíz de la entrada de Yair Lapid en el ruedo político, otras personalidades han anunciado que se suman a distintos partidos de la oposición de cara a las próximas elecciones generales. Y pronto Arieh Deri, el que fuera líder del partido religioso Shas, volverá a la política tras haber estado en la cárcel por corrupción. Para mi pesar, la ley israelí permite a aquellos que han cumplido condena por este delito poder presentarse a diputado en el Parlamento pasados siete años.

Deri es una de las personas más interesantes y odiadas dentro de la política israelí. Es un hombre de ideas políticas moderadas que ayudó a Yitzhak Rabin a obtener mayoría en el Parlamento para aprobar los acuerdos de Oslo, y que podría sumarse a una coalición de centroizquierda, en caso de fundar un nuevo partido suponiendo que su antigua formación no le permitiese presentarse como candidato a primer ministro. A diferencia de Lapid, que representa más al sector de centroizquierda, Deri representa al sector de centroderecha en la sociedad israelí, y podría sumarse a una coalición dispuesta a llegar a un acuerdo con los palestinos sobre la base de los parámetros de Clinton y la Iniciativa de Ginebra.

Beniamin Netanyahu va a hacer todo lo posible para que las elecciones sean dentro de dos años, pero es difícil que lo consiga, ya que en las últimas semanas en Israel se respira un ambiente preelectoral y eso implica que los miembros de la coalición de gobierno van a intentar desmarcarse para encauzar su propia campaña electoral y no parecer que se esconden bajo la sombra del partido que lidera el Gobierno.

El primer partido candidato a abandonar la coalición es el liderado por el ministro de Exteriores, Avigdor Lieberman, pero también el Shas puede hacer lo mismo y así, desde la oposición, prepararse para la doble batalla: contra el Likud de Netanyahu y contra el partido que forme su antiguo líder, Arieh Deri. Y desde el momento en que uno de estos partidos deje la coalición, el Likud se quedaría en minoría y habría, por tanto, que adelantar las elecciones. En definitiva, ya se ha abierto la veda.

Is it possible for a religious demand for modesty to be about anything other than men controlling women’s bodies? From recent events in Israel, it would certainly seem that it is not.

Last month, an innocent, modestly dressed 8-year-old girl, Naama Margolese, living in Beit Shemesh, described being spat on and vilified by religious extremists — all men — who believed that she did not dress modestly enough while walking past them to the religious school she attends. And more and more, public buses in Israel are enforcing gender segregation imposed by ultra-Orthodox riders in and near their neighborhoods. Woe to the girl or woman who refuses to move to the back of the bus.

This is part of a larger battle being waged in Israel between the ultra-Orthodox and the rest of Israeli society over women’s place in society, over their very right to have a visible presence and to participate in the public sphere.

What is behind these deeply disturbing events? We are told that they arise from a religious concern about modesty, that women must be covered and sequestered so that men do not have improper sexual thoughts. It seems, then, that a religious tenet that begins with men’s sexual thoughts ends with men controlling women’s bodies.

This is not a problem unique to Judaism. But the Talmud, the basis for Jewish law, offers a perhaps surprising answer: It places the responsibility for controlling men’s licentious thoughts about women squarely on the men.

Put more plainly, the Talmud says: It’s your problem, sir; not hers.

The ultra-Orthodox men in Israel who are exerting control over women claim that they are honoring women. In effect they are saying: We do not treat women as sex objects as you in Western society do. Our women are about more than their bodies, and that is why their bodies must be fully covered.

In fact, though, their actions objectify and hyper-sexualize women. Think about it: By saying that all women must hide their bodies, they are saying that every woman is an object who can stir a man’s sexual thoughts. Thus, every woman who passes their field of vision is sized up on the basis of how much of her body is covered. She is not seen as a complete person, only as a potential inducement to sin.

Of course, once you judge a female human being only through a man’s sexualized imagination, you can turn even a modest 8-year-old girl into a seductress and a prostitute.

At heart, we are talking about a blame-the-victim mentality. It shifts the responsibility of managing a man’s sexual urges from himself to every woman he may or may not encounter. It is a cousin to the mentality behind the claim, “She was asking for it.”

So the responsibility is now on the women. To protect men from their sexual thoughts, women must remove their femininity from their public presence, ridding themselves of even the smallest evidence of their own sexuality.

All of this is done in the name of the Torah and Jewish law.

But it’s actually a complete perversion. The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men.

It is forbidden for a man to gaze sexually at a woman, whether beautiful or ugly, married or unmarried, says the Talmud. Later Talmudic rabbis extended this ban even to “her smallest finger” and “her brightly colored clothing — even if they are drying on the wall.”

To make these the woman’s responsibility is to demand that Jewish women cover their hands, and that they not dry their clothes in public. No one has ever said this. At least not yet.

The Talmud tells the religious man, in effect: If you have a problem, you deal with it. It is the male gaze — the way men look at women — that needs to be desexualized, not women in public. The power to make sure men don’t see women as objects of sexual gratification lies within men’s — and only men’s — control.

Jewish tradition teaches men and women alike that they should be modest in their dress. But modesty is not defined by, or even primarily about, how much of one’s body is covered. It is about comportment and behavior. It is about recognizing that one need not be the center of attention. It is about embodying the prophet Micah’s call for modesty: learning “to walk humbly with your God.”

Eight-year-old Naama could teach her attackers a thing or two about modesty.

The debate over how to handle Iran’s nuclear program is notable for its gloom and doom. Many people assume that Israel must choose between letting Iran develop nuclear weapons or attacking before it gets the bomb. But this is a false choice. There is a third option: working toward a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. And it is more feasible than most assume.

Attacking Iran might set its nuclear program back a few years, but it will most likely encourage Iran to aggressively seek — and probably develop — nuclear weapons. Slowing Iran down has some value, but the costs are high and the risks even greater. Iran would almost certainly retaliate, leading to all-out war at a time when Israel is still at odds with various Arab countries, and its relations with Turkey are tense.

Many hawks who argue for war believe that Iran poses an “existential threat” to Israel. They assume Iran is insensitive to the logic of nuclear deterrence and would be prepared to use nuclear weapons without fear of the consequences (which could include killing millions of Palestinians and the loss of millions of Iranian civilians from an inevitable Israeli retaliation). And even if Israel strikes, Iran is still likely to acquire nuclear weapons eventually and would then be even more inclined to use them.

Despite all the talk of an “existential threat,” less than half of Israelis support a strike on Iran. According to our November poll, carried out in cooperation with the Dahaf Institute in Israel, only 43 percent of Israeli Jews support a military strike on Iran — even though 90 percent of them think that Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.

Most important, when asked whether it would be better for both Israel and Iran to have the bomb, or for neither to have it, 65 percent of Israeli Jews said neither. And a remarkable 64 percent favored the idea of a nuclear-free zone, even when it was explained that this would mean Israel giving up its nuclear weapons.

The Israeli public also seems willing to move away from a secretive nuclear policy toward greater openness about Israel’s nuclear facilities. Sixty percent of respondents favored “a system of full international inspections” of all nuclear facilities, including Israel’s and Iran’s, as a step toward regional disarmament.

If Israel’s nuclear program were to become part of the equation, it would be a game-changer. Iran has until now effectively accused the West of employing a double standard because it does not demand Israeli disarmament, earning it many fans across the Arab world.

And a nuclear-free zone may be hard for Iran to refuse. Iranian diplomats have said they would be open to an intrusive role for the United Nations if it accepted Iran’s right to enrich uranium for energy production — not to the higher levels necessary for weapons. And a 2007 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that the Iranian people would favor such a deal.

We cannot take what Iranian officials say at face value, but an international push for a nuclear-free Middle East would publicly test them. And most Arab leaders would rather not start down the nuclear path — a real risk if Iran gets the bomb — and have therefore welcomed the proposal of a nuclear-free zone.

Some Israeli officials may also take the idea seriously. As Avner Cohen’s recent book “The Worst-Kept Secret” shows, Israel’s policy of “opacity” — not acknowledging having nuclear weapons while letting everyone know it does — has existed since 1969, but is now becoming outdated. Indeed, no one outside Israel today sees any ambiguity about the fact that Israel possesses a large nuclear arsenal.

Although Israeli leaders have in the past expressed openness to the idea of a nuclear-free zone, they have always insisted that there must first be peace between Israel and its neighbors.

But the stalemate with Iran could actually delay or prevent peace in the region. As the former Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan, argued earlier this month, Israel’s current stance might actually accelerate Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and encourage Arab states to follow suit. Moreover, talk of an “existential threat” projects Israel as weak, hurts its morale, and reduces its foreign policy options. This helps explain why three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.

While full elimination of nuclear weapons is improbable without peace, starting the inevitably long and arduous process of negotiations toward that end is vital.

Given that Israelis overwhelmingly believe that Iran is on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons and several security experts have begun to question current policy, there is now an opportunity for a genuine debate on the real choices: relying on cold-war-style “mutual assured destruction” once Iran develops nuclear weapons or pursuing a path toward a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East, with a chance that Iran — and Arabs — will never develop the bomb at all.

There should be no illusions that successfully negotiating a path toward regional nuclear disarmament will be easy. But the mere conversation could transform a debate that at present is stuck between two undesirable options: an Iranian bomb or war.

Cuando asumí el puesto de embajador israelí en Suráfrica, en 1992, la historia estaba ya cambiando en favor de la democracia. Sin embargo, seguían en vigor numerosas leyes del apartheid, aunque ya no se aplicaban de forma estricta. Recuerdo, en especial, las leyes concebidas para incapacitar a la sociedad civil, destruir las organizaciones de la comunidad y sofocar los derechos humanos. Entre ellas estaban las que impedían la llegada de fondos a las organizaciones de derechos humanos. Recuerdo lo absurdo que me pareció todo eso en aquel momento.

Hoy, esos recuerdos han vuelto a agolparse. Las leyes que están a punto de aprobarse en la Knesset son increíblemente parecidas a las de la Suráfrica del apartheid. El Comité Ministerial Legislativo ha aprobado unas enmiendas que pretende restringir los fondos de otros Estados destinados a grupos locales de derechos humanos. La puesta en práctica de esta ley congelaría la democracia en Israel y lo que queda de nuestra sociedad.

En Suráfrica, el proceso empezó con la Comisión Schlebusch de Investigación sobre Ciertas Organizaciones. La diputada israelí Kirshenbaum propuso hace poco un comité similar para “investigar las finanzas y la legitimidad de las organizaciones israelíes de derechos humanos”. Ese suele ser el comienzo. Lo siguiente que hizo el Parlamento surafricano fue aprobar la Ley de Organizaciones Afectadas, cuyo fin era “impedir la injerencia de países extranjeros en el escenario político interno” y “la ayuda económica extranjera para promover cualquier opinión concreta”. El objetivo era cualquier grupo que se considerase una “organización afectada”. Las enmiendas israelíes utilizan un lenguaje idéntico, al hablar de “asociaciones restringidas”.

La ley surafricana, al menos, ofrecía ciertas garantías procesales, porque no se podía calificar a un grupo de “organización afectada” mientras no lo declarase el presidente del Estado, después de una investigación por un tribunal de tres magistrados. La ley propuesta en Israel no prevé ninguna garantía procesal equivalente. Se limita a declarar que “una asociación restringida no recibirá donaciones de una entidad estatal extranjera”. Eso incluye cualquier grupo que se niegue a cumplir cualquier parte del servicio militar o promueva cualquier tipo de boicot.

El peligro de intentar aislar un país del resto del mundo es algo que entendía muy bien la única voz de la conciencia en el Parlamento surafricano, una mujer judía y amiga personal, Helen Suzman, que dijo: “Suráfrica está cayendo bajo el control de un grupo cada vez más amplio de hombres secretos, que llevan a cabo investigaciones e informes secretos”. Pero un parlamentario nacionalista alegó que la ley era necesaria para bloquear el dinero destinado a estudiantes que “se alinean con los negros”. La táctica del miedo funcionó y el proyecto fue aprobado.

Igual que en Israel, la ley surafricana no estaba dirigida a grupos involucrados en actividades violentas o ilegales. Sus objetivos eran las voces de la conciencia incansables que se habían convertido en un problema para el régimen. El ministro de Justicia incluyó entre las organizaciones afectadas a la Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Surafricanos, representantes oficiales de todos los universitarios. “Lo que se ataca”, declararon los estudiantes, “es el derecho de los jóvenes a definir lo que está mal en la sociedad y emprender programas creativos para contrarrestar sus problemas y abrir la puerta a la posibilidad de un futuro positivo”.

En su defensa de la Ley de Recaudación de Fondos de 1978, el ministro de Justicia, Jimmy Kruger, dijo que “la ley se utilizará para tomar medidas contra las actividades de recogida de fondos dirigidas a debilitar la autoridad o amenazar la seguridad del Estado”, y dijo que su Gobierno sabía que llegaba a Suráfrica mucho dinero extranjero “destinado a garantizar nuestra destrucción”.

Nuestros políticos israelíes justifican sus actos con idénticos temores. El fundamento de la Ley Kirshenbaum-Akunis es que “unas organizaciones que suelen calificarse a sí mismas de organizaciones de derechos humanos”, en realidad, tienen “el único propósito de hacer daño y alterar el discurso político de Israel desde dentro”. Sin embargo, la verdad es que las organizaciones que se verán más afectadas son las que luchan para preservar lo que queda de la democracia israelí y la interpretación progresista de la declaración de independencia.

Mi experiencia en Suráfrica me enseñó que esas leyes acaban por fracasar. Fracasan porque un país democrático no puede aislarse del mundo sin destruirse a sí mismo. La ley pretende proteger la imagen pública de Israel, pero lo que consigue es que la imagen pública de Israel quede dañada. La aplicación de una ley así resta legitimidad a Israel y pone más de relieve la importancia de esas organizaciones.

Esta ley fracasará porque matar al mensajero no sirve de nada. El mundo conoce la ocupación. Las oleadas de crítica e indignación por ese crimen pasarán por encima de cualquier barrera que pretendamos erigir. Es necesario que Europa y el resto de la comunidad internacional dejen claro a Israel que el mundo no va a dejar de ayudar a los israelíes que luchan para encontrar una solución basada en los derechos humanos y la justicia.

Advocates of strong U.S.-Israel relations have aimed for decades to keep Israel from being a divisive issue in American politics. Yet Israel is one of very few foreign policy issues already rating attention in the 2012 presidential election.

Republican candidates recently staked their claim to the “pro-Israel” mantle in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. President Obama made his case on Friday to 6,000 Reform Jews gathered in Washington.

Studiously avoiding talk of peace, two states or America’s interest in the diplomatic resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most Republican candidates express unqualified support for Israeli government policy and unprecedented backing for Israeli settlement beyond the pre-1967 Green Line.

Pushed by a vibrant echo chamber of pundits and activists, they are seeking to claim the term “pro-Israel” as the exclusive property of the political right. In doing so, they are breaking new ground. Their agenda is not to ensure bipartisan support for aid to Israel or nurturing U.S.-Israeli ties based on shared interests and values.

Rather, they seek political advantage in labeling as “anti-Israel” those who disagree with their views, particularly those who promote a more balanced U.S. policy in the Middle East — including Obama.

Under this view, the only way to be truly “pro-Israel” is to sign on to the policy agenda of an Israeli government led by a right-of-center prime minister and even further right coalition.

Unfortunately, there is not enough debate over what it means to be “pro-Israel” and little frank discussion of the fundamental, even existential, choice facing Israel and the United States at a strategic fork in the road.

Down one path, Israel maintains the status quo. Settlements beyond the Green Line continue to expand, and doubts regarding the existence of a true partner for peace are used to justify continued procrastination in taking meaningful steps toward a two-state solution.

All too quickly on this path it will become clear that there no longer is a Green Line. Rather, there will be one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean left to grapple with how to remain a democratic, Jewish nation when a majority of the people living there are not Jewish.

The other choice for Israel is to proactively take bold, even risky, steps to establish a state of Palestine based on the pre-1967 lines with land swaps.

Many of Israel’s closest friends — including strong advocates of the U.S.-Israel relationship from both parties — understand that it must choose this latter path because its long-term survival and security are at risk without the creation of a Palestinian state.

The United States desperately needs to have a serious debate over which path best promotes its interests and those of Israel.

U.S. politicians also need to choose. Will they opt to seem pro-Israel to a small number of the loudest voices on the far right, or will they choose to actually be pro-Israel by advocating bold leadership and giving Israel the support it needs to take necessary risks?

Pro-Israel hawks too often duck the merits of the question by attacking critics of Israel’s present policies as “anti-Israel” or introducing the idea that anti-Semitism motivates those who point out that Israel’s own actions affect international attitudes toward it and the conflict.

This approach neither builds support for Israel over time nor enhances its long-term odds of survival.

To be pro-Israel in the 21st century is to recognize that both Jews and Palestinians have a right to a national homeland and that the route to peace and security is through an agreement to live in two states of their own.

Not so long ago, this vision sported bipartisan consensus. Every president since 1967 has opposed settlements and supported a democratic Israel.

The trajectory of U.S. policy since the late 1980s has been clear. President George H.W. Bush launched the Madrid “land for peace” talks. President Bill Clinton set out more explicit parameters for territorial division. President George W. Bush was proud to be the first president to explicitly call for a Palestinian state.

Yet the current GOP field seems determined to reverse this trend, turning against the very policies necessary to save a democratic and Jewish Israel.

Obama and those who anxiously urge — as friends and allies — that Israel choose the two-state path need to make the case, with vigor, that theirs is the better definition of “pro-Israel.”

Those who oppose this path are the ones breaking the long-term bipartisan consensus in this country. Among Jewish Americans, their views are in the minority. It should be on them to make a reasoned argument why theirs is a better way to be pro-Israel rather than resorting to labeling those who disagree with them as “anti-Israel.”

Silence. Just silence from the U.N. Silence from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. And silence from major media outlets throughout the world.

Imagine for just a moment if this were happening to cities in, say, Texas. Imagine that the citizens of El Paso, Laredo and San Antonio have to stay inside their homes. Schools are closed, businesses are shut and people have to suspend their lives. Not because of some natural disaster or a nuclear or chemical accident, because groups in Mexico have purchased and are firing thousands of deadly missiles at Texans across the border. Sometimes a school is hit, sometimes a grocery store, and every so often someone is killed.

Imagine a similar occurrence in Seattle, Detroit or Cleveland — with rockets raining in from Canada.

Your reaction to this imagined scenario is, no doubt, incredulity. The very thought of terrorists in another country attacking Americans at random is ludicrous. You know the president would immediately order the U.S. military to respond, root out the terrorists and make sure that the Canadian or Mexican governments clearly understood that this behavior would not be tolerated. The United Nations Security Council would immediately condemn this infringement on a country’s sovereignty and the safety of its citizens. The U.N. charter makes a country’s self-defense as legal as it is logical. This is universally understood.

So if it is natural to be outraged and support the defense against terrorists who attack Texas, or England or Russia or China, why is it not natural to support the same for Israel? Since the beginning of October, more than 70 rockets and missiles have rained down on southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, which remains under the control of the Hamas terrorist organization. Last week, Israel’s densely populated northern towns were hit by rockets fired from Lebanon.

Hamas deliberately fires rockets into the heart of Israel’s major cities, which have exploded on playgrounds, near kindergarten classrooms and homes. Last month, a man was killed when a rocket struck his car on his evening commute home. Many more people have been injured. In the last month alone, more than a million Israelis had to stay home from work and more than 200,000 students were unable to attend school. You don’t read about this because if it’s covered at all, it’s buried in the back pages of newspapers.

Although these horrific attacks should appall good people everywhere, not one word of condemnation has come from the Security Council in the United Nations. Peace activists that regularly criticize my country are silent on this one as well.

Underlying the violence that continues to emanate from Gaza is a deeply rooted culture of incitement. Last month, would-be Palestinian suicide bomber Wafa al-Biss was released from prison as part of an exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. Al-Biss offered a breathtaking challenge to cheering schoolchildren at her Hamas welcome-home rally. She said, “I hope you will walk the same path that we took and God willing, we will see some of you as martyrs.” Her crime? She tried to kill doctors, nurses and patients by blowing herself up in an Israeli hospital. Luckily, she failed to detonate.

These are the poisonous values that are being fed to the next generation of children in Gaza. When Israel looks at children, it sees the future. When Hamas looks at children, it sees suicide bombers and human shields. If only incitement were confined to Gaza. It also pervades the official institutions of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — and many other corners of our region. In schools, mosques and media, generation after generation of children across the Middle East have been taught to hate, vilify and dehumanize Israelis and Jews.

The intolerance all too common in the Middle East finds its way around the world, even entering the halls of the U.N. Today the U.N. is home to a triple standard: one standard for democracies, a different standard for dictatorships and a special, unobtainable standard for Israel. So I pose this ethical question, not from a philosophy course at a great university but based very much in the real world: If it is not OK to fire deadly rockets at the citizens of any of the other 193 member states that make up the United Nations, why is the world silent when the victims are Israelis?

Hace unos meses Dan Merón, uno de los mayores expertos en literatura israelí, me dio un libro que había escrito sobre la obra literaria de Zeev Jabotinsky, el fundador e ideólogo de la derecha israelí. Se le considera el padre espiritual de Menahem Beguin, Isaac Shamir o del actual primer ministro, Netanyahu. Jabotinsky nació en Odessa y era novelista, poeta, traductor, dominaba varias lenguas y era un gran admirador de la cultura italiana, e incluso llegó a simpatizar en los años 20 con el régimen fascista. Era un hombre cosmopolita que logró ganarse muchos adeptos. En 1929 los británicos le impidieron residir en Palestina y murió en la diáspora en 1940. A pesar del tiempo transcurrido, su obra y su figura siguen presentes en la derecha israelí.

Para alguien como yo, que desde su juventud militó en el movimiento socialista, la ideología de Jabotinsky le era muy extraña; pero cuando Dan Merón me contó que en 1934 Jabotinsky y su rival político, David Ben Gurión, se habían reunido varias veces en secreto en la ciudad de Londres, me vino la idea de escribir una obra de teatro acerca de esos encuentros. En esa obra, basada en hechos reales, traté de imaginarme esas citas en las que dos corrientes opuestas dentro del sionismo buscaban alcanzar algunos acuerdos. Pero no fue posible ningún consenso. El movimiento liderado por Jabotinsky se escindió del sionismo y se convirtió en un grupo clandestino que luchó sobre todo contra el mandato británico y, después, contra los árabes.

Por eso, ahora que la derecha manda con soltura en Israel y está aprobando en el Parlamento israelí leyes muy dudosas, antiliberales y cuyo fin es limitar la libertad de expresión y de crítica, aumentar la influencia de la religión en la vida pública y reducir aún más los derechos de la minoría árabe en Israel, resulta sorprendente lo lejos que se hallan los jóvenes de la derecha actual de la filosofía de su fundador, Jabotinsky, que era, al igual que Ben Gurión, un hombre liberal y declaradamente laico. Hoy en día las discusiones entre la izquierda y la derecha tienen como tema central la religión, debido a que la derecha actual en su mayoría está compuesta por personas religiosas o tradicionales para quienes los valores democráticos, en el mejor de los casos, son secundarios, y en el peor de los casos los consideran contrarios a su visión del mundo.

Frente a esto, conviene recordar la radical laicidad del fundador del Estado judío, David Ben Gurión: contrajo matrimonio civil, no celebraba en su casa la Pascua judía y vivía totalmente alejado del mundo de la sinagoga. Lo mismo cabe decir de Jabotinsky: mandó que incinerasen su cadáver, contraviniendo así las normas de la religión judía, no comía kosher, y los héroes de sus novelas eran judíos completamente asimilados. Precisamente esa rotunda laicidad de dos líderes tan importantes dentro del sionismo es lo que hace que sea interesante analizar la discusión política que ambos mantenían en relación con la estrategia que había que adoptar para materializar la idea sionista.

Actualmente, dentro de los partidos de derecha que están representados en el Parlamento israelí se puede distinguir a los políticos veteranos que mantienen la herencia de Jabotinsky y que se oponen a las leyes antidemocráticas que proponen miembros de su propio partido, ajenos a esa herencia y que en su mayoría son religiosos o pertenecen al grupo parlamentario del ministro de Asuntos Exteriores, Libermann, cuya educación soviética hace que los valores democráticos no estén muy claros en su visión del mundo.

¿De qué tipo es Netanyahu? Por un lado, fue educado claramente dentro de la tradición heredada de Jabotinsky; de hecho, su padre fue incluso secretario de Jabotinsky. Pero, por otro lado, Netanyahu es un político sagaz, deseoso de poder, y que con tal de sobrevivir, está dispuesto a favorecer a los grupos religiosos y conservadores, con cada vez más fuerza en Israel, y también en el mundo entero.

Lo que descubrí a través de los documentos que tuve que leer y estudiar para escribir mi obra de teatro es que en el sionismo laico se daban dos visiones distintas sobre el objetivo final. Mientras que para la derecha y la izquierda la meta era establecer un Estado judío con el que normalizar la vida de los judíos con el fin de escapar del fuerte antisemitismo, había un sector dentro de la izquierda, sobre todo el liderado por Ben Gurión, que pretendía llevar a cabo cambios esenciales en la idiosincrasia judía tradicional; de ahí que su visión antirreligiosa fuese tan radical.

Así pues, aunque en mi obra de teatro he querido dar un trato igualitario a esas dos personalidades tan relevantes, no puedo evitar ser más leal a Ben Gurión, cuyo pensamiento, cuarenta años después de su muerte, sigue estando cada vez más vivo en mí y en mis compañeros.

“Clearly, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the yeshiva student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.”

We were sitting in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Acre in Israel. The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria: the daily contest between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as a bridgehead in that struggle, just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster the Jewish hold on land there.

Israeli politicians and pundits labeled the Oct. 3 burning of a mosque in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab community in northern Israel, and the subsequent desecration of Arab graves in Jaffa as a sudden escalation. But they were mistaken.

For several years, extremist West Bank settlers have conducted a campaign of low-level violence against their Palestinian neighbors — destroying property, vandalizing mosques and occasionally injuring people. Such “price tag” attacks, intended to intimidate Palestinians and make Israeli leaders pay a price for enforcing the law against settlers, have become part of the routine of conflict in occupied territory.

Now that conflict is coming home. The words “price tag” spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy.

Indeed, the mosque burning represented the violent, visible edge of a larger change: the ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society.

The agents of this change include veterans of West Bank settlements seeking to establish a presence in shared Jewish-Arab cities in Israel and politicians backing a wave of legislation intended to reduce the rights of Arab citizens.

Jews began settling in occupied territory weeks after the Israeli conquest of 1967. The strategy of settlement was born before Israeli independence in 1948, when Jews and Arabs fought for ethnic dominance over all of British-ruled Palestine. By settling the land, Jews sought to set the borders of the future Jewish state, one acre at a time. Post-1967 settlers, though they saw themselves as a vanguard, were really re-enacting the past, reviving an ethnic wrestling match — this time backed by an existing Jewish state.

Now, the attitudes and methods of West Bank settlement are inevitably leaking back across a border that Israel does not even show on its maps.

In 1996, the former Israeli chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and his son Shmuel Eliyahu established a project to place “core groups” of their followers in depressed Jewish towns. The Eliyahus assigned their first core group to Acre.

Their goal was to bolster religious education and build faith-based charities. The elder Eliyahu, now deceased, was a pre-eminent teacher of the pro-settlement religious right. His son recently gained notoriety for issuing a religious ruling forbidding Jews to rent or sell real estate to non-Jews anywhere in Israel.

The group’s rabbi, Nachshon Cohen, was an alumnus of a yeshiva in the Palestinian city of Hebron. The reason to start the religious project in Acre was “the demographic problem,” Rabbi Cohen explained to me. The mixed city had about 45,000 residents. But Jews were leaving because “people didn’t want to live next to Arabs.” The energy of the new core group, Rabbi Cohen hoped, would keep the town Jewish.

A key part of the settlement project in Acre was the establishment of a hesder yeshiva — a seminary mixing religious study and army service. It, too, would help draw Jews who were both “ideological” and “on a high socio-economic level” into the town, the yeshiva’s director, Boaz Amir,told me. While moving back into Israel and speaking of helping poor Israelis, the settlers were reimporting the message of Jewish-Arab struggle. It was gentrification with a hard ethnonationalist edge.

Acre is just one of the mixed Jewish-Arab cities that religious nationalists have set out to “save.” The Acre core group has grown to 110 families, roughly one percent of the town’s population. Drawing this number of potential settlers to live inside Israel has an insignificant effect on settlement growth in the West Bank.

Yet it broadcasts a message that Israel’s Arab citizens are strangers and opponents rather than members of a shared polity. Rabbi Yossi Stern, the yeshiva’s dean, described the transformation of Acre’s Wolfson neighborhood — a set of Soviet-style apartment blocks built in the 1960s — from a Jewish to a majority-Arab area as “a national sin.” He argued forcefully that Jews should move back into such shifting areas. For Arabs and Jews “to be in the same neighborhood, in the same building … that’s not good,” Rabbi Stern said. Coexistence was clearly not his goal.

Segregation, though, is intrinsically a denial of rights. The countryside throughout the Galilee region of northern Israel is dotted with a form of segregated exurb, the “community settlement.” In each of these exclusive communities, a membership committee vets prospective residents before they can buy homes.

The concept, born in the mid-1970s, originally allowed West Bank settlers to ensure that their neighbors shared their “ideological-social background,” including the same shade of religious commitment. The Likud government that came to power in 1977 applied the model to create Jewish-only bedroom communities in the Galilee and in the Negev.

In 1995, Adel and Iman Ka’adan, an Israeli Arab couple, tried to buy a lot in the community settlement of Katzir. As educated professionals eager to live in a place with good schools for their daughters, they fit the community’s profile. But as Arabs they were ineligible. Their legal battle led to an Israeli Supreme Court decision in 2000 that rejected discrimination against Arab citizens, stressing, “equality is one of the foundational principles of the State of Israel.”

Katzir’s membership committee proceeded to turn the Ka’adans down again on the grounds that they would not fit in socially. It took five more years in court before they were they allowed to buy land there. But last April, the legislature overrode the judiciary, when the Knesset passed a law authorizing community settlements in the Galilee and Negev to reject candidates who did not fit their “social-cultural fabric.” The new law may not hurt the Ka’adans, but other Israeli Arabs will not be able to benefit from their Supreme Court victory.

That law is not an isolated incident. In its current term, the Knesset has sought to turn parliamentary power against democratic principles and Israel’s Arab minority. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party has led the offensive, but other legislators have joined it. Members of Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party co-wrote the community settlements law.

Another law makes it illegal to call for consumer boycotts of products from settlements. Other bills would require loyalty oaths to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to its flag and national anthem. They may never pass but they serve as political theater, labeling the Arab minority as disloyal.

Israel’s courts, human rights groups and large parts of the public have fought back, seeking to preserve the principle of equality and the fragile sense of a shared society. The problem they face is that Israel remains tied to the West Bank and the settlement enterprise. And the ethnic struggle cannot be kept on one side of an unmarked border.

If and when Israel finally leaves the West Bank quagmire behind, it will face a further challenge: the settlers need to be brought home. But allowing them to apply their ideology inside Israel, or to transplant whole communities from the West Bank to the Galilee, will only make the situation worse in Israel proper.

The reason for Israel to reach a two-state solution and withdraw from the West Bank is not only to reach peace with the Palestinians living in what is now occupied territory. It is to ensure that Israel itself remains a democracy — one with a Jewish majority and a guarantee of equality for its Arab minority.

Israel does not need to bring the war from Samaria home. It needs to leave that war in the past.

“In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Yeats in 1914. These words resonate with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who have witnessed dramatic shifts in our relationship to power. After generations of sacrifice and organization, gay people in parts of the world have won protection from discrimination and relationship recognition. But these changes have given rise to a nefarious phenomenon: the co-opting of white gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western Europe and Israel.

In the Netherlands, some Dutch gay people have been drawn to the messages of Geert Wilders, who inherited many followers of the assassinated anti-immigration gay leader Pim Fortuyn, and whose Party for Freedom is now the country’s third largest political party. In Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, the extremist who massacred 77 people in July, cited Bruce Bawer, a gay American writer critical of Muslim immigration, as an influence. The Guardian reported last year that the racist English Defense League had 115 members in its gay wing. The German Lesbian and Gay Federation has issued statements citing Muslim immigrants as enemies of gay people.

These depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States. (The government isn’t alone; an Israeli pornography producer even shot a film, “Men of Israel,” on the site of a former Palestinian village.)

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, the director of Al Qaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”

What makes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies so susceptible to pinkwashing — and its corollary, the tendency among some white gay people to privilege their racial and religious identity, a phenomenon the theorist Jasbir K. Puar has called “homonationalism” — is the emotional legacy of homophobia. Most gay people have experienced oppression in profound ways — in the family; in distorted representations in popular culture; in systematic legal inequality that has only just begun to relent. Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality.

In Israel, gay soldiers and the relative openness of Tel Aviv are incomplete indicators of human rights — just as in America, the expansion of gay rights in some states does not offset human rights violations like mass incarceration. The long-sought realization of some rights for some gays should not blind us to the struggles against racism in Europe and the United States, or to the Palestinians’ insistence on a land to call home.

Tout d’abord, la question me gêne car il est difficile d’expliquer pourquoi un pays, Israël, qui dispose d’un arsenal nucléaire militaire (de 100 à 300 ogives nucléaires) s’arrogerait le droit d’attaquer un autre pays, l’Iran, signataire du Traité de non-prolifération (TNP), parce qu’il le soupçonne d’avoir l’intention de militariser son programme. L’argument qu’Israël n’a pas signé le TNP est peu recevable. Cela crée un véritable déséquilibre stratégique dans la région et que n’a-t-on pas écrit sur le refus des Etats-Unis de ratifier le traité de Kyoto alors qu’ils sont un des principaux pollueurs de la planète.

Par ailleurs, je ne suis pas certain que les autorités israéliennes aient vraiment l’intention d’attaquer l’Iran. Il s’agit plutôt d’une stratégie de la menace qui vise à pousser les pays occidentaux à accroître la pression sur l’Iran. L’Iran joue ici le rôle de la menace extérieure qui permet d’unifier le pays et faire oublier les autres problèmes politiques et sociaux. Il n’est pas sûr qu’il y ait un véritable consensus en Israël pour une telle attaque. L’ancien chef du Mossad, Meier Dagan, a récemment réaffirmé son opposition résolue à une telle action.

D’une façon générale, on néglige les éléments de politique intérieure et de communication dans cette crise. Barack Obama est en campagne électorale et compte tenu d’une situation économique difficile, a besoin de montrer que sa politique extérieure n’a pas affaibli les Etats-Unis et de réaffirmer son soutien à Israël. Cette situation pourrait expliquer l’ampleur donnée par les autorités américaines au soi-disant complot d’un iranien résidant aux Etats-Unis (qui ressemblait plus à Mr Bean qu’à James Bond) pour assassiner l’ambassadeur de l’Arabie Saoudite aux Etats-Unis en demandant l’aide du cartel de la drogue mexicain…

Ceci ne signifie pas que le dossier du nucléaire iranien ne constitue pas un enjeu. Mais il serait temps de l’aborder rationnellement. Quel a été le résultat de toutes les sanctions multilatérales et bilatérales prises contre l’Iran depuis 2007 et même avant ? Oui, certaines ont limité les flux financiers entre l’Iran et le reste du monde et pèsent sur l’économie. Mais elles pèsent surtout sur la population qui doit payer plus cher des produits maintenant importés illégalement. Pourquoi punir collectivement une population (il y a quand même eu en Iran de nombreux morts dans des accidents d’avions du fait de l’embargo américain sur les équipements aéronautiques vendus à l’Iran) alors que qu’une majorité des Iraniens a démontré son aspiration à une plus grande démocratie en 2009 et doit, en outre, subir une dure répression des autorités ? Est-ce que ces sanctions ont eu un impact sur le programme nucléaire iranien ? Pas un seul. Au contraire, l’Iran a augmenté sa capacité d’enrichissement à 20 % et est maintenant beaucoup plus radical dans ses négociations avec les Occidentaux. Pour information, il faut noter que le nouveau directeur de l’organisation iranienne de l’énergie et vice-président, Fereydun Abassi Davâni, est un des scientifiques qui a échappé à une tentative d’assassinat probablement mené par des services secrets étrangers. Je doute que cela l’ait rendu plus “modéré” face aux pressions occidentales.

Contrairement à ce que disent de nombreux éditoriaux où le nom d’Ahmadinejad précède d’une ligne le mot “bombe”, le programme nucléaire iranien est dirigé par le Conseilnational de sécurité où sont représentés toutes les instances du pouvoir iranien concernées par ces questions. Et il n’est absolument pas certain que depuis 2003, la décision politique de construire une bombe ait été prise au sein de ce conseil. Par ailleurs, le programme nucléaire iranien est devenu une affaire d’identité nationale en Iran et le régime perdrait le peu de légitimité qui lui reste en cédant à toutes les exigences occidentales.

Dans ces conditions, il serait bon au moment où la crise financière de la zone euro oblige les Européens à affronter des questions fondamentales (solidarité financière entre Etats, légitimité démocratique des institutions, etc.) que l’Union européenne change radicalement sa politique iranienne sur le dossier du nucléaire. Au lieu de toujours évoquer plus de sanctions qui ne mènent à rien, il faut absolument se concentrer son énergie sur de véritables négociations. Il faut également prendre conscience que derrière ce dossier du nucléaire, il y a la question des relations (ou leur absence) entre l’Iran et les Etats-Unis et Israël. Il faut donc aussi que l’UE ait une politique iranienne qui défende vraiment ses intérêts économiques et stratégiques.

Les récents développements autour du programme nucléaire militaire iranien ont relancé le débat en Israël sur l’opportunité de frappes militaires, à travers des déclarations des plus hautes autorités du pays. Si ce débat n’est pas nouveau en Israël, il prend un relief particulier dans le contexte du nouveau rapport de l’AIEA qui confirme en s’appuyant sur des éléments matériels très forts et très précis, la finalité militaire du programme nucléaire iranien.

Le débat israélien sur l’option militaire se déroule dans un environnement radicalement différent de celui qui peut parfois faire surface aux Etats-Unis ou en Europe. Pour l’Etat hébreu, la menace nucléaire iranienne est de nature existentielle. Cette perception s’appuie sur des réalités géographiques incontournables : l’ensemble du territoire israélien est dès aujourd’hui à portée des missiles iraniens et, comme le rappelait brutalement un haut responsable iranien, “Israël is a one bomb country”. Une unique frappe nucléaire sur le territoire israélien aurait en effet des conséquences incalculables. Les menaces récurrentes proférées par le président Mahmoud Ahmadinejad à l’encontre d’Israël donnent à cette menace une réalité très concrète. Face à un risque vital pour la sécurité nationale, le débat sur la meilleure réponse paraît donc légitime, même s’il prend parfois en Israël une forme publique inhabituelle.

L’hypothèse de frappes israéliennes imminente est-elle pour autant vraisemblable à court terme et militairement crédible ? S’agissant de la crédibilité de l’option militaire, il convient d’abord de relever qu’Israël a déjà par deux fois mené des raids audacieux afin des fins de contre-prolifération. En 1981, le bombardement du réacteur iraquien d’Osirak (construit par la France) a exposé le programme nucléaire de Bagdad en frappant le site le plus visible et, selon les Israéliens, l’aurait retardé de quelques années. Les inspections de l’Action team de l’Agence internationale de l’énergie atomique (AIEA) après la première guerre du Golfe (1991) ont d’ailleurs confirmé la réalité des ambitions nucléaires militaires Saddam Hussein. En septembre 2007, et sans que les Israéliens l’aient à ce jour formellement confirmé même si leur responsabilité ne fait guère de doute, l’aviation israélienne a frappé le réacteur nucléaire clandestin syrien en construction à Al-Kibar, révélant au monde l’existence d’un programme nucléaire clandestin syrien mené par Damas avec l’assistance nord-coréenne qui fait depuis l’objet d’investigations poussées de l’AIEA.

Plusieurs leçons peuvent être tirées de cette double expérience réussie. Militairement, l’aviation israélienne est parvenue à mener deux opérations très exigeantes sans pertes, ni dommages collatéraux majeurs. Politiquement, les frappes israéliennes n’ont pas entraîné de représailles politiques ou militaires significatives et ont parfois même été discrètement approuvées par des pays de la région ou au-delà. Si elles n’ont pas résolu de manière définitive la question des ambitions nucléaires iraquienne ou syrienne, elles ont retardé efficacement ces programmes et ont exposé publiquement les ambitions de ces deux pays, remplissant l’objectif stratégique recherché.

Ce modèle peut-il pour autant être appliqué à l’Iran ? Les experts en débattent vivement en Israël et ailleurs. Techniquement, une opération de ce type serait beaucoup plus difficile en Iran compte tenu de la multiplicité des sites nucléaires qui sont souvent enterrés et dont la liste complète n’est peut-être pas connue. Géographiquement plus éloigné, l’Iran dispose par ailleurs de défenses sol-air et de capacités de représailles variées (frappes de missiles, terrorisme, activation des alliés de Téhéran (Hezbollah, Hamas) à proximité d’Israël. Politiquement, beaucoup de commentateurs redoutent des conséquences stratégiques majeures d’un nouveau conflit au Moyen-Orient voyant un Etat occidental frapper un Etat musulman. Ces contraintes sont connues et discutées en Israël comme ailleurs, mais pourraient peser de peu de poids le jour où Israël estimera que la fenêtre d’opportunité avant la bombe iranienne. Il convient de garder en mémoire qu’une opération israélienne aurait certainement un objectif limité et n’aurait sans doute pas pour ambition de “régler le problème” mais de gagner du temps.

Une telle opération est-elle pour autant imminente ? Sans doute pas, les Israéliens se félicitent de la fermeté du dernier rapport de l’AIEA qui ne fait pas mystère des ambitions militaires iraniennes, contrastant avec les précautions de langage des rapports publiés par le précédent directeur général de l’Agence de Vienne, l’Egyptien Mohamed El-Baradei. Ils espèrent vivement qu’il permettra d’adopter un nouveau train de sanctions “paralysantes”. A cet égard, il est possible que l’inhabituel débat public israélien sur l’option militaire des dernières semaines ait également servi un objectif diplomatique : indiquer à la communauté internationale qu’Israël souhaite que le dossier nucléaire iranien demeure prioritaire.

En définitive, l’option militaire reste en Israël une option de dernier recours qui devra répondre à plusieurs critères : un effet concret sur le programme qui devra être significativement ce qui suppose des renseignements précis et une opération très exigeante (même si Israël ne se lancera pas dans une campagne aérienne de longue durée) ; un feu vert (ou orange) des Etats-Unis ; la certitude que la voie diplomatique est épuisée et surtout la conviction que l’Iran est sur le point de franchir un seuil critique. Ces conditions ne sont pas encore réunies et Israël souhaite, comme ses partenaires occidentaux, échapper à l’alternative entre “le bombardement de l’Iran et la bombe iranienne” selon la formule de Nicolas Sarkozy.

Dans l’intervalle, Israël poursuivra ses campagnes diplomatiques et ses actions clandestines ayant pour objectif de freiner le programme iranien à travers des attaques informatiques (le Mossad est soupçonné d’être à l’origine des virus Stuxnet et Duqu) ou des éliminations ciblées de responsables des activités nucléaires ou balistiques iraniennes.

En définitive, la meilleure chance d’éviter une frappe israélienne aux résultats aléatoires et aux conséquences difficilement prévisibles reste une mobilisation sérieuse de la Communauté internationale qui, du fait des réticences russes et chinoises, semble toujours réagir avec retard aux avancées du programme iranien, ce qui laisse accroire aux dirigeants de la République islamiste qu’ils peuvent parvenir au seuil nucléaire sans payer un prix politique et économique trop élevé.

Speculation over an Israeli bombing mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear program is at fever pitch.

The consequences of such a strike would be staggering. Iran has vast retaliatory capacity. Missiles would be sent into oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah would launch thousands of missiles against Israel from southern Lebanon. Iran’s proxies in Iraq would mount new terror campaigns against withdrawing American troops.

And these are just for starters.

Worse, any Israeli strike would set back Iran’s program, but hardly end it. The key to any successful nuclear program is software — technical knowledge — not hardware. It is the hardware that Israel will destroy. Even under stringent sanctions, Iran should be able to find, somewhere in the world, the materials necessary to rebuild its shattered hardware.

Of course, the Israelis may assume that a bombing raid would so disrupt Iranian society that political chaos would follow. That could happen, but it is even more likely that the skeptical and often hostile population would rally around their despised government in a show of great Iranian nationalism. Even if chaos were to follow, any subsequent Iranian government would be likely to proceed with the immensely popular nuclear program.

Whatever the Israeli calculations, it is clear that Israel sees an Iranian nuclear weapon as an existential threat. The history of the Jewish people is that waiting is no way to deal with such a threat. (See the June 5, 1967, Israeli surprise attack on Egyptian and Syrian airfields and the June 7, 1981, raid that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor.)

Israel faces a charging bull and could be impaled on either of its horns — attack and see massive retaliation while incurring U.S. anger or allow the existential threat to blossom. There is an alternative, one that Israel will most likely take for the immediate future. That alternative is to throw sand in the eyes of the charging bull.

That means Israel ups the rhetoric over a prospective attack on Iran in order to pressure the U.S. to do more to bring Iran to the negotiating table. In fact, President Barack Obama is upping the sanctions and the pain they inflict. But no amount of pain will bring Iran to negotiate an end to its nuclear bomb program. Iran might be willing to do that, but in return the U.S. would have to accede publicly to permitting an Iranian nuclear enrichment program under very stringent international supervision.

Just how would that make Obama look before the 2012 presidential election? Not a perception that he would be willing to foster.

So here we are. The options are shrinking — for the Israelis, for the Iranians and for the United States.

The Israelis are not likely to bomb anytime soon. But don’t count it out as a last resort.

Opportunities to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination. All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.

On Saturday the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will open its third session: after Barcelona and London, this session will take place in South Africa, the location of a seminal struggle for self-determination by a community oppressed by apartheid. Partly as a result of this courageous and persistent protest by thousands of ordinary people, who were regularly demonised as terrorists by political opponents within the South African regime (and by certain world leaders, including the UK’s), there was a concerted international effort to bring international law to bear upon an entrenched position.

Between 1948 and 1990, the UN regularly condemned apartheid as a crime. The South African regime paid little or no attention to such censure. The pressure for change, however, could ultimately not be contained. There is no doubt that this could not have been achieved without the consensus of international support. Major factors in the turning tide were the roles played by the convention on suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid, and the resolutions by the general assembly (1966) and the security council (1984) to categorise apartheid as a crime against humanity.

This has been replicated in the Rome statute 2002 article 7(1), where it is described as “inhumane acts carried out in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”. This is a crime engaging universal jurisdiction.

The evidence, the intrinsic features, the painful experience of what is involved in the practice of apartheid are still reverberating indelibly in the minds of the people of South Africa, some of whom will be called before the tribunal, alongside reputable experts. There are, of course, racial groups in other parts of Africa and elsewhere which will recognise the same pattern of suppression.

We have visited Israel/Palestine on a number of occasions and every time have been struck by the similarities with the South African apartheid regime. The separate roads and areas for Palestinians, the humiliation at roadblocks and checkpoints, the evictions and house demolitions. Parts of East Jerusalem resemble what was District Six in Cape Town. It is a cause for abiding sadness and anguish. It revolves around the way in which the arrogance of power brings about a desensitisation. Once this has occurred it permits atrocious acts and attitudes to be visited on those over whom power and control are exercised. What such people are doing to themselves just as much as their victims should also be of concern.

As part of a South African religious delegation to Israel in the 1980s, Michael Nuttall, the bishop of Natal, pointed out that there were things happening in Israel that did not even happen in South Africa – forms of collective punishment. This has special resonance in the light of Richard Goldstone’s attempt to pre-empt the tribunal in the New York Times this week by an assertion that nothing in Israel comes close. His analysis is simplistic. No one is suggesting the two situations are identical.

These are all matters the tribunal will be assessing in order to ascertain what parallels and comparisons can be drawn. Whatever they may be, the ultimate objective is to consider the Israel-Palestine situation on its own facts and apply the norms of international law to identify three major issues. Have there been violations? If so, what are they and who is responsible? And thirdly, what are the legal ramifications and processes which should ensue? It is hoped that this process may contribute and not detract from the urgent need to progress understanding and peace, truth and reconciliation.

El intercambio de prisioneros entre enemigos es con frecuencia un preludio para la reconciliación política. Lamentablemente, el reciente intercambio entre Israel y Hamás, en el que la organización islamista se llevó la parte del león de más de 1.000 prisioneros a cambio del soldado israelí Gilad Shalit, no es un buen augurio para las posibilidades de una paz palestino-israelí.

Al contrario de lo que parece, el trato no es un reflejo del interés de los dos bandos por iniciar un acercamiento político que pudiera conducir al fin del sitio de Gaza y otras medidas de creación de confianza. Ese intercambio revela exactamente lo contrario: que las dos partes están comprometidas con sus valores fundamentales de resistencia y confrontación.

Para Israel, recuperar a Shalit era su forma de confirmar un espíritu de unidad en tiempo de guerra y cumplir la promesa hecha por el ejército a sus reclutas (y sus familias) de que ningún soldado, vivo o muerto, sería abandonado jamás. El mensaje consistía en que Israel debe permanecer movilizado y alerta en un medio hostil y que su supervivencia depende de la cohesión de su ejército de ciudadanos, así como de la solidaridad con aquellos a los que se envía al combate.

El trato sobre Shalit, polémico y disgregador, desencadenó un debate profundamente moral en una de las sociedades civiles más vivas del mundo. El trato es también, para los israelíes, una insignia de honor para la aspiración de su pericleana democracia a una elevada condición moral en un vecindario autocrático.

En cambio, para Hamás, el intercambio de prisioneros encarnó el valor fundamental de la firmeza. Significó hacer frente al enemigo sionista, el cruzado con tecnología avanzada cuya superioridad militar sólo se puede derrotar con una resistencia obstinada.

Hamás cree que el trato confirmó las enseñanzas del dirigente de Hezbolá, Hassan Nasrallah, quien ha calificado a Israel de simple “telaraña” que se puede destruir con el susurro de una espada. Ante el desplome emocional de Israel por la suerte de un joven soldado, tanto Hamás como Hezbolá han de sacar la conclusión de  que su incapacidad para abordar los dilemas psicológicos y sentimentales abre la vía para su derrota estratégica final.

Entretanto, el trato comprometió gravemente la capacidad de dirección de Mahmoud Abbas, el Presidente de la Autoridad Palestina, que ha pasado años clamando por la liberación de prisioneros para realzar su prestigio entre su pueblo como interlocutor de Israel para la paz. El resonante éxito de Hamás al lograr el regreso a su país de los héroes de la causa palestina fue una importante derrota para Abbas… y un golpe importante para el proceso de paz.

El trato sobre Shalit dio un claro impulso al bando de la guerra en Palestina y debilitó a sus adalides de la paz. La triste ironía es que Abbas sigue cooperando con Israel en el acoso a Hamás en la Ribera Occidental y sigue manteniendo a centenares de militantes de Hamás, entre ellos a algunos que fueron detenidos por planear secuestros de soldados y civiles israelíes.

La “primavera árabe” ha empujado a Israel hasta una trampa estratégica de la que sólo podrá salir mediante un acuerdo con los palestinos. En el actual clima político, los dirigentes árabes, ya sean conservadores o revolucionarios, ya no pueden permitirse el lujo de ser vistos como cómplices de Israel y los Estados Unidos en la región. La causa palestina resonará ahora más que nunca en las plazas mayores de El Cairo, Ammán y Ankara.

Al liberar a Gilad Shalit, el Primer Ministro israelí, Benjamin Netanyahu, puede haber pasado a ser por fin un dirigente capaz de adoptar decisiones difíciles. Necesitará esa cualidad para adoptar también iniciativas audaces sobre el proceso de paz.

Hay que reconocer que Hamás no es un enemigo fácil, pero tampoco es inmune a cálculos políticos racionales. Es cierto que su dirigente, Jaled Mashaal, declaró hace muy poco en Teherán que “nuestro objetivo es liberar toda Palestina desde el río hasta el mar”. Sin embargo, más de una vez ha hecho declaraciones conciliadoras.

Pero Israel no necesita firmar un acuerdo de paz con el errático Mashaal. Su tarea es reforzar a Abbas, en lugar de debilitarlo, como hizo en el trato sobre Shalit. El mayor interés de Israel es el de llegar a un acuerdo con el hombre que ha repudiado constantemente la táctica del conflicto armado propia de sus predecesores.

The Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure. The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.

I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system, under which human beings characterized as black had no rights to vote, hold political office, use “white” toilets or beaches, marry whites, live in whites-only areas or even be there without a “pass.” Blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. “White” hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.

In assessing the accusation that Israel pursues apartheid policies, which are by definition primarily about race or ethnicity, it is important first to distinguish between the situations in Israel, where Arabs are citizens, and in West Bank areas that remain under Israeli control in the absence of a peace agreement.

In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.

To be sure, there is more de facto separation between Jewish and Arab populations than Israelis should accept. Much of it is chosen by the communities themselves. Some results from discrimination. But it is not apartheid, which consciously enshrines separation as an ideal. In Israel, equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal; inequities are often successfully challenged in court.

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.

But until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed. As things stand, attacks from one side are met by counterattacks from the other. And the deep disputes, claims and counterclaims are only hardened when the offensive analogy of “apartheid” is invoked.

Those seeking to promote the myth of Israeli apartheid often point to clashes between heavily armed Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank, or the building of what they call an “apartheid wall” and disparate treatment on West Bank roads. While such images may appear to invite a superficial comparison, it is disingenuous to use them to distort the reality. The security barrier was built to stop unrelenting terrorist attacks; while it has inflicted great hardship in places, the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the state in many cases to reroute it to minimize unreasonable hardship. Road restrictions get more intrusive after violent attacks and are ameliorated when the threat is reduced.

Of course, the Palestinian people have national aspirations and human rights that all must respect. But those who conflate the situations in Israel and the West Bank and liken both to the old South Africa do a disservice to all who hope for justice and peace.

Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and the West Bank cannot be simplified to a narrative of Jewish discrimination. There is hostility and suspicion on both sides. Israel, unique among democracies, has been in a state of war with many of its neighbors who refuse to accept its existence. Even some Israeli Arabs, because they are citizens of Israel, have at times come under suspicion from other Arabs as a result of that longstanding enmity.

The mutual recognition and protection of the human dignity of all people is indispensable to bringing an end to hatred and anger. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.

On Sunday, the Tel Aviv District Court sentenced Anat Kamm, a 24-year-old journalist and former soldier, to four and a half years in prison for leaking documents containing evidence of what she suspected might be war crimes committed by her commanders.

Uri Blau, a prominent Israeli investigative reporter at Haaretz who received the documents from Ms. Kamm, is now waiting to hear whether the attorney general will indict him.

Meanwhile, the commanders implicated in the leaked documents were cleared by the attorney general, and one was promoted to deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces.

The verdict sends several chilling messages. To young soldiers it says: shut up, even if you suspect your commanders of violating the law; they will go unpunished and you will go to jail if you leak. To the source it says: no one will protect you; don’t be a self-sacrificing fool. And to the journalist it says: know your place; cover what we tell you to cover, print our news releases, and keep within your bounds.

The sentencing of Ms. Kamm — who has already spent two years under house arrest — marks a watershed in the relationship between the public and the news media in Israel.

Leaks are used by journalists as a matter of course. Journalists routinely meet people like Ms. Kamm — ordinary patriotic soldiers who are horrified by the contrast between their expectations of their country and its actual conduct.

These ordinary patriots are sometimes moved to make shocking revelations about their country’s inner workings. They act out of civic duty and a belief that their compatriots need to know the truth, regardless of what official institutions think the public should know.

Ms. Kamm and Mr. Blau operated by the unwritten code of conduct that has enabled the Israeli press to monitor at least some aspects of the country’s powerful security establishment for the past 63 years. Ms. Kamm did not leak her secrets to an enemy, or even to a foreign journalist. She gave the documents to a fellow Israeli, who consulted his editors, and submitted his article to the military censor, who gave him the go-ahead.

On Sunday, we learned that this code of conduct no longer applies.

Despite the steps Ms. Kamm and Mr. Blau took, the Israeli government has labored over the past year to portray Ms. Kamm as an enemy, initially charging her with espionage. Israel’s largest newspapers jingoistically referred to her as “the soldier spy,” rushing to sensationalize the case at the expense of their own vital interest in press freedom.

The plea bargain which Ms. Kamm eventually struck left her charged with “unauthorized holding and distributing of classified information.” But the memory of the espionage charge and the implied notion that informing the public can somehow be equated with treason will continue to poison the Israeli public sphere for years to come.

It could also serve as a dangerous legal precedent.

Mr. Blau also stands accused of holding classified information without authorization and before the end of the year he might be put on trial simply for doing his job — obtaining information and publishing it in the name of the public interest.

The damage to democratic discourse in Israel caused by the imprisonment of Ms. Kamm and the possible indictment of Mr. Blau will not only affect coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it could deal a deadly blow to investigative journalism in Israel, destroying the possibility of scrutinizing any controversial subject of vital public interest.

Indeed, Mr. Blau’s portfolio extends far beyond security matters. In the past, he has published important revelations of potential personal corruption involving major public figures such as the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, and the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

The judges did not elaborate on how Ms. Kamm’s documents have actively damaged Israel’s security. The verdict does, however, mention the potential damage the documents could have caused, had they fallen into the wrong hands.

But the damage the Tel Aviv District Court has inflicted on Israeli democracy is immediate and concrete. One can’t help but wonder if the safeguarding of Israeli democracy itself is in the wrong hands.

American leaders have traditionally explained the foundations of the U.S.-Israel relationship by citing shared democratic values and the moral responsibility America bears to protect the small nation-state of the Jewish people. Although accurate and essential, this characterization is incomplete because it fails to capture a third, crucial aspect: the many ways in which Israel advances U.S. national interests.

Today, Israeli contributions to U.S. national interests cover a broad spectrum. Through joint training, exercises and exchanges on military doctrine, the United States has benefited in the areas of counter-terrorism, intelligence and experience in urban warfare. Increasingly, U.S. homeland security and military agencies are turning to Israeli technology to solve some of their most vexing technical and strategic problems.

This support includes advice and expertise on behavioral screening techniques for airport security and acquisition of an Israeli-produced tactical radar system to enhance force protection. Israel has been a world leader in the development of unmanned aerial systems, both for intelligence collection and combat, and it has shared with the U.S. military the technology, the doctrine and its experience regarding these systems. Israel is also a global pacesetter in armored vehicle protection, defense against short-range rockets, and the techniques and procedures of robotics, all of which it has shared with the United States.

In missile defense, the United States has a broad and multifaceted partnership with Israel. Israel’s national missile defenses — which include the U.S. deployment in Israel of an advanced X-band radar system and the more than 100 American military personnel who man it — will be an integral part of a larger missile defense spanning Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf to help protect U.S. forces and allies.

Israeli-developed defense equipment, some of which benefited from generous U.S. aid, now used by the U.S. military include short-range unmanned aircraft systems that have seen service in Iraq and Afghanistan; targeting pods on hundreds of Air Force, Navy and Marine strike aircraft; a revolutionary helmet-mounted sight that is standard in nearly all frontline Air Force and Navy fighter aircraft; lifesaving armor installed in thousands of MRAP armored vehicles used in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a gun system for close-in defense of naval vessels against terrorist dinghies and small-boat swarms. Moreover, U.S. and Israeli companies are working together to produce Israel’s Iron Dome — the world’s first combat-proven counter-rocket system.

Counter-terrorism and intelligence cooperation is deep and extensive, with the United States and Israel working to advance their common interest in defeating the terrorism of Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups, and preventing nuclear proliferation in the region. There are joint Special Forces training and exercises and collaboration on shared targets.

This intimate relationship reinforces overall U.S. intelligence efforts by providing Washington with access to Israel’s unique set of capabilities for information collection and assessments on key countries and issues in the region. Such was the case, for example, when Israel passed to the United States conclusive photographic evidence in 2007 that Syria, with North Korean assistance, had made enormous strides toward “going hot” with a plutonium-producing reactor.

On important issues, the two nations do sometimes differ, a phenomenon not unique to the U.S.-Israel relationship. Over the decades, there have been periodic policy flare-ups, some even bitter, on topics ranging from Israel’s preventive action against Iraq’s nuclear reactor to Israeli sales of weaponry and military technology to China. Some of the most contentious disputes have been about actions affecting the Middle East peace process. But more often have been instances of U.S.-Israel collaboration — most important, the Arab-Israel peace treaties that are the anchor of American national interests in the Middle East.

We do not deny that there are costs to the United States, in the Arab world and elsewhere, for its support of Israel, as there are costs to U.S. support of other beleaguered — and sometime imperfect — friends, including West Berlin in the Cold War, Kuwait in 1990-91 and Taiwan today.

But the long-standing U.S. commitment to Israel has not prevented development of close ties with Arab nations, which understand — however much they disagree with U.S. support for Israel — that they benefit from a good relationship with the United States on other issues. Nor has it made the Arab oil-exporting states any less conscious of their own economic and strategic interest in a reasonably stable flow of oil to world markets, or their eagerness to buy first-class military equipment from the United States or to enjoy the benefits of U.S. protection against Iranian or other aggression.

Would Saudi Arabia’s policies toward the United States, for example, be markedly different if Washington entered into a sustained crisis with Israel over the Palestine issue? Would Riyadh lower the price of oil? Would it stop hedging its regional bets concerning U.S. attempts to coerce Iran into freezing its nuclear weapons programs? Would it regard current U.S. policy toward Afghanistan more positively? Would it view American democracy promotion in the Middle East more favorably? Would it be more inclined to reform its internal governmental processes to be more in line with U.S. preferences? No.

In sum, we believe that Israel’s substantial contributions to U.S. interests are an underappreciated aspect of this relationship and deserve equal billing to shared values and historical responsibility as rationales for American support of Israel.

Una multitud de preguntas aparecieron y siguen apareciendo, tanto entre los palestinos como en el seno de la comunidad internacional, en relación con el acuerdo de intercambio completado hace poco entre Hamas e Israel. Son preguntas que intentan comprender las circunstancias y las condiciones del acuerdo.

1. ¿Debe considerarse lo conseguido como un gran logro nacional? Se trata sin duda de un gran logro de Hamas. La liberación de un gran número de presos y en especial de los sentenciados a cadena perpetua parece un milagro. Quienes han vivido la opresión y la oscuridad de la cárcel gozarán ahora de la libertad.

2. ¿Podría haberse concluido un acuerdo aún mejor? La respuesta explica la repetida postergación por parte de Hamas de la firma del acuerdo. Hace dos años se consideró, con razón, que en aquel momento no se podía conseguir lo que se ha conseguido hoy, cuando Israel estaba bajo presión de su opinión pública para que pusiera fin al sufrimiento del soldado cautivo. No deja de ser un indicio de la fuerza de Hamas, que ha estado en condiciones de esperar a que Israel estuviera en peor posición.

3. ¿Está Israel en peor posición? Israel no está hoy en mejor posición que ayer. De otro modo, habría seguido con su obstinación de siempre. Desde las últimas negociaciones de hace dos años, ha fluido mucha agua por el río de la vida. Israel perdió el año pasado lo que no había perdido en las décadas anteriores. Lo sucedido en el mundo árabe ha sido descrito por Israel como un terremoto que ha derrocado símbolos, dirigentes y políticas en los que se apoyaron en las últimas décadas. Israel ha visto incluso cómo era derribada su bandera de la embajada en Egipto. El respaldo mundial a la causa palestina ha superado cuanto podía imaginar Israel. Los representantes de todos los países del mundo reunidos en la Asamblea General de la ONU aplaudieron repetidas veces el discurso que exigía justicia para todos nosotros. Netanyahu, en cambio, empezó su intervención confundido y titubeante… ¿No era un momento apropiado para conseguir mejores condiciones que antes?

4. ¿Incidió la solicitud de reconocimiento ante la ONU en el hecho de que Hamas se inclinara por firmar el acuerdo? Hamas no ocultó su confusión ante la iniciativa de acudir a la ONU; es más, llegó incluso a prohibir concentraciones y marchas en Gaza. Esa medida agudizó su necesidad de conseguir un triunfo espectacular, aunque fuera a costa de abandonar algunas de las condiciones iniciales.

5. ¿Por qué ha aceptado Israel el trato ahora? ¿Es razonable que le permita semejante triunfo a Hamas? Los motivos que llevaron a Israel a firmar el acuerdo ahora se resumen en la frase de David Midan, jefe de los negociadores israelíes: “Hamas es hoy una parte negociadora adecuada”.

Además, un destacado analista político israelí afirmó que, con la aceptación del acuerdo, Israel deseaba castigar a Abu Abas por la petición ante la ONU. Lo mismo declaró a la prensa israelí el ex ministro Yosi Sarid, que Netanyahu había querido vengarse de Abas. El analista Meir Cohen dijo en la televisión israelí que la negativa de Israel de liberar a un centenar de prisioneros de Hamas y dejarlos regresar a Cisjordania surge del miedo a la caída de la Autoridad Palestina, pero ese miedo desapareció después del paso de Abu Abas por las Naciones Unidas.

6. ¿Ha tenido Israel otras razones para firmar el acuerdo ahora? Sí, porque han empezado a sonar de nuevo los tambores de guerra contra Irán. E Israel quiere marcar el terreno de la próxima guerra. Por un lado, el propósito es salvar a Shalit, que habría corrido un gran peligro de estallar la guerra estando en cautividad, y elevar la moral de los soldados asegurándoles que serán liberados en caso de captura. Por otra parte, han frenado la participación de Hamas en un hipotético frente meridional en caso de que Israel ataque a Irán. La segunda parte del trato se ha postergado dos meses, lo que hará que Hamas se comporte con más disciplina, calma y responsabilidad.

7. ¿Qué diferencia este acuerdo de los anteriores? La resistencia palestina capturó al soldado israelí, lo retuvo en suelo palestino y fue capaz de ocultarlo durante cinco años a los servicios de inteligencia israelíes. El acuerdo es similar a los anteriores en la medida en que no permite el regreso de los presos a su patria. En el primero, firmado con Al Fatah en 1983, se intercambiaron cinco mil presos de la cárcel de Ansar por seis soldados israelíes. El segundo tuvo lugar en mayo de 1985. Conocido como acuerdo de Ahmed Jibril, incluyó la liberación de más de 1.100 presos.

Una última pregunta. ¿Por qué aceptó Hamas dejar al margen del acuerdo a Maruan Barguti y a Ahmed Saadat? En la medida en que Israel tenía prisa por castigar al presidente Abas por su petición ante la ONU, ¿era razonable liberar a unos presos que representan a las dos principales facciones que estaban a favor del paso de Aas? Israel no se puso en un principio a la liberación Barguti, pero de pronto se obstinó en no liberarlo, lo que confirma que esa negativa fue un castigo contra la AP por sus gestiones ante la ONU. Y Hamas, que consideraba urgente la conclusión del acuerdo para compensar su pérdida de influencia en la escena política interna, no se opuso a la negativa de liberar a Barguti y a Saadat. De modo que hay ganadores y perdedores, depende del ángulo desde el que se mire.

As the Palestinian quest for statehood grinds on at the United Nations, those who really hold the Palestinians’ fate in their hands — the people of Israel — are more pessimistic than ever about the prospects for peace.

According to a survey published in late September, two thirds of Israelis hold no hope of ever achieving peace with the Palestinians. But the poll also revealed a striking contrast: 88 percent say that Israel is a good place to live. Israel may be more isolated diplomatically than at any time since the dark days of the 1970s, but with the Israeli economy booming and with terrorism largely under control, the vast majority of Israelis seem to believe that they can live indefinitely with the status quo.

They cannot. Israel’s future — as a democratic, Jewish and prosperous state — faces real threats, but more from within than from without. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict does threaten Israel, but not, as the Israeli right would have it, because militant and even seemingly moderate Palestinians plan to drive the Jews into the sea. Rather, the conflict threatens Israel because of the havoc it continues to wreak on the country’s internal politics.

First and foremost, the ongoing occupation has fueled an aggressive ethno-religious nationalism that has become increasingly prominent since the second intifada. This is happening mostly because Israelis have grown despondent over the prospects for peace: They believe Israel has tried everything to end the conflict and has been repaid only with terrorism, obstruction and global opprobrium. Israelis have not felt this alone and embattled for a generation.

The country’s abiding sense of anxiety has advanced the fortunes of, among others, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his stridently nationalist party, Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home). Together with allies in the right-wing Likud and the purportedly moderate Kadima, members of Yisrael Beitenu have attempted to silence Israeli NGOs focused on human rights and civil liberties. They have passed laws that seek to restrict Israeli citizens’ right to protest the occupation by boycotts. And they have the independence of the Supreme Court in their sights too. Israel’s bulwarks against the forces of illiberal nationalism are crumbling.

Among the victims of this growing ethnocentrism are Israel’s Arab citizens, today, over 20 percent of the country’s population. Long subjected to discrimination, Arab citizens have also, in the past decade, suffered increasing hostility from the Israeli government. Since 2009, Knesset members from the three largest parties have put forward a parade of anti-Arab bills, from a mandate that all new immigrants swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state to a provision that would end Arabic’s status as an official language.

It is no surprise, then, that Arab citizens have come to feel that they will never be treated fairly in an Israel defined as a Jewish state. In 2009 over half viewed a Jewish and democratic Israel as inherently racist, and nearly 75 percent endorsed using all legal means to transform Israel from a Jewish state into a binational one.

It is hard to see how Jewish and Arab citizens can escape the cycle of mutual distrust and provocation as long as the occupation continues to structure Israel’s political discourse. The occupation has impeded a serious national conversation about how Israel should negotiate the inherent tensions between its ethno-religious and civic identities.

Finally, the occupation has exacerbated the challenge that ultraorthodox (haredi) Jews pose to Israel’s prosperity. Historically, haredi parties exploited divisions over Israel’s territorial future to become free-agent kingmakers, selling their support to left- or right-leaning governing coalitions in exchange for massive communal subsidies.

The haredi burden on the Israeli economy is large and growing, and it rightly worries those responsible for Israel’s economic future. But this cannot end as long as Israeli governments rise or fall on the support of haredi parties.

The occupation stands at the center of these challenges to Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic and prosperous state. All is not lost, however. A centrist governing coalition could still halt Israel’s slide toward illiberalism, offer its Arab citizens hope for equality and justice, and compel its burgeoning haredi population to earn their keep rather than live off the state. But to do that, Israel must first pull out of the West Bank and resolve the conflict with the Palestinians.

Of course, Israel cannot end the occupation alone. The needed Palestinian leadership has too often failed to materialize. But Israel’s commitment to peace has also too often been halfhearted. Its leaders must do all they can to end the conflict — to ensure Israel’s very survival as the Jewish state and liberal democracy its founders envisaged.

For more than 60 years, the American-Israeli relationship has by and large been incredibly close. Most of us, on both sides of the Atlantic, assumed that the election of Barack Obama three years ago would assure the continuation of this long-standing friendship. Unfortunately however, American and Israeli supporters of this special relationship quickly began to notice a subtle but noticeable change in the dynamics between the two administrations. This change points to a fundamental misunderstanding of the moral and strategic reasoning behind the relationship. More important, this shift in U.S. policy not only has laced Israel into a precarious position, but also is endangering American interests throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world.

During my recent visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, I could not help but notice once again how much attention our small corner of the world continuously receives throughout the United States. Despite an economy in danger of a double-dip recession, European banks on the brink of implosion and a war on al Qaeda that has expanded to the Arabian Peninsula, President Obama felt the need to dedicate a large part of his address to the General Assembly to the seemingly insolvable Israeli-Arab conflict.

This sentiment is not limited to government officials. During my meetings with Americans of all types of political and religious affiliation, the topic of Israel – and concern for the Jewish state’s security – was raised constantly. While this may seem like an obvious topic of conversation with an elected Israeli official, the level of concern that is expressed to me is markedly different from what confronts me during my meetings in Europe. This is a fact that is constantly reaffirmed in public opinion polls.

On an official level, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has been a constant – and some would say rare – point of bipartisanship throughout the decades. It was Democratic President Harry S. Truman who recognized the infant state before any other nation. Republican President Richard Nixon’s nonstop airlift of needed weapons during the 1973 Yom Kippur War ensured Israel’s survival during that pivotal moment. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are two more examples of presidents who agreed on very little domestically but continued to develop and expand the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and well-being.

Many have tried to explain and analyze this unwavering support for Israel. I think this commitment is the result of three important elements: religious beliefs, shared values and basic strategic security needs.

There is no denying the historic and religious ties that result from our shared Judeo-Christian heritage. The United States is one of the most religious countries in the world, so it is obvious that the return of the Jewish people to their historic homeland after thousands of years in exile was an event of much significance to millions of Americans.

Our shared values of democracy, liberalism and human rights also have contributed to the Israeli-U.S. relationship. Even now, while the world hopes for positive results that may or may not follow the Arab Spring, Israel remains the only true democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, where the civil rights of all its citizens are respected and leaders answer directly to the people in regular, free and open elections. The American people recognize and respect this important distinction.

Finally, and I believe most importantly, Israel is a true strategic ally to the United States. It is a known axiom that Israel is the U.S.’ cheapest and most effective aircraft carrier in the region. Aside from a small number of soldiers who were stationed in Israel to operate the Patriot air-defense system, American soldiers have never had to deploy to defend the Jewish state. Israel has never made demands for concessions from the United States in return for strategic assets and access, as so many other allies have done. On the contrary, Israel regularly supplies the United States with anti-terrorism training and know-how and much-needed intelligence that help the U.S. military keep the American people safe. Examples of this type of cooperation are too numerous to list and mainly remain classified and unknown to most. However, one can only imagine the threats that would be posed today to America and U.S. interests from both terrorist elements and belligerent states like Iran if not for the high level of cooperation between these two allies.

The Obama administration claims that it is trying to help Israel by enacting a “balanced” approach to our conflict with the Palestinians. While this new policy may be the result of a genuine belief that it can alter the reality that we have had to deal with in our region for almost 100 years, this is not how it is perceived by many in the region. It is clear that extremist elements are instead emboldened by the distance that has become apparent between the United States and Israel. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is steering Turkey dangerously away from Europe, Israel and the West and reorienting this NATO member as an ally of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, initial hopes for the emergence of a liberal democracy in the most populated Arab country has given way to violent extremism that so far has resulted in the attack on Israel’s embassy and continuous and often fatal violence against women and religious minorities such as the Coptic Christians. These are just two examples of the emerging strength of extremists in our region that are the direct result of the changing U.S. orientation.

While I respect Mr. Obama’s attempts at solving the bloody conflict that has taken too many lives for too many years, I would advise him not to abandon the principle of “zero daylight” between the U.S. and Israel on the core issues we face. This special relationship is not an act of American charity. It is a strategic alliance that greatly benefits two like-minded countries that share common heritage and values. I urge the president to assess for himself whether this can be said of any other country in the Middle East.

Tanto es el entusiasmo en Israel por la liberación de Gilad Shalit que parece como si el Gobierno israelí no hubiese pactado con Hamas sino que se hubiera enviado a un israelí a Marte y ahora se estuviese celebrando su regreso.

No es la primera vez que se libera a soldados o ciudadanos israelíes secuestrados por organizaciones terroristas. Y siempre se aplicó el mismo principio por el que se canjeaban unos pocos soldados israelíes a cambio de cientos o miles de presos o prisioneros de guerra. Pero no recuerdo una alegría tan grande en la gente como en este caso; ello se debe en gran parte al empeño de la familia y los amigos de Shalit de no dejar que su secuestro cayese en el olvido, para que el Gobierno pactase con Hamas su liberación.

Han sido muchas las concentraciones y las marchas populares en apoyo a la familia y pidiendo que se negociase su liberación. En muchos lugares había pancartas y pósters recordando el número de días que duraba ya su secuestro. Pero lo que más ha ayudado es el coraje de la familia, que decidió hace más de un año dejar su casa en una aldea de Galilea e instalarse en una tienda de campaña junto a la residencia del primer ministro en Jerusalén, y desde allí presionar al Gobierno a que aceptase las duras condiciones que imponía Hamas para la liberación.

No obstante, a pesar de la solidaridad general de la sociedad israelí, ha habido no pocas personas, tanto de la derecha como de la izquierda, que se han opuesto a este intercambio, sobre todo, porque algunos palestinos liberados habían sido condenados por cometer atentados terroristas donde habían muerto decenas de israelíes.

Las personas en contra de este canje son de tres tipos:

1. Aquellas que consideran a los prisioneros palestinos criminales y se rebelan contra esta liberación desde el punto de vista judicial y moral. Para esta gente habría sido mejor haber dejado a Shalit en su cautiverio y no haber liberado de la cárcel a asesinos que no merecen compasión. Además, su liberación hiere los sentimientos de los familiares de sus víctimas. Esta visión no es muy popular, pero se da en algunos sectores y no sólo de la derecha.

2. Otra gente se opone al acuerdo por la diferencia abismal en el número. Lo habrían aceptado si hubiera consistido en intercambiar a Shalit por un único preso palestino, aun cuando este hubiese cometido un atentado atroz. Contra esta postura se podría argumentar que, desde el inicio del conflicto entre judíos y palestinos, los judíos han demostrado una capacidad militar muy superior pese a su inferioridad numérica. En todas las guerras contra países árabes los israelíes han ganado pese a contar con una población muy pequeña en comparación con la de los países árabes con los que se enfrentaba. El soldado israelí está mucho mejor entrenado y cuenta con una tecnología sofisticada que no tiene el combatiente árabe. Por ello, cuando Hamas pide mil presos a cambio de un solo soldado lo que hace es buscar en este sentido un canje un poco paritario. Es decir, un soldado israelí vale mucho más que un guerrillero que lucha con machetes, bombas caseras o cinturones explosivos.

Dado que Israel ha asumido que siempre será inferior demográficamente a sus enemigos y que ha de suplir esa diferencia con una mejor preparación de sus soldados, el canje de un prisionero israelí por mil no supone una humillación o una claudicación, sino un pacto justo que implica reconocer, incluso por parte del enemigo, la superioridad militar de Israel.

3. Otro sector se opone a este intercambio por una sencilla razón: se ha comprobado que en canjes anteriores, parte de los palestinos liberados volvió a cometer atentados terroristas que causaron nuevas víctimas entre los israelíes. Por eso, la liberación de un solo soldado israelí conlleva poner en peligro a no pocos israelíes. Sin embargo, creo que este argumento se puede rebatir fácilmente si consideramos los siguientes aspectos:

a) Una gran parte de los liberados irá a la Franja de Gaza, a un territorio totalmente cerrado y aislado de Israel, desde donde no podrán cometer atentados terroristas, sino a lo sumo unirse a grupos de combatientes de Hamas.

b) Otros presos serán desterrados de Cisjordania y no tendrán, por tanto, contacto con población israelí.

c) El resto de los presos se quedará en Cisjordania. La experiencia dice que una parte puede volver a la actividad terrorista, pero estos palestinos estarán vigilados por las fuerzas de seguridad israelíes, que los tiene bien identificados, pero también por la policía de la Autoridad Palestina (AP).

Este es un factor nuevo que no se ha dado en liberaciones anteriores. En los últimos años, la AP lucha eficazmente contra el terrorismo con el fin de estabilizar Cisjordania y prepararla como futuro Estado. Por tanto, este último grupo que volverá a Cisjordania estará bien vigilado, y esperemos que algunos se empapen del nuevo espíritu optimista de la Autoridad Palestina, a la espera de negociar con Israel la solución de dos estados.

Quizás, tal y como ha ocurrido en otros conflictos, de las cárceles israelíes hayan salido personas que acaben convirtiéndose en líderes a favor de lograr la paz con el enemigo que en el pasado las encarceló.

The exchange of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier was brokered by a German mediator and by Egypt, because Israel regards Hamas as a terrorist organization with which it will not negotiate.

But the fact remains that this was a deal Israel cut with Hamas. The question now is whether this show of pragmatism can lead to further developments, with broader ramifications for the Arab-Israeli conflict.

When Hamas took power more than five years ago, I wrote on these pages that the development had a potentially positive side: “Things might now become much clearer. There will be no whitewashing, no Arafat-style double-talk, or endless Abbas impotence. It’s better to deal with a pure enemy: Fight him ruthlessly while he is your enemy, and sit down and talk to him when he is genuinely willing to cut a deal. History has seen such things happen.”

This has happened. Israelis has become weary of the Palestinian Authority, suspecting that the elusive rival has been systematically dodging the negotiating table in the hope of getting better results elsewhere: Through terror in Yasir Arafat’s time; through the United Nations today.

Not so with the Hamas. For Israelis, the organization is simply an enemy. Their answer to the Qassam rockets launched from Gaza was blockade, air attacks, targeted killings and even a full military operation. Hamas, on its part, remained resilient in its determination to fight Israel forever.

The Gilad Shalit case, however, introduced an element of pragmatism into this zero-sum game. Suddenly an ideologue like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in the two books he has edited on terror warns against negotiating with terrorists, has found himself acting against his own strong belief.

Hamas, for its part, has had to compromise on its vow to get its top leaders out of Israeli jails. The prisoners swap materialized because both sides — an ideologue and Islamic zealots — had a lot to gain from it, although not all they wanted. This is a sign of a good deal, when both sides walk away equally dissatisfied.

That Israel should tighten its measures against future kidnappings and exact a heavy personal price from perpetrators of terror goes without saying. At the same time, this show of pragmatism should not be seen as a one-time exception to the rule, but rather carried over to other areas — the economy, to start with.

While the masses in Gaza celebrate the return of their brothers and sisters from Israeli jails, the economy there is ruined, unemployment is extremely high and there is no hope for the young generation.

With a bold move, Netanyahu can have a dramatic impact on the Gaza situation, and indeed on the whole Middle East. He can propose to ease the blockade on Gaza and to look favorably at any measure that would make life easier there.

In exchange, Hamas would commit itself to a 10-year hudna (truce) — a well established notion in Islamic tradition. The Egyptians would surely love to broker such a deal, which would enhance their position as well. And, finally, this would resonate well with the spirit of progress driving the Arab Spring.

This is not a recycling of Shimon Peres’ naïve vision of a “New Middle East” from the 1990s, but rather a down-to-earth idea that can address the basic needs of the people here: an economic horizon for the people in Gaza; security for the Israelis.

After all, Richard Nixon didn’t go to China to reform the Chinese; neither did the visit change America. He gave hitherto mortal enemies a break, allowing them to funnel their energies into more productive channels.

Is this a daydream? Maybe. But for once, when people on both sides are hugging their loved ones, let us be guided by our hopes, and not only by our fears.

Almost every day, during a recent stay in Jerusalem, I walked past the tent that the parents of Sgt. First Class Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was captured in 2006 by Hamas, had pitched near the residence of Israel’s prime minister. Theirs was a long vigil.

Distraught but dignified, and most of the time not knowing whether their son was dead or alive, the Shalits have haunted the conscience of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country.

My head told me that by giving in to Hamas’s demand for a thousand prisoners in exchange for Sergeant Shalit, Israel would encourage more abductions and free terrorists who would almost surely murder many more Israelis. But my heart told me that these bereft parents deserved all the support they could get. In the end, my heart won and I walked up to the tent, signed the petition and gave a donation.

I knew I’d done wrong.

Last week, Israel agreed to exchange Sergeant Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Today, Sergeant Shalit arrived in Israel and the first 477 of the prisoners were released. I don’t blame Mr. Netanyahu, his cabinet or his security services for giving in to their hearts, too.

It couldn’t have been easy. The prisoners released today include those who orchestrated suicide attacks on a Jerusalem pizzeria (15 killed), a Passover seder in Netanya (30 killed), a bus in Jerusalem (11 killed) and a bus in Haifa (17 killed). The remaining 550 prisoners, not yet named, are set to be released in two months.

Clearly, the Israeli leaders and officials who approved the exchange were willing to pay a high price to maintain Israel’s sense of solidarity. They want Israeli parents to feel reassured that the government will do all it can to save their captured sons and daughters. And Israeli soldiers are presumably more ready to go into battle if they know that.

Yet, Israel’s leaders should have listened to their heads, painful though it would have been. The consequences of past prisoner releases should have convinced them that the exchange would almost surely prove, in the long run, the more costly choice. In the past three decades, according to one estimate, Israel has released about 7,000 Arab prisoners in exchange for about 16 Israelis and the bodies of 10 more.

Another estimate has put the number of Arab prisoners exchanged since 1985 at about 10,000. According to a 2007 report by an Israeli terrorism victims group, 177 Israelis were murdered in the five years before the study by recidivist terrorists who had been freed.

Abbas ibn Muhammad Alsayd, released in 1996, was subsequently involved in three terrorist attacks, including the 2002 bombing of a Netanya Passover Seder. In 1998, Iyad Sawalha was released as a “good-will” gesture; in 2002 he detonated a bomb that killed 17. And in 2003, Ramez Sali Abu Salmin was released; 7 months later he blew himself up in a Jerusalem cafe, killing 7.

Israeli leaders should realize that releasing 1,027 prisoners for one abducted Israeli soldier will result in more abductions, and that such extortionist and hugely disproportionate mass releases must, finally, stop.

The spokesman for the military wing of Hamas has stated publicly that Sergeant Shalit “will not be the last solider kidnapped by Hamas as long as Israel keeps Palestinian prisoners detained.”

Another group, the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, which was involved with Sergeant Shalit’s abduction, announced, “The abduction of soldiers is our strategy.”

And today, Wafa al-Bass, who was imprisoned in 2005 when she was caught smuggling a suicide bomb through a Gaza checkpoint while pretending to seek medical treatment, said, after being freed, that Palestinians should “take another Shalit” each year until all remaining Palestinian prisoners were free.

You don’t have to read the work of the psychologist B. F. Skinner to understand the danger of positive reinforcement as it applies to the exchange of prisoners for abducted Israelis. You need only read Mr. Netanyahu himself, who in his 1995 book, “Fighting Terrorism,” wrote that “prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse.”

Nor is the return to terrorist attacks on Israelis the only consequence of freeing such prisoners. The case of Samir Kuntar, who was set free in 2008 in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers, should serve as a lesson. Mr. Kuntar had killed an Israeli man in front of his 4-year-old daughter and then killed the daughter by bashing her head with his rifle — while the man’s wife, hiding nearby, accidentally smothered their 2-year-old trying to keep her quiet.

Mr. Kuntar is now a hero among Palestinians and across the Muslim world. He and other prisoners released by Israel were honored by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elimination of Israel. Mr. Ahmadinejad gave Mr. Kuntar a medal for “supporting the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance.”

Given this history, it is absurd to see Israel’s exchanging a soldier, or even dead bodies, for hundreds of prisoners as a policy that strengthens the country’s sense of solidarity or morale.

What will Israeli leaders say to the relatives of the civilians who almost surely will be killed by the prisoners released in the Shalit deal — and to the parents of the soldiers, as well as civilians, who will be taken captive by Hamas for further prisoner releases?

Continuing to take existential risks for peace, even ones unlikely to bear fruit, may be necessary for Israeli leaders. What is not necessary is taking suicidal risks that will save one sergeant but guarantee the abductions of many more soldiers and the murders of many more Israelis.

One’s heart can’t help but celebrate for the Shalit family. But one’s head can’t help but throb contemplating the many abductions — and the numerous dead — that his release will yield.

Algunos medios se empeñan en llamar aislamiento de Israel a lo que también es un acoso ideológico de arcano aroma tercermundista. En llamar antisionismo (como si el sionismo siguiera existiendo hoy en día y no fuese una corriente nacionalista, tan legítima como la italiana o la catalana, que dio forma a una variante innovadora del socialismo, por ejemplo) a lo que rezuma “antisemitismo orgánico”. Y en situar a Israel en el centro de la injusticia frente a los palestinos como si los palestinos no tuvieran nada que ver con su propia historia ni en cómo han llevado a su pueblo a un callejón sin salida.

Ningún país occidental y democrático, si se viera en las mismas circunstancias que Israel, querría ni creería que su conflicto con los palestinos se resolviese yendo a la ONU. Es un marco pueril, sobre todo si no se va a conseguir el éxito previamente pactado. Pero el astuto Abbas sabía que si no lograba ese éxito, al menos sacaría de rédito el enfrentamiento de Israel contra muchos países y contra determinada opinión pública, porque su tradicional victimismo ha llegado a cotas de una gran teatralidad. Detrás de la propuesta de Abbas hay una vuelta de tuerca en el uso del mejor arma palestina: la imagen hecha y el prejuicio inalterable de muchos ciudadanos y países occidentales, especialmente europeos. En un mundo en el que la imagen lo es todo, Israel no ha invertido nada en ese aspecto: no es la imagen lo que cuida. Pero hace muchos años, desde el siniestro personaje que fue Arafat, que los palestinos solo invierten en imagen.

Abbas, cuyo rostro ha sido calificado de apacible, de bonachón, como si el rostro fuese un argumento político, viene fraguando detrás de esa apariencia de vulnerabilidad empática una acción de desgaste, dejando que Hamás cargue con lo más burdamente negativo del empeño, y propiciando a nasseristas como Erdogan su bochornoso número de actor. Todos son unos consumados actores expertos en la mentira. Pero, ojo, los israelíes no son corderitos, ni mucho menos, y aplican la mentira con arrogancia; al fin y al cabo, en la política la mentira forma parte de la verdad, como dijo Talley-rand. Pero digamos que los israelíes mienten más sinceramente. La lastimera mentira palestina es jaleada, amplificada, maquillada y dirigida por determinados medios, intelectuales y activistas europeos (especialmente españoles), logrando un rotundo éxito de imagen distorsionada.

Me llama la atención cómo en España ese activismo mediático llega a extremos de intoxicación informativa, incluso parece que es una consigna cíclica: periódicamente, con o sin noticia, se publica algún artículo contra Israel. Y siempre, invariablemente, sobre estas premisas: 1) demonización de Israel confundiendo al Estado con su Gobierno, y al Gobierno con su pueblo; 2) normalizaciónacrítica y maniquea del victimismo palestino; y 3) oscurecimiento de aspectos inquietantes de la realidad política palestina, como son la asunción de Hamás, la benevolencia con la islamización (una islamización, por otra parte, ante la que no existe postura crítica, incluso se habla en términos elogiosos del moderado Erdogan, del sentido democrático de los Hermanos Musulmanes o de la sharia como base de futuras constituciones de los países árabes “despertados” recientemente) y la incapacidad de negociación real por parte palestina. Se diga lo que se diga, esta incapacidad negociadora palestina es ya alarmante, porque, pese a su dureza y su mezquindad, los israelíes están dispuestos a generar una política de compras, intercambios y cesiones de la que los palestinos no quieren ni oír hablar, ya que los situaría en un terreno incómodo y sin protección: el de las negociaciones bilaterales y a solas, cara a cara, demostrando cada parte sus habilidades, sus miserias y sus grandezas, como el matrimonio que se divorcia con dolor y sentido práctico.

Aquí, en España, viene siendo habitual lanzar la consigna de que el problema de Israel son los asentamientos, incluso se ha oído que es el laberinto en el que Israel está perdido. Este es un error de óptica grave, en mi opinión, porque es interesado y reduccionista, al focalizar el conjunto del problema histórico en uno de los puntos más negociables de cualquier futuro -e inevitable- acuerdo. Lo mismo sucedió con el muro. Se decía que el muro era uno de los mayores ultrajes contra la humanidad, un obstáculo para la paz. Ahora, años después, todo el mundo ha terminado por reconocer que sirvió para lo que se hizo: cesaron los atentados terroristas. Las quejas de los palestinos siguieron existiendo, y con razón, obviamente, pero el muro también será parte de una negociación y se derruirá tarde o temprano. No: el verdadero problema de Israel es su seguridad en el contexto incierto de sus países vecinos, fronterizos o no, como en el caso de Irán. Un problema que, por desgracia, no ha variado desde 1948.

La realidad es que cualquier negociación habrá de hacerse desde posturas muy globales (dos Estados, sí, pero yendo a la ONU juntos, etcétera), con protagonistas que hayan asumido el derecho absoluto de la otra parte -Hamás, nuevamente, es el verdadero obstáculo-, y desde ahí, ir descendiendo a lo concreto mediante escalones que conduzcan al punto final, que es una convivencia desafecta pero pacífica. Esos escalones se llaman asentamientos, se llaman capitalidad (religiosa), se llaman refugiados, se llaman fronteras. La intransigencia palestina a incluir concesiones a medio plazo y reivindicaciones negociables sin condiciones es, pese a lo que parezca, mucho mayor que la intransigencia israelí. Porque esta está basada, en primer lugar, en la experiencia de muchas trampas de última hora por parte palestina, y en segundo lugar, en el sostenimiento de un pulso entre dos por la seguridad. Israel sabe que si cede en la seguridad, tal como está de crispado y confuso su mundo de vecindad, el futuro se le complicará trágicamente. La intransigencia palestina, en cambio, también sospecha de la inveterada retórica israelí, pero está basada en los buenos réditos que su inversión en imagen de víctima le da, ya que no es la seguridad su problema, al contrario, cuando sea un Estado -y lo será-, será el Estado más seguro del mundo. Por todo esto, conviene introducir otros puntos de vista, a la hora de hablar de Israel, y evitar el discurso unidireccional.

For five years, the image of captured soldier Gilad Shalit returning home has been the national daydream in Israel, engraved on T-shirts and bumper stickers and graffiti in every town and hamlet in the country. Now that it is actually about to happen, that daydream is seen to be embedded in a nightmare. The public understands that as Sgt. Shalit walks in the front door to be embraced by family and friends, 1,027 killers who have been broken out of high-security prisons, will be setting up camp in the backyard.

Hamas received the bulk of what it has demanded since Sgt. Shalit’s capture. This includes the release of many labeled by Israel as “arch-terrorists” responsible for some of the bloodiest incidents during the Palestinian uprising when more than 1,000 Israelis were killed and thousands more wounded. Israel reportedly succeeded in drawing the line around 25 or so terrorist “heavies,” who will not be released. Hamas was also obliged to accept the exile to Gaza of more than 100 terrorists considered by Israel as too dangerous to release to their homes in the West Bank.

Although Hamas‘ broad demands have long been known, it was widely assumed that the lengthy negotiations and Israel’s stubbornness over the years would have seen greater erosion in Hamas‘ position. In the end, Israel made the major concessions because, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there was danger that Sgt. Shalit might suffer the same fate as an Israeli Phantom navigator who was captured by Hezbollah in 1986 in Lebanon and then disappeared.

Apart from the immense security problem the prisoner exchange entails for Israel, Hamas‘ victory has serious political implications since it enhances Hamas‘ standing enormously among the Palestinian public. It is seen as an organization that is serious and can get things done – both in capturing Sgt. Shalit in a bold attack and in holding out until it gets what it wants in exchange for him. This represents a serious challenge to the lackluster and often corruption-ridden regime of Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip but the Palestinian Authority controls the more important West Bank, which abuts Israel’s heartland and is in a constant struggle to suppress Hamas sentiment there. Should there be general elections that include both the West Bank and Gaza, as both sides have mooted in the past, Hamas‘ chances of victory will have significantly improved.

In addition, the deal gives comfort to Israel’s enemies and may encourage them to be more pugnacious in the belief that Israel can be made to bend.

The two senior security officials in Israel until earlier this year, the head of the Mossad and the head of the Shin Bet security service, both objected vehemently to Hamas‘ terms. Their replacements have taken a softer view. Past experience suggests that a large percentage of prisoners released in such exchanges return to terrorist activity when there is a flare-up with Israel. Many on the Israeli right wing, including ministers, have objected to the deal, saying that Israel will pay for it in blood.

Hamas‘ major tactical success has been in making it impossible for Israeli special forces to attempt to rescue Sgt. Shalit over the years by taking measures not yet clear. There have been periodic hints in Israel of such attempts.

One consolation for Israel is that it has in the past agreed to an even worse deal for itself with a Palestinian organization. The deal did not undermine Israel’s strategic position and is barely remembered today even though it was exceedingly painful at the time. In 1985, the government headed by Yitzhak Rabin, now Israel’s president, agreed to free 1,150 prisoners in exchange for three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon.

Most Israelis will attempt in the coming weeks to put aside thoughts about the terrorists in the backyard and focus on the return of a soldier, whose whereabouts and conditions of imprisonment for the past five years have been unknown.

The claim of Israel’s isolation, echoed by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, is gaining status as fact. “Israel finds itself increasingly isolated, beleaguered, and besieged,” John Heilemann wrote recently in New York magazine. The Economist reported that “Israel’s isolation has . . . been underlined by the deterioration of its relations with Turkey and Egypt.” New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “isolating his country,” while Thomas Friedman described Israel as “adrift at sea alone.”

But is Israel really more isolated now than in the past?

Isolation, of course, is not automatically symptomatic of bad policies. Britain was isolated fighting the Nazis at the start of World War II. Union forces were isolated early in the Civil War, as was the Continental Army at Valley Forge. “It is better to be alone than in bad company,” wrote the young George Washington. That maxim is especially apt for the Middle East today, where one of the least-isolated states, backed by both Iran and Iraq and effectively immune to United Nations sanctions, is Syria.

Israel, in fact, is significantly less isolated than at many times in its history. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel faced a belligerent Egypt and Jordan and a hostile Soviet bloc, Greece, India and China — all without strategic ties with the United States. Today, Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan; excellent relations with the nations of Eastern Europe as well as Greece, India and China; and an unbreakable alliance with America. Many democracies, including Canada, Italy and the Czech Republic, stand staunchly with us. Israel has more legations abroad than ever before and recently joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which comprises the most globally integrated countries. Indeed, Egypt and Germany mediated the upcoming release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.

Israel is not responsible for the upheavals in the Arab world or for the lack of freedom that triggered them. Israelis did not elect Turkey’s Islamic-minded government or urge Syria’s army to fire on its citizens. Conversely, no change in Israeli policies can alter the historic processes transforming the region. Still, some commentators claim that, by refusing to freeze settlement construction on the West Bank and insisting on defensible borders and security guarantees, Israel isolates itself.

The settlements are not the core of the conflict. Arabs attacked us for 50 years before the first settlements were built. Netanyahu froze new construction in the settlements for an unprecedented 10 months, and still the Palestinians refused to negotiate. Settlements are not the reason that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity pact with Hamas in May, or why, in his address to the U.N. General Assembly last month, Abbas denied the Jews’ 4,000-year connection to our homeland. As Abbas wrote in the New York Times in May, the Palestinian attempt to declare a state without making peace with Israel was about “internationalization of the conflict . . . to pursue claims against Israel” in the United Nations, not about settlements.

As for borders and security, Israel’s position reflects the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. After uprooting all our settlements, we received not peace but thousands of Hamas rockets fired at our civilians. In Lebanon, a U.N. peace force watched while Hezbollah amassed an arsenal of 50,000 missiles. Israel’s need for defensible borders and for a long-term Israeli army presence to prevent arms smuggling into any Palestinian state is, for us, a life-and-death issue. Moreover, in a rapidly changing Middle East, we need assurances of our ability to defend ourselves if the Palestinians who support peace are overthrown by those opposed to it.

Despite repeated Palestinian efforts to isolate us, Israel is not alone. And we have a great many friends, especially in the United States, who we know would not want to imply that Israel stands alone in a dangerous region. Prime Minister Netanyahu remains committed to resuming peace talks with the Palestinians anywhere, any time, without preconditions, while insisting on the security arrangements vital to Israel’s survival. Meanwhile, we will continue to stretch out our hand for peace to all Middle Eastern peoples. To paraphrase one of George Washington’s contemporaries — if that be isolation, make the most of it.

En una rara incursión fuera de su Texas natal, el gobernador Rick Perry acusó al presidente de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, de “apaciguamiento” hacia los palestinos. El ex alcalde de la ciudad de Nueva York Edward Koch respaldó a un candidato parlamentario republicano y católico contra un demócrata judío en Nueva York, porque el republicano respalda a Israel contra viento y marea -y porque Obama había manifestado reservas sobre la expansión de los asentamientos de Israel en Cisjordania-. Según las propias palabras de Koch, Obama “arrojó a Israel debajo del ómnibus”. Ganó el republicano.

Mientras tanto, el primer ministro israelí, Benjamin Netanyahu, que es bastante sensible respecto de los extranjeros que se inmiscuyen en la política interna israelí, ha venido seduciendo abierta y consistentemente a parlamentarios republicanos con sus críticas contra Obama. ¿Y la respuesta de Obama? Un discurso ante las Naciones Unidas, reiterando su apoyo a Israel, su entendimiento de los miedos y la vulnerabilidad de Israel, sin casi mencionar los miedos y la vulnerabilidad palestina.

¿Qué tiene Israel que reduce al presidente de Estados Unidos a gelatina? ¿Por qué, de hecho, todos los políticos estadounidenses tienen tanto miedo de criticar las políticas israelíes? ¿Es por temor a ser tildados de antisemitas? ¿O es el “voto judío”?

Aparentemente, los demócratas no tienen tanto que temer. Las encuestas sugieren que una mayoría de los norteamericanos judíos (apenas un 1,7% de la población estadounidense) todavía vota por el Partido Demócrata.

Cuando se trata del llamado lobby de Israel en Washington, que está bien organizado y muy bien financiado, los cristianos evangélicos también juegan un papel importante. Pero votan abrumadoramente por los republicanos, de manera que Obama aparentemente no tendría mucho que perder ahí.

Es verdad, ciertas organizaciones pro-israelíes, en particular el Comité de Asuntos Públicos de Estados Unidos e Israel (AIPAC, por su sigla en inglés), pueden generar muchísimo dinero para respaldar o arruinar a candidatos políticos, a quienes se juzga exclusivamente por sus actitudes hacia Israel. Y el dinero, cuando se lo da o cuando se lo quita, así como los judíos que se niegan a votar por Obama por resentimiento, podrían marcar toda la diferencia en “estados indecisos” cruciales como Florida.

Dejando de lado el dinero, los votantes y los lobbies, algo fundamental cambió en los últimos años y eso asusta a los demócratas: el conflicto de Israel con Palestina hoy es utilizado por la derecha estadounidense como un garrote para golpear a los liberales.

Esto no era así antes. En las primeras décadas de su existencia moderna, cuando estaba esencialmente gobernado por socialistas, Israel contaba en gran medida con el respaldo de la izquierda liberal del mundo. De hecho, la última administración norteamericana que de alguna manera fue dura con el gobierno israelí fue la del republicano George H. W. Bush.

Los judíos, tanto en Europa como en Estados Unidos, tradicionalmente tendían a inclinarse hacia la izquierda. Las políticas de derecha, especialmente cuando se basan en el nacionalismo étnico, rara vez son buenas para las minorías, a las que les va mucho mejor en un entorno más abierto y cosmopolita. Los judíos estaban entre los más ardientes seguidores de la lucha por los derechos civiles de los norteamericanos negros en los años 1950 y 1960.

Mientras Israel fue un estado liberal, resultaba fácil, hasta natural, que la mayoría de los judíos norteamericanos lo respaldaran. No había ningún conflicto entre la cabeza y el corazón, entre un apego emocional a Israel y un compromiso político con las causas liberales.

Pero las cosas empezaron a cambiar cuando el Partido Laborista israelí perdió terreno a manos del Likud de línea más dura. Cada vez más, Israel empezó a verse infectado precisamente por el tipo de política a la que la mayoría de los judíos tradicionalmente le temieron, especialmente el nacionalismo étnico.

Provocado en parte por la hostilidad de los vecinos árabes y la intransigencia de los líderes palestinos, Israel comenzó a girar marcadamente hacia la derecha. Esto también fue el resultado de cambios demográficos: los judíos de Oriente Medio eran más visceralmente anti-árabes que sus hermanos europeos, y los inmigrantes judíos de Rusia eran visceralmente anti-izquierda. Es más, la cantidad de judíos ortodoxos siguió creciendo rápidamente.

En consecuencia, la izquierda liberal europea perdió su simpatía por Israel y el país adquirió un nuevo grupo de amigos entre la derecha -inclusive la extrema derecha-. Los populistas europeos de derecha, entre ellos algunos que representan partidos con un fuerte pasado antisemita, hoy proclaman orgullosamente su respaldo por los colonos israelíes en tierra palestina. Y, en Estados Unidos, una peculiar alianza de judíos de línea dura y cristianos evangélicos, que creen que todos los judíos llegado el caso deberían regresar a la Tierra Santa y convertirse al Cristianismo, se ha vuelto la principal base de respaldo de Israel.

Esto ha dado lugar a una situación muy extraña. Los políticos de derecha del sur de Estados Unidos, junto con los populistas austríacos, alemanes, franceses y holandeses, están acusando a los liberales de apaciguar al “islamofacismo”. Estos herederos políticos de tradiciones profundamente racistas son los nuevos paladines de un estado judío, cuyas políticas hoy le deben más al chauvinismo étnico del siglo XIX que a las raíces socialistas del sionismo.

Defender las políticas intransigentes de Israel tal vez sea la manera más fácil que encuentre el presidente demócrata de Estados Unidos de evitar problemas en un año electoral. Obama efectivamente necesita todos los amigos que pueda conseguir. Pero el precio será alto. Obligado a respaldar a Israel, para bien o para mal, Estados Unidos rápidamente está perdiendo credibilidad e influencia en un Oriente Medio turbulento.

Ejercer presión sobre Israel para que frene la construcción de asentamientos y llegue a un acuerdo sobre un estado palestino viable será muy difícil. Pero es la única manera de romper el ciclo constante de violencia. Hacerle frente a Israel, y a sus nuevos amigos fanáticos, no es anti-judío. Por el contrario, es defender la tradición liberal en la que muchos judíos siguen creyendo.

Egyptians have hardly noticed as the 30th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s death approached this week. It isn’t only because they’re too busy with ongoing political protests and labor strikes as the country zigzags toward democratic elections.

They just don’t care.

To the young people who made the January 25 “revolution” in Tahrir Square, Sadat is a figure from a distant past. If they think of him at all, many are quick to curse him for making peace with Israel. There is little regret or grief over his assassination by Islamic extremists at a military parade in a Cairo suburb on Oct. 6, 1981.

And yet, Sadat was a remarkable warrior-statesman. As Egypt’s vice president in 1970, he became president upon the sudden death of Egyptian icon Gamal Abdel Nasser. The country was still reeling from its humiliating defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War three years earlier. Sadat increased Egypt’s ties with the U.S. and unceremoniously expelled Soviet military advisors in 1972. Then he put together the brilliant plan that led to the surprise Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in 1973 — the October War to Egyptians and the Yom Kippur War to Israelis.

That attack, as Sadat intended, restored Egyptian pride and shattered the Middle East stalemate. Four years later, he undertook the single most extraordinary diplomatic gesture in the region’s modern history, when he flew to Israel and told the Knesset: “We really and truly welcome you to live among us in peace and security.”

Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, after President Carter skillfully negotiated the Camp David Accords. With the formal peace treaty the following year, Sadat secured the end of Israel’s occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, removing Egypt from the circle of conflict in the Middle East and enabling Egyptians to focus on building their country.

Over the years, Egyptians have formed a greater appreciation for Sadat’s political maneuvering. “Sadat 30 Years Later: Smart or Crazy?” asks the headline on the cover of the Egyptian newsmagazine Rose al-Youssef this week. Most of the articles inside agree: Sadat was a clever politician.

Sadat, like Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev and white South African President Frederik W. De Klerk later, was a leader who saw the handwriting on the wall and bravely changed history. He broke the taboo against recognizing Zionism and the state of Israel and positioned the entire Arab world to end a destructive era of hostility and conflict. By 2002, the Arab League, which had expelled Egypt 23 years earlier because of the peace treaty, had voted unanimously on a plan offering Israel full peace in exchange for Israel’s full withdrawal from lands still occupied from the 1967 war.

What keeps Sadat from being the hero to Egyptians that he is to much of the rest of the world is that the peace he made with Israel was not a wholly honorable one. His separate deal left Palestinians out in the cold — with the most populous Arab country out of the military calculus, Israel expanded West Bank settlements, pursued the annexation of Arab East Jerusalem and variously rejected or delayed Palestinian self-determination. That pattern, which has largely continued for the last three decades, vexed Sadat as well as, on occasion, U.S. presidents from Carter and George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

It is likely that the new generation of Egyptians, feeling empowered to fight injustice and indignity, will not be as complacent. Egyptian democracy will produce a foreign policy that is far more responsive to public sentiment — a sentiment that is turning increasingly against Israel and the peace treaty.

Signs of fraying relations have multiplied since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s successor, eight months ago: An Egyptian mob stormed the Israeli Embassy, forcing diplomats to flee the country; saboteurs have repeatedly bombed a Sinai pipeline carrying natural gas to Israel; and Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf recently declared that the peace treaty with Israel was “not sacred” and is subject to modification. If Israel were to launch a military attack in the region similar to the ones in Lebanon in 2006 and the Gaza Strip in 2008, it is easy to imagine Tahrir Square swelling with angry anti-Israeli protesters — and similar scenes in other Arab capitals and cities.

The times cry out for statesmen of Sadat’s vision and courage. After a burst of peacemaking determination President Obama met resistance from hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and retreated. Egypt’s next president, meanwhile, will face the difficult challenge of maintaining a long-standing treaty with Israel — and the peace, international respect and U.S. economic and military aid that go with it — while popular opinion rises against Israeli policies.

Ultimately, Israel’s choices will heavily determine the prospects for peace. Until a future Israeli government unreservedly accepts the Palestinian aspiration to independence and negotiates in good faith toward the creation of a viable Palestinian state, Sadat’s historic quest for a Middle East settlement will remain tragically elusive.

In my travels I have seen how far awareness of the Palestinian issue has spread – in contrast to the misery of my constituents, the Bedouin of the Negev. Just last month the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to relocate up to 30,000 Bedouin from unrecognised villages in the Negev. On Thursday a national strike is planned in Israeli Arab areas in protest at this move.

The Bedouin are the indigenous owner-occupiers of the Negev – they have been there for thousands of years. Since 1948 Israel has built dozens of Jewish towns, villages, kibbutzim and farms while pushing the Bedouin into ever smaller enclaves. In Rahat, for example, there are 52,000 Bedouin living on 21,000 acres, while the regional council of Bnei-Shimon covers 440,000 acres and is home to just 6,000 Jews.

When Beersheba was occupied by the Israeli army in 1948, 90% of the Palestinian population of the Negev were deported – mainly to Jordan and Gaza. Although Israel claims that the Negev was just desert, British aerial photos from 1945 show that all residential areas in the Beersheba district were farmed.

It is estimated that 200,000 Bedouin remain in the Negev today, concentrated adjacent to the Israel-Jordan border. Israeli governments have recognised only a few Arab villages in the Negev, even though many were established before the state of Israel. The first to get recognition was Tel Sheva in 1968, followed by the approval of Arab residential areas in seven districts.

At the same time, Israel does not recognise Bedouin ownership rights. Pressure from the Jewish Agency meant that even those who farm land have no rights and are regarded as being there illegally. Despite refusing to recognise property rights, the Israeli government has announced that Arab citizens who waive the rights on their land will receive alternative land totalling around 20% of the original, plus cash for the remainder.

In 2008 Israel’s Goldberg commission produced a report on the situation in the Negev, but its recommendations were not what the Israeli government expected (nor did it meet the minimum demands of the Bedouin). Consequently a new committee was established to make recommendations to the government.

Not unexpectedly, the new committee – headed by Ehud Praver, chief of policy planning in the prime minister’s office – met ostensibly to implement Goldberg’s recommendations. The Praver plan, however, was produced without any consultation with the Bedouin in the Negev, even though Praver’s brief had been to resolve land ownership issues.

The plan, as amended and adopted, includes confiscation of half a million acres owned by Arabs in the Negev and; the expropriation, without compensation by way of alternative land, of 300,000 acres inhabited by 200,000 Arabs.

The plan ratifies all court decisions made in absentia against Israel’s Bedouin citizens and prohibits the establishment of any Arab community west of Highway 40 (the main route across the Negev). While it gives a maximum of five years to investigate claims of ownership before the land is placed on the state register, the special courts for objections from Israeli Bedouin citizens will consist mainly of members appointed by the government.

The Israeli government believes that relocating Bedouin communities from unrecognised to recognised villages is the way forward. Municipalities absorbing such displaced persons will be compensated. Recognition of existing villages is still an option, but it’s a last resort. Unlicensed new construction is being dealt with severely; owners of existing unlicensed buildings have time to obtain permits, after which a demolition campaign will start. The cost of demolition will be charged to the homeowners.

The position of the High Steering Committee of the Arabs of the Negev (a broad coalition of community groups – including Jewish bodies – political parties, the Islamic movement, local authorities, NGOs and the Regional Council for Unrecognised Villages) is clear: it rejects these plans as a form of ethnic cleansing. The committee also supports the decision of local Arab municipalities not to resettle displaced Bedouin from unrecognised villages, since the solution should be recognition, not displacement.

As the Israeli government’s plans violate international laws and conventions, this issue will be taken to the UN and other bodies. Britain has a particular responsibility and a special role to play. After all, the Balfour declaration – which laid the foundation for the creation of Israel – states that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

U.S. policy in the Middle East is f loundering. President Obama’s two most important allies in the region are on a collision course. It will not be resolved by the State Department’s injunction to Turkey and Israel to “cool it.”

Turkey’s importance to Washington is clear: its involvement in NATO and its forces in Afghanistan; its strong economic ties to northern Iraq; its ongoing cooperation against terrorism; and, most recently, its role in the NATO missile defense shield. The depth of the U.S.-Turkey alliance makes the crisis in Israeli-Turkish relations one that equally involves the United States.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expanded his confrontation with Israel beyond the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident and into a full-scale assault on Israel’s position in the region. He recently declared that the Turkish navy will escort Turkish vessels going to Gaza to provide aid. Washington did not grasp where Erdogan’s sustained verbal attacks on Israel were heading. He now directly challenges our major alliance in the Middle East, and how far he will go is unclear. Obama himself must acknowledge that the situation is a crisis. As the political climates in Turkey and the United States harden, Erdogan and Obama will find it increasingly difficult to compromise.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said years ago that Turkey would construct a new order in the region. Erdogan followed this with criticism of interference in Middle Eastern affairs by “outside” powers, a clear shot at Washington. Erdogan’s rhetoric of late is about reducing Western influence in the region and teaching Israel a lesson for “irresponsible” or “immature” behavior.

Had Erdogan pushed only for an apology over the deaths of Turkish citizens in the May 2010 flotilla incident, Turkey’s actions would be understandable in the face of Israel’s unwise decision not to immediately resolve the problem. The recently leaked U.N. report on the flotilla affair sought to find a way for the sides to reconcile. Erdogan, however, is not interested in repairing the situation with Israel.

Erdogan is calculating that, as a NATO member, a European Union candidate country and the world’s 16th-largest economy, Turkey can move the Middle East in ways no other regional country can. He has significantly expanded Turkey’s trade and investment. He has successfully pivoted away from Libya and Syria, where he had been closely affiliated with the authoritarian regimes. He is wildly popular on the Arab street, and his address to the Arab League last Tuesday could well be a bid for the populist mantle last held by the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. His vigorous battle at the United Nations for a Palestinian statehood resolution is another step in his effort to isolate Israel.

By threatening to militarily contest Israel’s blockade of Gaza — which was deemed legal by the U.N. Palmer Commission — the Turkish government has laid down a serious challenge to American policy. Danger stems not just from potential miscommunication between those two countries but also from third parties with their own agendas, creating conditions for confrontation.

The eastern Mediterranean is already a caldron of competing claims and threatening rhetoric. Turkey’s minister for E.U. affairs warned this month that his country might stop Cyprus’s exploration for gas and oil, saying, “This is what we have the navy for.” Lebanon’s Hezbollah-dominated government is engaged in a verbal war with Israel over the latter’s gas discoveries off the coast at Haifa. Erdogan involved Turkey in negotiations between Cyprus and Israel on joint exploration opportunities when he told al-Jazeera this month that Israel would be prevented from exploiting the eastern Mediterranean’s oil and gas reserves on its own.

Washington is caught between two longtime allies. It cannot deal with the Israelis and Turks separately. Inaction is not a real option, as Israel could become a significant issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, especially if the United States is defeated in its opposition to a General Assembly vote to create a Palestinian state. The situation will generate concern on Capitol Hill and give Republicans another opportunity to attack Obama for not defending American interests and Israel.

Congress could also worsen the fray by reviving legislation regarding the Armenian genocide. A resolution recognizing the 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks has repeatedly failed to garner enough support for a floor vote. But its backers may calculate that the worsening conditions between Israel and Turkey would prompt the powerful Israel lobby to no longer support Turkey on this matter, raising the likelihood that the resolution would pass. Similarly, arms exports to Turkey will face greater scrutiny.

Obama may not have much time to prevent further deterioration. Israel has been seeking to build ties with Asia, Europe and the Americas; while the Arab Spring evolves, Israel is becoming increasingly isolated as countries such as Egypt and Jordan reassess ties. It is also floundering from the Obama administration’s mishandling of the peace process and of Israel in particular.

Obama’s meeting with Erdogan on Tuesday is crucial. He can take a few important steps. He should immediately deploy 6th Fleet ships from Norfolk to the Eastern Mediterranean to signal that the United States will not tolerate even inadvertent naval clashes. He needs to make clear to Erdogan that the United States will not side with Turkey against Israel and that Turkey’s current strategy risks undermining regional stability.

Obama could offer to work with Turkey and Israel to end the partial blockade of Gaza, provided Erdogan can persuade Hamas to abandon, once and for all, missile barrages and violence against Israel. Such a policy course would have wide international backing and give everyone some of what they want.

Erdogan has a choice: He can boost his domestic and regional popularity by deepening the confrontation with Israel or he could think beyond that by engaging in a constructive endeavor that will help regional stability.

Israel is at a fascinating, and frightening, crossroads. In the last two years the Knesset has proposed and passed laws that seriously endanger Israel’s identity as a liberal democracy.

It began with a law forbidding public commemoration of the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948, known as the Nakba; it continued with the demand for all new Israeli citizens to swear a loyalty oath to a Jewish and democratic country, and recently culminated in a bill outlawing calls to boycott any Israeli group or product — including those from the occupied territories.

On the other hand, in the last two months, Israel’s democracy has come dramatically alive after a long period of hibernation. Protests for social justice have mobilized hundreds of thousands in demonstrations that have the support of 87 percent of the country, according to a Haaretz poll. These protests have become an exercise in direct democracy, forcing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move beyond party politics and listen directly to the grievances of Israel’s disenfranchised middle classes.

Existential fears have pushed Israelis to the right; only when it comes to social questions are they willing to listen to the largely liberal middle class. Who, then, represents the real Israel? Is Israel an open-minded, liberal country with a developed sense of justice, or is it an ethnocracy with theocratic leanings?

Mr. Netanyahu believes that he can avoid agreeing to a viable Palestinian state, in the face of fierce international criticism, because he is certain that America’s heartland, as opposed to its liberal elites, is tied to Israel on ideological and theological grounds. The ovations he received in Congress earlier this year only strengthened this belief. Convinced that Obama won’t win a second term, he simply wants to hang on until a Republican president is sworn in.

His foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has a very different worldview. Mr. Lieberman’s open disdain for European leaders and diplomats is not a failure of diplomacy; he is a shrewd man, who first and foremost seeks to cultivate an image of a strong leader for his right-wing constituency. He believes that the West’s hegemony has come to an end, and that the future lies with autocratic governments like those ruling Russia and China. Hence he believes that Israel has no reason to pander to the West’s values.

To him, liberal democracy represents weakness and he contends that Israel should evolve into a stronger state with less individual freedom. At the same time, he is completely secular: his constituency is primarily of Russian origin, and many of its members are not accepted as Jewish by Israel’s Orthodox rabbinical establishment.

The national-religious parties in the governing coalition, meanwhile, are based on the belief that the Jewish people have a God-given right to what they call the Greater Land of Israel. In the long run, they want Israel to be a theocracy based on biblical law. Their participation in the democratic game is based on the prediction that Israel’s demography will inevitably lead to an Orthodox Jewish majority, and that they simply need to make sure that Israel doesn’t give up the West Bank before they rule the country.

The ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and Yahadut Hatorah, also want Israel to become a theocracy in the long run. Until a decade ago, they did not necessarily claim that Israel should hold on to the occupied territories, but they realized that their electorate is right-leaning, and they need space for the rapidly expanding families of their constituency. They see liberal elites as their primary enemies.

The paradox, of course, is that Mr. Lieberman and the religious parties are on opposing ends of the spectrum in other ways. Mr. Lieberman wants a secular state; the religious parties want a theocracy. What unites them is that, for completely different reasons, they have no investment in the values of liberal democracy, which are one of the major stumbling blocks for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. As Israeli liberals have repeated ad nauseam, such annexation will either lead to a binational state without a Jewish majority, or to an apartheid regime.

The coalition partners have found a modus vivendi primarily by uniting in their hatred for the institutions that uphold liberal democratic values: Israel’s Supreme Court, its largely liberal academic community and its human rights organizations.

Israel’s recent falling out with Turkey is just the latest example: Mr. Lieberman made it impossible for Mr. Netanyahu to apologize for the killing of nine people by Israeli commandos on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara last year by insisting that it would undermine Israel’s national pride. When Turkey retaliated with trade sanctions and threats of an increased naval presence in the Mediterranean, Mr. Lieberman called on Israel to support Kurdish militants. Mr. Lieberman keeps upping the ante for being a patriotic Israeli, pulling Mr. Netanyahu along with him.

The staying power of Israel’s governing coalition is primarily the result of the trauma Israelis sustained during the second Palestinian intifada and subsequent rocket attacks. Israelis have trouble trusting anybody but a hard-liner for fear that, once again, they will become targets of terror attacks.

Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition may seem incoherent in its core values, but it has created a potentially explosive mix that has brought considerable damage to Israel, pushing it into unprecedented isolation that is only likely to deepen if a sizable majority of the United Nations General Assembly recognizes Palestine as a state later this month. This would be especially challenging when relations are already strained with historic regional allies like Egypt and Turkey.

The irony is that Mr. Netanyahu himself is not opposed to liberal democracy. But the only way for him to prevent an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders is to hold his right-wing coalition together.

Mr. Lieberman has outflanked him and challenged his leadership of the Israeli right. Mr. Netanyahu needs to keep up with the right-wing Joneses and show that he is no less of a strong leader. The only common denominator of his major coalition partners is enmity to the core values of liberal democracy, and, for lack of choice, he has so far pandered to their wishes.

Desde que se inició en Israel el movimiento social denominado la protesta de las tiendas he intentado actuar según la norma recogida en el libro bíblico de Amós, capítulo 5, versículo 13: “El prudente en esos tiempos calla”. Mi asombro era tan grande que me obligué a no analizar un fenómeno tan singular y protagonizado por gente relativamente joven con parámetros ideológicos antiguos y desgastados. También me parecía que los líderes de las protestas aún no sabían hasta dónde podía llegar su protesta. Por tanto, había que esperar y observar cómo se desarrollaba este fenómeno antes de opinar sobre él.

Ahora, tras la multitudinaria manifestación del sábado día 3, que ha mostrado que las protestas no hacen sino intensificarse, destacaría tres aspectos nuevos en la esfera pública y política en Israel:

1. Se ha abierto un diálogo provechoso entre distintos sectores desde el punto de vista económico, social y étnico, y se ha creado un vínculo emocional entre los habitantes de las ciudades y de los extrarradios.

2. Personas que hasta ahora no tenían un planteamiento ordenado sobre cuestiones de gobierno y economía están participando con creatividad en resolver problemas sobre esos asuntos.

3. De momento, no existe el típico debate entre derecha e izquierda o entre laicos y religiosos; aunque se perciben en las protestas elementos propios de una ideología laica y de izquierdas, es muy leve el tratamiento dado a cuestiones fundamentales en el presente israelí, como la ocupación de territorios o los asentamientos de colonos. Incluso la crítica a los privilegios discriminatorios que reciben los ultraortodoxos apenas ha aparecido en alguna pancarta, y no ha sido expresada en ninguno de los discursos de los participantes en las protestas.

En el sector de la izquierda y del movimiento pacifista eso ha generado cierta decepción, pero hay que entender que sí tiene bastante sentido que en las protestas no se hayan planteado las viejas reivindicaciones de la izquierda, pues realmente no son la causa de la penosa situación económica actual. De hecho, en los países occidentales con una economía de libre mercado, también son cada vez mayores las diferencias entre las clases pudientes y las clases pobres, asfixiadas por la crisis económica, y en ellos ni existe un sector de religiosos ultraortodoxos que no producen nada y que sí reciben, en cambio, subsidios y gozan de privilegios de los que no goza el resto de la población, ni tampoco se gasta dinero del erario público en levantar asentamientos de colonos ni es necesario un gran presupuesto militar. Esto significa que hay una tara, algo fundamental que no funciona en el sistema neocapitalista radical, que ha provocado la actual crisis económica y que constituye el epicentro de las protestas populares en Israel.

Aunque los líderes de las protestas han evitado sacar el tema de los privilegios económicos y sociales que disfrutan los ultraortodoxos y los colonos en los territorios ocupados, ya se están percibiendo señales claras de gran preocupación por parte de los partidos conservadores y los partidos religiosos que conforman el Gobierno israelí. Son conscientes de que tal y como se están desarrollando estas protestas, acabarán trasladando sus demandas al ámbito de la acción política en forma de partido, lo que podría cambiar radicalmente la relación de fuerzas en el Parlamento.

En las multitudinarias manifestaciones en las plazas de Israel es patente la ausencia de gente con kipá srugá (kipá tejida) y de colonos, que tantas ayudas y apoyos han recibido de los gobiernos de derecha que llevan gobernando el país más de treinta y cinco años casi ininterrumpidamente. Tampoco participan en las protestas los judíos ultraortodoxos a pesar de ser un sector muy pobre, y es que saben muy bien que la miseria en la que viven se debe al gran número de hijos que tienen y a que la mayoría prefiere estudiar la Torá en vez de trabajar.

Además, creo que este movimiento popular de protesta también preocupa mucho a los ultraortodoxos y conservadores al estar liderado por israelíes laicos cuyo núcleo identitario es la ciudadanía israelí, algo que han descubierto a raíz de la crisis económica. “Ante usted, primer ministro –repite varias veces el presidente de la Unión Nacional de Estudiantes– se presentan los nuevos israelíes”. Así que frente a la confusa identidad judía mezcla de pueblo y religión, y que en los últimos años ha generado leyes discriminatorias para la minoría árabe, frente a la pintoresca exigencia para que los palestinos reconozcan al Estado de Israel como un Estado judío, y frente a la colonización judía en territorios palestinos concebida como un mandato divino, los participantes en las protestas se identifican simplemente como israelíes; su identidad es básicamente su ciudadanía israelí, lo que los hace ser leales al Estado y estar dispuestos a combatir por él siempre y cuando ese Estado los tenga en cuenta y se preocupe por su calidad de vida en la actualidad, en vez de subordinar sus necesidades a proyectos místicos y nacionalistas que sólo traen desgracias a los propios israelíes y su entorno. Así pues, estos nuevos israelíes están haciendo sombra a los viejos judíos.

My fingers burned with excitement. It was just weeks after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s dramatic trip to Israel in November 1977 and my boss had just returned from Egypt, the first Israel Defense Forces officer ever to visit that nation. I was a young officer, and the “present” he brought me — a standard tourist postcard — was the most precious one I could imagine. It was something from Egypt, and it was not going to explode. Until Sadat’s trip, and the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty that followed, that sort of contact had been as tangible to Israelis as the moon. The postcard was a sublime gift.

I have been reminded of that moment recently.

On Friday, an Egyptian mob broke through barriers and attacked the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, forcing the Israeli ambassador to flee. After initially dodging frantic calls from Israeli leaders and U.S. ones as well, the Egyptian government finally responded and sent in commandos to save embassy personnel from an all but certain violent death.

Two weeks earlier, Palestinian terrorists killed eight Israeli civilians along the border with Egypt, and in the firefight that followed, IDF troops accidentally killed a number of Egyptian soldiers. The provisional government in Egypt initially threatened to recall its ambassador from Israel, and thousands demonstrated against Israel in Cairo.

Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, there has been increasingly strident anti-Israeli invective in Egypt, including calls by a number of presidential candidates to recall the ambassador. The Muslim Brotherhood repeatedly has advocated downgrading or even abrogating the peace treaty, and the Egyptian-Israeli gas line — the lone remnant of bilateral normalization — has been bombed multiple times.

Israel, like other countries, watched the ouster of Mubarak with awe. We all rejoice when despots fall. In Israel’s case, however, this has been tempered by a nightmare, the possibility that Mubarak’s downfall might portend the end of over three decades of peace.

It wouldn’t happen overnight, and it might not be the result of a conscious decision by Egypt to go back to war with Israel. More likely, it would be the unintended result of a spark lighted on one of the other fronts, in conflicts with Hezbollah or Hamas, or perhaps the product of overwhelming public pressure on the Egyptian government.

The events of the past weeks have brought the nightmare much closer to reality. We have seen the hate-filled narrative before and have no desire to do so again.

For more than three decades the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty has been the linchpin of U.S. policy in the Mideast, allowing the United States to build a pro-Western Arab camp, contain radicals and promote peace. For Israel, it has been even more crucial, putting an end to the warfare with the greatest of its adversaries and allowing it to devote its resources both to other fronts and, more important, domestically.

All sides must now do everything possible to prevent a collapse of the peace treaty and the horrific possibility of renewed hostilities. The Egyptian government’s response has been mixed so far. At a time of great domestic sensitivity, it has reiterated that it remains fully committed to the treaty, though its initial response to the embassy attack was very worrisome. Israel’s response to the large-scale rocket attacks on its cities and towns in recent days was intentionally limited, to avoid further exacerbating tensions with Egypt. The U.S. mediated.

There are dark clouds on the horizon. The new Egyptian government, to be elected this year, may prove far less responsible than the provisional military one now in power. The U.N. debate on Palestinian statehood in late September is likely to inflame passions throughout the Arab world, certainly in Egypt. Massive Palestinian demonstrations planned in the West Bank in support of the U.N. move will further exacerbate tensions, even if we optimistically assume no significant clashes with Israeli forces. Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist organizations may light the fire at any moment, as may a desperate Syrian President Bashar Assad, dearly clinging to power. All may have an interest, as may Iran, in a significant escalation that could divert attention from Syria and draw Egypt back into confrontation with Israel.

The time to act to prevent catastrophe is now. An Israel worried about the future of peace with Egypt will be understandably less inclined to go forward with the Palestinians, but the need for a major diplomatic initiative, together with military restraint, is greater than ever. The Palestinians must ensure that the U.N. vote becomes a basis for negotiations, not conflict. The U.S. must bring all of its influence to bear on the Palestinians to encourage them to do so, and on Egypt to ensure that it continues to pursue a peaceful course. Responsible Egyptians must make their voices heard.

El ataque a la embajada israelí en El Cairo por parte de una multitud de manifestantes en la noche del 9 al 10 de septiembre constituye la crisis más importante en las relaciones entre Israel y Egipto desde que en noviembre de 1977 el avión del presidente egipcio Sadat aterrizase en el aeropuerto israelí de Lod. Los seis vigilantes de seguridad israelíes, los únicos que se hallaban en la embajada en el momento del asalto, estuvieron a punto de morir y sólo tras la presión de Israel y, sobre todo de Estados Unidos, llegó un comando egipcio a rescatarlos para llevarlos sanos y salvos a Israel. Cuatro manifestantes egipcios murieron y cientos fueron heridos durante el asalto y la intervención del comando.

En seguida las autoridades egipcias condenaron el ataque, lo mismo que hicieron los medios de comunicación y el mundo árabe. El acuerdo de paz israelo-egipcio no peligra de momento, pero es cierto que, cuando el personal diplomático israelí ha tenido que ser evacuado y los manifestantes han vaciado los cajones y armarios de la embajada y han esparcido por el suelo toda la documentación, nadie puede asegurar que las cosas vuelvan a ser como eran antes.

La primavera árabe ha dado voz al pueblo y, en especial en Egipto, ha hecho que sienta que puede cambiar la realidad. En un Egipto donde ya hay libertad de expresión y donde se está juzgando al ex presidente Mubarak y a sus hijos, la gente está empezando a liberar sus frustraciones. Pero no hay que olvidar que quien manda ahora es una junta militar cuyos miembros fueron nombrados por Mubarak, y el pueblo no está viendo el cambio que tanto anhelaba y sigue sin saber cuándo se convocarán elecciones para el Parlamento y la Presidencia. Así pues, la sensación de incertidumbre, el temor de que al final acabe gobernando el país un régimen militar, unido a la grave situación económica, hace que muchos se sigan manifestando en la plaza Tahrir para oponerse a los símbolos de poder, como el Ministerio del Interior, y a su enemigo común: Israel. Curiosamente, la mayoría de los manifestantes nacieron después del acuerdo de paz entre Egipto e Israel, y la mayoría no sabe que gracias a ese acuerdo Israel le devolvió a Egipto todos los territorios que había perdido en la Guerra de 1967, y que gracias a ese acuerdo Egipto recibe cada año una generosa ayuda económica por parte de Estados Unidos. La petición de romper relaciones diplomáticas con Israel empezó a oírse en las protestas acaloradas de principios de septiembre, y como no había un verdadero gobierno que se enfrentase a ella sino una junta militar temporal, los eslóganes pasaron a querer convertirse en realidad. El mensaje a Egipto ha de ser claro: no se puede eternizar un gobierno temporal. El mando del país ha de pasar a manos de poderes civiles que garanticen el orden y el cumplimiento de la ley; la democratización ha de empezar ya.

Por otra parte, Israel también debe aprender la lección. El mundo árabe no es un grupo de 22 presidentes que se encuentran cada cierto tiempo en las reuniones oficiales de la Liga Árabe. El mundo árabe son cientos de millones de personas con anhelos propios y que cada vez influirán más en sus líderes. Y la cuestión palestina es un elemento que aglutina al mundo árabe, aunque su solución no vaya a hacer cambiar la situación del resto de los árabes. En cambio, el Gobierno de Netanyahu insiste en que el problema palestino no afecta a las relaciones de Israel con los países de su entorno. Pero esa no es la realidad. Precisamente ahora se hace mucho más urgente solucionar el problema con los palestinos, ya que así mejorarían las relaciones con nuestros vecinos, Israel sería realmente una democracia con una mayoría judía y, sobre todo, muchos países ya no tendrían un pretexto para tratarnos con hostilidad. Esto serviría no sólo para casos como Turquía, con quien últimamente se han deteriorado tanto las relaciones, sino para otros países de la región.

En Israel se plantean ahora preguntas de tipo práctico: ¿Era adecuado el edificio donde está la embajada? ¿Era necesario que hubiera seis vigilantes de seguridad? ¿Por qué no era posible hablar por teléfono con el mariscal egipcio Tantatui? ¿Por qué este contestó sólo cuando le llamó Obama?, etcétera. Pero hay algo más preocupante y es que el Gobierno Netanyahu-Libermann ha enterrado la posibilidad de negociar seriamente un acuerdo con los palestinos y se niega a congelar la construcción de asentamientos.

Israel se halla así en el invierno que ha traído la primavera árabe: los turcos expulsan de su país al embajador israelí, Jordania lleva año y medio sin nombrar a un nuevo embajador, y el embajador israelí en Egipto ha de ser evacuado en mitad de la noche. Además, la dependencia de Estados Unidos es enorme. Si no llega a ser por la intervención de Obama, ningún comando egipcio habría entrado en la embajada israelí para salvar a los vigilantes. Por tanto, para garantizar la colaboración norteamericana, el Gobierno de Netanyahu debe cambiar de actitud: en vez de pactar con los republicanos en contra de Obama, ha de cultivar la relación con el Gobierno actual y, para ello, es fundamental negociar y poner fin al conflicto con los palestinos.

Rafi Schutz, embajador israelí en España hasta hace un par de meses, resume en el diario Haaretz su mandato como un periodo especialmente lúgubre. Nada raro por otra parte, pues a un exembajador israelí en Europa del Este le pasó lo mismo, y ambos siguen los pasos del exembajador israelí en Reino Unido, quien siempre se quejó de lo difícil que lo había tenido en los campus universitarios ingleses debido a la hostilidad creciente. Al exembajador israelí en Irlanda le pasó exactamente lo mismo.

El grupo al completo echa la culpa de todos sus males al clásico antisemitismo. Pero mientras sus colegas en Irlanda y Reino Unido no dan más detalles, el exembajador en Madrid radica todos sus problemas en la terrible Inquisición española del siglo XV. Los españoles (el artículo de Schutz se titula Por qué los españoles nos odian) serían anti-israelíes por pura incapacidad a la hora de aceptar la responsabilidad que les toca en eso de la Inquisición, una institución a la que, según él, todavía siguen apoyando.

Pensar que los jóvenes españoles piensan y sienten motivados por atrocidades cometidas hace más de 500 años y no por las criminales políticas actuales del Estado de Israel, o la idea de que la única razón del apoyo de España a la causa palestina sea la Inquisición, no es si no muestra de la desesperación de los diplomáticos israelíes en Europa, quienes ya desde hace tiempo ven perdida la batalla por la razón moral.

Este tipo de lamentaciones demuestran algo importante: la lucha de la sociedad civil en los principales países europeos va teniendo éxito. Sin recursos y a través de grupos pequeños que saben cómo sacar el mejor partido de su principal ventaja -el actual Gobierno de Israel-, la sociedad civil está consiguiendo hacer verdaderamente difícil la tarea de los diplomáticos israelíes. Por lo tanto, si hubiera que valorar la situación, creo que todos los que formamos parte de estos pequeños grupos de resistencia en Occidente podríamos sentirnos un poco satisfechos ante el trabajo bien hecho.

Los embajadores israelíes, por su parte, deberían ser capaces de apreciar que la política israelí en la Palestina ocupada ha sido y sigue siendo inaceptable. Por eso es tan criticada: el profundo racismo que subyace en la naturaleza del Estado judío ha conseguido galvanizar las conciencias de los ciudadanos -muchos de ellos judíos- de todo el mundo en apoyo de una campaña en pro de la justicia y de la paz en Palestina.

Pero antes de conseguirlas tendremos que hacer un esfuerzo para librarnos de las garras de los políticos y del juego de poder que se traen entre manos. La iniciativa de declarar un Estado independiente de Palestina en tan solo un 22% del territorio original es una broma de mal gusto, se apruebe finalmente o no se apruebe. La petición realizada a la comunidad internacional para que reconozca a una Palestina independiente en apenas una parte de Cisjordania, e integrada por una mínima parte de la población palestina, puede asustar al Likud pero no tiene nada que ver con la larga lucha por la liberación de Palestina. Puede que esta iniciativa termine en agua de borrajas o puede que para Israel tan solo sirva como un pretexto más para seguir ocupando y anexionando tierras que no son suyas.

Al final se trata solo de una nueva táctica en este juego de poderes al que tan aficionados son los políticos, un juego que, como todos sabemos, no lleva a ninguna parte, porque hasta que los palestinos no resuelvan su problema de representatividad y la comunidad internacional no ponga al descubierto las artimañas de Israel, la realidad y los políticos seguirán estando divorciados.

Mientras tanto, lenta pero definitivamente, seguiremos colocando en su sitio las piezas de un rompecabezas basado en el reconocimiento por ambas partes de que cualquier solución habrá de incluir a todos los palestinos (los que viven tanto en los territorios ocupados como en Israel o en el exilio), y en la construcción de un nuevo régimen para toda la tierra de la Palestina histórica que ofrezca igualdad y prosperidad para todos los que viven allí ahora o fueron expulsados de allí por la fuerza en los 60 años de existencia del Estado de Israel.

La incomodidad expresada por los diplomáticos mencionados no tiene su origen en el rechazo o en las malas caras de los Ministerios de Asuntos Exteriores o los Gobiernos de los países en que estuvieron destinados. Es posible que al tiempo que muchos ciudadanos europeos se empeñan en ponerles a ellos las cosas difíciles, sus respectivos Gobiernos miren para otro lado, ya sea aceptando el dinero de Israel para impedir zarpar rumbo a Gaza a la Flotilla de la Paz o para comprar su silencio, lo que demuestra que, a pesar de las lamentaciones de sus diplomáticos, la inmunidad de Israel sigue estando garantizada.

Esta es la razón principal por la que nosotros tendremos que procurar la incomodad no solo de los embajadores israelíes en todas las capitales europeas, sino también la de quienes les apoyan o tienen miedo de hacerles frente.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has ordered the Revolutionary Guards to draw Israel into another Middle East war through their Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah proxies in an effort to save Bashar Assad’s brutal regime in Syria, sources report.

The ploy appears to be working, as Israeli opposition leaders are demanding the Netanyahu government launch a major military campaign against the terrorist-controlled Gaza Strip.

Just in the past few days, militants in the Hamas-ruled strip have bombarded southern Israel with more than 100 rockets and mortars. The instability in Cairo with the fall of the Mubarak regime has helped the Iranian-backed terrorists in the Sinai area attack Israel from within Egypt’s borders and has enabled Iran to smuggle in thousands of rockets to arm the militants. On Aug. 18, gunmen infiltrated Israel and killed six civilians and two soldiers. And at least one civilian was killed and 20 others were wounded in the rocket attacks.

The Iranian leader had previously sent a letter to President Obama warning him that unless he avoided interfering in Syria’s affairs, consequences would take place in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the White House continued its condemnation of the atrocities in Syria, attacks against U.S. forces picked up in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with several U.S. fatalities.

When Mr. Obama openly called for the ouster of Mr. Assad last week, Iran retaliated by handing out eight-year sentences to the two American hikers held since 2009 on charges of espionage.

The Iranian regime apparently is willing to start a similar Arab-Israeli war like the one in 2006 initiated by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon. At that time, the Iranian regime feared that President George W. Bush had decided to attack Iran, and therefore it created a diversion not only to flex its muscle in the region but also to keep America busy with yet another crisis. Now fearing the fall of Mr. Assad, who has been complicit in many of Iran’s terrorist plots in the region over the years, it sees the need for another war to divert attention from Syria’s suppression of its people.

Ever since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Syrian regime has provided the kind of gateway for the radicals ruling Iran to create Hezbollah, arm Hamas, sabotage any peace activity between the Palestinian authorities and Israel, and push for the destruction of Israel through its proxies.

Syria is the most important ally of the Iranian regime, and the fall of Mr. Assad would drastically decrease Iran’s influence in the region. It also would threaten the demise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Iran has done everything at its disposal to help suppress the months-long uprising in Syria. The Iranian supreme leader has called the Syrians involved in the unrest enemies of God and agents of Israel. Back in May, Ayatollah Khamenei held a covert meeting in Tehran with commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, representatives of the Syrian Embassy, members of Hezbollah and leaders of the Sadr movement in Iraq. There, he demanded that all operational and logistic forces be applied to stamp out the blaze of sedition in Syria and destroy those who were enemies of Allah in that country.

The guards also have warned Turkey and any other country that might interfere in Syrian affairs of consequences and that Iranian missiles would be used to retaliate against any interfering force.

Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, a marja scholar in the city of Qom, announced on Sunday that Israel has had a direct hand in the unrest in Syria and issued a fatwa that any change in Syria will be against Islam.

The Iranian regime is determined to save Mr. Assad, and in doing so it will not hesitate to destabilize the region. Mr. Obama, who has rightly called for Mr. Assad to step down, must make clear that Iran will not be allowed to continue with its adventurous policy in the region and that any instigation of war will come back to haunt the Iranian leaders themselves.

The dual tracks of negotiations and sanctions have failed to stop the radicals ruling Iran in their nuclear-bomb ambitions. Just today, Iran announced it has moved some of its centrifuges to an underground uranium-enrichment site that offers better protection from possible airstrikes. It is critical to global security that we act in time to stop the jihadists in Tehran from checkmating the world.

Pour répondre à M. Marek Halter (Le Monde 19/08/11) qu’il soit permis de rappeler (d’appeler à la lecture) et prendre appui sur l’ouvrage de Sylvain Cypel : les Emmurés, la société israélienne dans l’impasse, Paris, La Découverte,2005. On parlera d’Israël en dehors du conflit israélo-arabe quand cet Etat acceptera de sortir de la légende pour tenir son rang dans l’histoire des Nations. Et l’on sait de tout temps que les légendes nourrissent les impostures; et donc pour parler, enfin, “autrement” d’Israël il faut que ce dernier accepte de mettre un terme à trois impostures majeures qui empoisonnent sa propre existence: une imposture historique, une imposture nationale et une imposture politique.

Au regard de l’Histoire, il convient de rappeler que la résolution 181 de l’ONU, dès le 29 novembre 1947, recommandait un plan de partage de la Palestine en deux Etats indépendants, l’un “arabe” et l’autre “juif”. Dès l‘origine, dans l’esprit de ceux qui ont voulu et contribué à la création de l’Etat d’Israël, ce dernier devait s’inscrire au côté d’un “Etat arabe” à naître qui ne s’écrivait pas encore “ palestinien ”. En aucun cas, la résolution de l‘ONU n’était une décision octroyant un droit à l’existence d’un Etat juif envers et contre tous. Au mépris insolent de la lettre et de l’esprit de la résolution 181 Israël s’est octroyé dès le départ et d’autorité les terres des “absents” soit environ 60% de son propre territoire, avant de procéder dès juillet 1948 ( !) à l’expulsion de 82% des Palestiniens vivant sur les territoires dévolus à ces derniers par l’ONU mais convoités avant d’être “annexés” par Israël. A l’expulsion s’ajouteront les destructions physiques de 400 sur 500 villages palestiniens. Il fallait une terre “nettoyée” de son passé pour accréditer la légende d’une terre “neuve” originelle. Les accords d’Oslo n’étaient donc qu’une mise en conformité du droit et des faits, dont les gouvernements israéliens successifs depuis l’assassinat de Itzhak Rabin n’ont eu de cesse de parjurer la signature et de remettre en question ce qui était acquis ou accessible…on est toujours trahi (et ici,en outre, tué) par les siens. Voilà pour l’imposture historique.

L’imposture nationale est tout entière contenue dans le fait que l’histoire nationale d’Israël occulte ces faits, et a donc créé et alimenté la “légende” de l’agression “arabe” pour justifier une politique continuelle de conquête de territoires au nom d’une légitime défense pervertie. Cette tromperie délibérée du peuple israélien a conduit ce même peuple à accepter de consentir des sacrifices humains, politiques et financiers hors de proportions avec ce que le droit à l’existence exigeait. Israël n’était pas menacé mais bien menaçant, provoquant l’hostilité régionale dont il se proclamait néanmoins haut et fort la victime. Au fond personne ne contestait les frontières d’origine de l’Etat d’Israël sinon Israël lui-même, et Sylvain Cypel rappelle judicieusement les propos tenus par Ben Gourion dès 1948 sur cette question : “(..) Nous nous emparerons de la Galilée occidentale et des deux côtés de la route vers Jérusalem (alloués par le plan onusien de 1947 à la future Palestine) et tout ça deviendra partie de notre Etat, si l’on en a la force. Alors pourquoi s’engager (sur des frontières) ?”. Les cartes reproduites se passent de commentaires et disent presque tout du torpillage délibéré du processus de paix par Israël.

Enfin, les responsables israéliens ont pris la responsabilité d’inscrire dans les mentalités une culture d’apartheid. Or cette culture ne discrimine plus désormais seulement les Arabes, mais désormais les juifs entre eux, au sein même de la société civile. Les vagues successives de “nouveaux” arrivants sont de moins en moins intégrés, parfois leur venue a été parfaitement intrusmentalisée notamment aux fins de colonisation des territoires occupés, qui demeuraient insuffisamment habités pour légitimer une occupation militaire. Le mouvement “d’indignés” qui réveille la société civile israélienne aujourd’hui est la manifestation citoyenne d’une saturation face à des inégalités croissantes, à des fossés sociaux qu’Israël creuse en son sein, derniers avatars de cette culture d’apartheid qui n’est au fond qu’une perversion du sionisme fondateur…soit une imposture politique que ne veut plus subir (taire?) le peuple israélien.

Les faits étant, par nature, têtus, les hommes obstinés par nécessité et l’avenir compté, il faut que cesse cette intolérable soumission à un “particularisme” d’Israël violation des fondements des Nations Unies, ceux de l’égalité et de la fraternité nécessaire des peuples. L’Autorité palestinienne a fixé un rendez-vous de paix au monde le 20 septembre prochain devant l’ONU, et il serait temps qu’Israël (pour lui-même) saisisse, à cette occasion, le destin qui ne lui est pas contesté : celui de vivre sur une terre faite d’histoire et non plus de légendes, faite par des hommes et non des bourreaux et des victimes, faite pour durer et non seulement résister. A cette seule condition, M. Marek Halter un “Israël juste” sera non plus un rêve – il faut en finir avec la légende – mais un fait en devenir.

J’avais cru qu’on pouvait enfin parler d’Israël, comme de l’Egypte, en dehors du conflit israélo-arabe. Parler de la société israélienne, de ses rêves et des conflits qui la traverse. Or, voilà que j’apprends que des attentats terroristes ont eu lieu, près d’Eilat, encore des morts, encore des blessés.

L’œuvre des jusqu’au-boutistes qui involontairement peut-être viennent au secours du gouvernement israélien en difficulté avec sa population. Un acte cependant qui vise Mahmoud Abbas et son projet de proclamation d’un Etat Palestien dans les frontières de 1967. Car, ceux qui tuent, quelle que soit leur appartenance, veulent toute la Palestine. Comme le montrent les cartes de la région vendues à Gaza.

Khaled Mechaal que nous avons, Clara Halter et moi même, rencontré à Damas pour lui parler de Gilad Chalit nous avait prévenus : il y a parmi les Palestiniens des groupes plus extrémistes encore que le Hamas. Je soupçonne l’Iran d’avoir aidé cette attaque terroriste pour détourner l’attention des médias de la Syrie dont l’effondrement serait tragique pour Ahmanidejad.

Cela ne devrait pas nous empêcher de nous pencher enfin sur la société israélienne comme nous l’avons fait avec l’Egypte à partir de la révolte de la place Tahrir.

Israël est né d’une longue lutte armée des juifs de Palestine contre l’occupant Ottoman d’abord, Britannique ensuite. Mais pour ceux qui l’ont proclamé, Israël représentait avant tout le premier pas dans la réalisation d’un projet, un vieux projet messianique d’une société exemplaire, égalitaire et sans exploitation de l’homme par l’homme.

Théodore Herzl le fondateur du sionisme politique le dit en toute lettre dans son livre L’Etat des juifs (1896). Il y réclame déjà la journée de travail de huit heures, la syndicalisation des travailleurs, une protection sociale pour tous, l’interdiction de l’exploitation de la main d’œuvre locale ou étrangère, un même salaire pour tous et le droit de vote pour les femmes… Eh oui ! Aussi il n’est pas étonnant que la Histadrouth, la puissante centrale syndicale juive, se crée cette même année 1896, plus de cinquante ans avant la proclamation d’Israël, un événement inimaginable dans cette Palestine de la toute fin du XIX^e siècle occupée par les Turcs.

Cette centrale syndicale crée à son tour un fonds d’entraide aux chômeurs et une agence pour l’emploi, mais aussi l’un des premiers théâtres dans le pays Haohel, une maison d’édition Am Oved, un quotidien Davar, un club sportif Hapoel et en 1926, Tnouva considérée comme l’une des plus grandes coopératives agricoles du monde. Quant à la Koupat Holim, la sécurité sociale, elle naît en 1933.

Aujourd’hui plus de deux millions d’individus y adhèrent. Le premier Kibboutz, Degania, voit le jour en 1907. Depuis, des centaines de ces micros sociétés collectives apparaissent dans le pays. Sociétés qui ne connaissent pas l’argent et où on partage parmi ses membres le produit du travail.

L’université hébraïque sur le mont Scopus à Jérusalem est inaugurée en 1925, vingt-deux ans avant la proclamation de l’Etat d’Israël et l’Institut des recherches Weitzmann à Rehovot, en 1939. La même année s’ouvre le plus grand centre médical au Proche-Orient, l’hôpital Hadassa.

Bref ce fut un vrai Etat longtemps avant la proclamation de l’Etat. Etat que Arafat admirait et qu’il aurait aimé reproduire du côté palestinien. Sauf que l’Etat que les juifs tentèrent de bâtir, n’était pas pour eux un Etat comme les autres. Israël devait avant tout être à leurs yeux un Etat juste. Certes les juifs n’ont pas tout réussi mais le rêve d’un voyage, c’est déjà un voyage.

Or voilà que ce voyage fut brusquement interrompu le 4 novembre 1995 par l’assassinat d’un homme grandi dans le Kibboutz Ramat-Yohanan et qui venait de signer la paix avec les Palestiniens, Itzhak Rabin. L’assassin était un jeune fanatique religieux, Yigal Amir.

LE RÊVE INTERROMPU

Au cours des quatre mille ans de l’histoire juive, l’assassinat de Itzhak Rabin n’a qu’un seul précédent : l’homicide de Guedaliah, gouverneur de Judée en 586 avant notre ère. Au lendemain de l’exil vers Babylone d’un grand nombre de Judéens déportés par le roi Nabuchodonosor, Guedaliah ben Ahikam fut désigné pour redonner un souffle au pays meurtri. C’était un esprit réaliste et fort. On l’accusa de brader le pays à l’étranger. Il fut assassiné par un opposant juif, un certain Ishmaël ben Netanya. Choqué par ce crime et encouragé par le prophète Jérémie, le peuple instaura un jeûne en souvenir du gouverneur exécuté. C’est le jeûne de Guedaliah.

Mais après l’assassinat de Rabin, nul jour de jeûne ou de commémoration. Pourquoi ? Ceux qui ont pris la place de Rabin à la tête d’Israël, tel Benjamin Netanyahu ne le crurent pas nécessaire. En bon élève de Reagan et Thatcher, ils voulurent tout d’abord transformer Israël en un pays capitaliste et libéral. Un pays “normal”. Ils ont réussi… à la Bourse. Mais la société israélienne, l’héritière des prophètes ne pouvait pas longtemps se contenter des bons points à la Bourse. Face à l’injustice sociale, il fallait qu’elle réagisse.

François Truffaut a dit un jour devant moi qu’il aimait les juifs car ils se réveillaient tout les matins en colère. J’ai fini par me demander si les Israëliens étaient encore des juifs. Leur révolte prouve que j’avais tort d’en douter.

Et la Paix dans tout cela? Les centaines de milliers de manifestants qui arpentent les rues des villes israéliennes découvriront tôt ou tard que les milliards de shekels dépensés dans la construction dans les territoires auraient suffi à construire des maisons et même des villes nouvelles dans le Neguev ou en Gallilée pour tous ceux qui n’ont pas à se loger.

Aux israéliens attachés à la Bible et qui savent que c’est à Hebron qu’Abraham avait acheté il y a quatre mille ans son premier lopin de terre au Hittite Ephron, je rappelle qu’il a acheté la Paix au roi des Phillistins, Abimelekh, près d’un puis dans le Neguev, puis d’où jaillit des siècles plus tard la ville de Beercheva, lieu où les israéliens, les descendants d’Abraham, viennent de manifester leur colère.

La coalition hétéroclite de droite composée de néo-conservateurs à la manière américaine, de juifs d’origine russe aux réflexes soviétiques et des ultra orthodoxes, aujourd’hui au pouvoir à Jérusalem, pourra-elle tenir longtemps encore face à cette colère ? A-t-elle le début d’une réponse, elle qui n’est d’accord que sur la politique étrangère et l’attitude face aux Palestiniens ? Or c’est la politique intérieure qui l’interpelle. Si le mouvement de contestation ne s’essouffle pas, ce gouvernement ne peut que sauter. Je ne vois pas ces différentes composantes trouver une réponse commune aux revendications des Israéliens. Alors, peut-être le rêve d’un Israël juste, interrompu il y a seize ans, se remettra-t-il en marche.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, once considered a friend to Israel, has had the audacity to demand that Israel apologize for last year’s incident involving the Gaza-bound ship Mavi Marmara. In fact, the Turkish government owes Israelan apology for this attack, along with other recent actions that have threatened the lives of Israeli citizens.

First, Turkey should apologize for encouraging the sending, under false pretenses, of anti-Israel activists into the country’s sovereign territory. These supposedly peaceful activists, who were in fact carrying a cache of illegal weapons, attacked Israeli soldiers without provocation. Furthermore, Turkey has been using the flotilla as an opportunity to establish itself as a superpower within the Muslim world. The Turkish government also should apologize for turning the flotilla incident into a platform intended to present Israel as aggressive and barbaric.

Most of all, Mr. Erdogan should apologize for continuing to support the flotilla and maintain connections with Hamas and other Islamic extremist groups. Hamas has called repeatedly for the destruction of the state of Israel, and the naval blockade was set up specifically to prevent the smuggling of arms into Gaza that could jeopardize Israel’s safety. The flotilla activists seek to circumvent this blockade with the intention of providing weapons to Hamas. Israel has a legal right to defend its borders and will continue to do whatever is necessary to ensure the well-being of its people.

Relations between Israel and Turkey were not always this bad. Less than four years ago, the two countries enjoyed a mutually beneficial diplomatic partnership based on economic, military and cultural agreements. Turkey was a popular vacation destination for Israelis, with more than a quarter-million people traveling to the country annually. In fact, things were going so well that in 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Mr. Erdogan to discuss indirect talks Turkey was mediating between Israel and Syria.

However, Turkey’s current attitude toward Israel should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the Middle East. Since Mr. Erdogan took office, his political agenda has become increasingly clear. His goal has been to flex his country’s muscles and prove its ability to lead the Muslim world. Unfortunately, this has been done at Israel’s expense. As a result, he is positioning Turkey’s relationship with Israel on shaky ground.

The origins of Turkey’s current problems with Israel can be traced back to 2004, when Turkey was rejected for membership in the European Union. Mr. Erdogan warned of a rise in Islamic extremism as a result, stating that if Turkey was not welcomed into the EU, the country would pay a heavy price in continued and escalating violence from the increasingly dangerous terrorist group al Qaeda. When European leaders did not take this threat seriously, the Turkish prime minister sought solace in the arms of the most radical anti-Western, anti-Zionist leader of all, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Ahmadinejad have since grown close, as their regimes have found common ground when it comes to their foreign policies toward Israel. This relationship has proved to be a dangerous one for the entire region.

I would argue that Turkey, which once was a diplomatic ally, has become an epicenter of controversy and a foe to Israel. What else would you call a country that publicly gives consent – if not outright support – to a falsely proclaimed “peaceful” flotilla that illegally enters the borders of another country and engages in violence?

By choosing to ally itself with dictatorial regimes throughout the Middle East, including Syria and Iran, the Turkish government is clearly thumbing its nose at the United States and its core democratic and social values. Moreover, Turkey is indirectly endangering the security of Americans by supporting the flotilla and aligning itself with Hamas, which has been shown to have direct ties to al Qaeda.

Turkey’s continued involvement in organizing the activists is a further attempt to delegitimatize Israel and exacerbate the Israeli-Palestinian problem. It is time for the flotilla’s supporters to recognize this deceit and call for an end to its hypocritical campaign against Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East. To help achieve this goal, the United States and other allies should start by leading the call for Turkey to apologize to Israel for its repeated insults and provocations.

Israel has never been an egalitarian state. But in its heyday, it was more egalitarian than most states in the world. The poverty wasn’t acute and the wealth wasn’t ostentatious, and social responsibility toward the poor and needy was shown not only on the economic level but on the emotional level too.

In the earlier Israel, those who worked — and almost all the women and men worked very hard — could make a modest but respectable living for themselves and their families. The new immigrants, the refugees, the immigrant camp dwellers all received public education, health services and housing. Young, poor Israel was a master social-entrepreneur.

But all that has been destroyed in the past 30 years, as a succession of Israeli governments encouraged and inflamed the economic jungle laws of grab as grab can.

Many Israelis are now saying they’ve had enough. Last month, thousands of people took to the streets to protest soaring housing prices, setting up a tent encampment along upscale Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. And their dissatisfaction has proved infectious. Parents have rallied against the high cost of child care; doctors have marched to protest hospital overcrowding.

The protest washing over Israel’s streets and squares today has long ceased to be merely a protest over housing distress. The heart of this protest is the affront and outrage over the government’s indifference to the people’s suffering, the double standard against the working population and the destruction of social solidarity.

The heartwarming sights of the tent cities and demonstrations spreading through Israel’s cities are in themselves a delightful revival of the kind of mutual fraternity and commitment that built the nation.

After all, the first thing these demonstrators are saying, even before “social justice” and “down with the government,” is: “We are brethren.”

The resources required for reestablishing social justice in Israel are located in three places:

First, the billions Israel has invested in the settlements, which are the greatest mistake in the state’s history, as well as its greatest injustice.

Second, the mammoth sums channeled into the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, where generations of ignorant bums are nurtured, filled with contempt toward the state, its people and the 21st century reality.

And third, and perhaps foremost, the passionate support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its predecessors for the unbridled enrichment of various tycoons and their cronies, at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

Let us not forget where the wealth pouring into the settlements, the yeshivas and the tycoons’ accounts comes from. It comes from the labor and creative talents of millions of Israelis who are carrying on their back a unique economic wonder of a state poor in natural gifts (we haven’t started counting the natural gas yet), and rich in human resources.

Neither the parties nor the veteran opposition organizations generated this protest. It was born out of the devotion and enthusiasm of hundreds and thousands of young people who swept along in their wake the best people in the country.

It is profoundly moving to see the protest veterans of all generations, who for years were a voice calling in the wilderness, spending time in the tents of the youngsters, who are wisely leading the new protest.

People like me, who have protested for many years against the policy of Israel’s governments, embrace this new generation, which surpasses the previous ones, with love and wonderment.

There are profound and institutionalized economic disparities between Arabs and Jews in Israel. But when it comes to housing prices, an Israeli Arab who makes $1,000 a month and pays $500 in rent can still find common ground with an Israeli Jew making $2,000 and giving $1,000 to the landlord.

On Saturday, approximately 150,000 people flocked to the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Beersheba and many small suburbs and towns to protest the rising cost of living. It was Israel’s largest demonstration on any issue in over a decade, and organizers are calling for an even larger protest this weekend, mimicking the snowballing weekly rallies of the Arab Spring.

The protests that are paralyzing Israel began on July 14, when a few professionals in their 20s decided they could no longer tolerate the city’s uncontrolled rents, and pitched six tents at the top of the city’s most elegant street, Rothschild Boulevard. Three weeks later, the six tents have swelled to over 400, and more than 40 similar encampments have spread across the country, forming unlikely alliances between gay activists and yeshiva students, corporate lawyers and the homeless and ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli Arabs.

So far, the protesters have managed to remain apolitical, refusing to declare support for any leader or to be hijacked by any political party. But there is one issue conspicuously missing from the protests: Israel’s 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, which exacts a heavy price on the state budget and is directly related to the lack of affordable housing within Israel proper.

According to a report published by the activist group Peace Now, the Israeli government is using over 15 percent of its public construction budget to expand West Bank settlements, which house only 4 percent of Israeli citizens. According to the Adva Center, a research institute, Israel spends twice as much on a settlement resident as it spends on other Israelis.

Indeed, much of the lack of affordable housing in Israeli cities can be traced back to the 1990s, when the availability of public housing in Israel was severely curtailed while subsidies in the settlements increased, driving many lower-middle-class and working-class Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza Strip — along with many new immigrants.

Israel today is facing the consequences of a policy that favors sustaining the occupation and expanding settlements over protecting the interests of the broader population. The annual cost of maintaining control over Palestinian land is estimated at over $700 million.

Had the protesters begun by hoisting signs against the occupation, they would most likely still be just a few people in tents. By removing the single most divisive issue in Israeli politics, the protesters have created a safe space for Israelis of all ethnic, national and class identities to act together. And by decidedly placing the occupation outside of the debate, the protesters have neutralized much of the fear-mongering traditionally employed in Israel to silence discussions of social issues.

But even as they call for the strengthening of Israel’s once-robust welfare state, the protesters are disregarding the fact that it is alive and well in the West Bank. Although some of their demands can be met without addressing the settlements (like heavier taxes on landlords’ rental income to discourage rent increases), Israel will never become the progressive social democracy the protesters envision until it sheds the moral stain and economic burden of the occupation.

Ironically, all of this comes just as Israel’s economy is being praised for managing to escape the worldwide recession: unemployment is at a 20-year low, terrorism is down and tourism is thriving. But such statistics are not enough to save Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from a broader sense of public dissatisfaction. And his efforts to appease protesters by promising to privatize state-owned land and cut red tape have failed. Mr. Netanyahu, a committed Thatcherite, will not win over the masses with market-based solutions.

Last week, young medical school residents walked out of hospitals mid-shift and prepared a collective resignation letter, putting Israel’s entire health care system on the verge of collapse. On Monday, thousands of Israelis took a day off from work in a spontaneous “solo strike” coordinated through Facebook. And this week, lecturers and nurses plan to stage their own strikes.

If the protests continue to stir more and more Israelis out of their political despondency, Mr. Netanyahu still holds two possible trump cards: a sudden breakthrough in the negotiations to free the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held captive in Gaza, or a sudden escalation of armed conflict.

Moreover, the impending United Nations vote on Palestinian statehood in September imposes a deadline of sorts on the protesters. If Palestinians react by marching on Israeli army checkpoints to demand freedom, Israeli protesters will have to choose between losing internal support by siding with the Palestinians, or abandoning any claim of a pro-democracy agenda by siding with the Israeli soldiers charged with suppressing them.

Before September comes, the protesters must first secure some more earthly achievements, like rent control in Israel’s larger cities, or perhaps, as the placards demand, even bring down Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government.

Only then could a sense of victory and democratic empowerment propel Israelis toward challenging the occupation, which remains the single greatest obstacle to social and political justice on either side of the Green Line.

Hace unos seis meses, uno de nuestros escritores jóvenes de éxito me invitó a participar en los talleres de escritura que dirige. Llegué a una casa particular en uno de los barrios exclusivos de Tel Aviv y me encontré con unos sesenta escritores y poetas jóvenes ansiosos por recibir algunos consejos de un escritor veterano. Pero antes de comenzar a responder a sus preguntas literarias les dije: “Si me hubiese propuesto hablar ante vosotros de la posibilidad de una rehabilitación política e ideológica del Partido Laborista israelí, no habrían venido a oírme más de tres o cuatro personas”.

Menciono este episodio mientras sigo las acampadas de protesta que proliferan ahora en Israel, donde ya se perciben señales de violencia juvenil y no sólo de jóvenes contra el Gobierno. Es una protesta firme y real que de momento se centra en la sensación de impotencia de los jóvenes ante el aumento del precio de los pisos y de los alquileres, que resultan imposibles, pero es evidente que tras ella late una angustia mayor producto de un retroceso y debilitamiento de los valores del bienestar y de la solidaridad social que siempre han sido la base del Estado judío. A pesar de que la economía del Estado de Israel aguanta bien ante la crisis económica mundial, las clases medias y bajas cargan cada vez más con el peso de mantener ese logro económico a costa de una desigualdad social cada vez mayor entre las distintas clases, incluida la clase media que tiene difícil llegar a fin de mes, una desigualdad económica que hoy día es de las mayores del mundo.

¿Puede convertirse esta protesta espontánea y vaga en una postura clara y en una actividad política e ideológica que consiga resultados a largo plazo en el Parlamento y en los cambios de política del actual Gobierno? ¿O permanecerá como una protesta algo infantil, efectista ante los medios que agonice por su incapacidad de continuidad o por algunas promesas tranquilizadoras del Gobierno de Netanyahu?

Israel no es Siria o Egipto, que carecen de una infraestructura política e ideológica capaces de pilotar la protesta o la revolución democrática. En Israel no hay necesidad de una plaza Tahrir ni de manifestaciones violentas en las ciudades, en Israel hay partidos políticos con gran experiencia donde, desde hace muchos años, hay personalidades políticas, entre ellas parlamentarios del Partido Laborista, de Meretz y del Partido Comunista judío-árabe que conocen muy bien las dificultades sociales del país, y que desde hace muchos años alertan de la creciente desigualdad y del hecho de que, a pesar de que el desempleo no es alto en comparación con otros países, muchos trabajadores están por debajo del umbral de la pobreza. Son personas capaces y creíbles que proponen soluciones económicas serias para paliar la creciente situación de las clases más desfavorecidas, y crean modelos ideológicos para que continúe el Estado de bienestar sin llevar al país a un déficit económico como el de Grecia o el de España. Los que están en las acampadas de protesta y otros ciudadanos que sufren las adversidades no están dispuestos a dar a la izquierda democrática israelí un inequívoco apoyo político, y todavía dudan en entrar en la actividad política con vistas a las próximas elecciones. Y mientras decenas de miles salen en los últimos días en impresionantes manifestaciones de protesta por las calles de las grandes ciudades, sólo unas decenas están dispuestos a ir a los mítines de los candidatos laboristas que se enfrentan a la dirección del partido. ¿Cuál es la razón? No hay duda de que la traición del presidente Shimon Peres y del ministro de Defensa, Ehud Barak –que en su día fueron líderes del Partido Laborista, pero que tendieron a una política social evidentemente de derechas, y que por razones personales oportunistas abandonaron el partido y se unieron a los partidos de derechas de Sharon y Netanyahu–, ha mancillado el buen nombre del partido socialdemócrata y le ha dejado dividido y mermado. Pero ahora que quiere rehabilitarse con políticos jóvenes y no tan jóvenes no podrá llegar a tener fuerza política real en el Parlamento sin el apoyo de los estratos desfavorecidos y sin el entusiasmo de esos jóvenes que han decidido protestar contra el Gobierno.

La diversa y rica actividad cultural en Israel ocupa con frecuencia el lugar de la actividad política organizada. La derecha en Israel es fuerte y está bien organizada, y los religiosos le dan su apoyo incondicional porque se benefician de generosas financiaciones en los asentamientos ilegales de los territorios ocupados o en los reductos religiosos de los alumnos de las yeshivás. Y efectivamente casi no se ve a religiosos participando en las acampadas. Si esos jóvenes no quieren que su protesta se quede en un episodio aislado, deben unirse al trabajo político gris y constante para rehabilitar el partido socialdemócrata, que tuvo logros tan impresionantes en la creación y en la administración del Estado de Israel durante muchos años. La política es un asunto agotador, con muchas frustraciones y desengaños. Pero quien piense que puede quedarse al margen y no ensuciarse las manos dejará el campo abierto a otros que harán una política distinta y se encontrará tendido en una tienda de campaña sofocante y estrecha en una protesta tan respetable como inútil.

Since taking office more than two years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly pressed the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” In his speech before the U.S. Congress in May, Netanyahu even made this demand the linchpin of any future peace deal, promising “a far-reaching compromise” if only the Palestinian leader were to publicly declare “I will accept a Jewish state.”

Regrettably, the Obama administration has bought into Netanyahu’s idea and is currently working behind the scenes to press key allies to adopt a formula that would call on Israel and the Palestinians to resume negotiations on the basis of the 1967 lines and — for the first time in Mideast peacemaking — spell out international expectations that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Much has been said about why the Palestinians refuse to extend Israel such recognition — certainly at this stage of the negotiations. But ironically, Israelis may well be the first to demur at such a definition of their state, or at least to be confused by it. For it is far from clear to anyone, not least Israel’s own Jewish citizens, what Netanyahu’s demand actually means.

Historically, the modern Zionist movement has sought to transform the term “Jewish” into a distinctly national category. But it has not fully succeeded. If it had, “Jewish” might have signified today a member of a national community — in the manner, say, that “French” refers to a national of France or “Polish” that of Poland.

And yet in much of the world “Jewish” today remains a fuzzy term whose precise meaning depends on context. “Jewish” can stand for a religious attribute, an ethical or spiritual one. It can mean an ethnic group or cultural tradition. For some Jews, especially in pre-emancipation Europe, Jewishness was felt to be a destiny. In certain milieus in the U.S. today, “Jewish” primarily defines a genre of humor.

In fact, only in Israel does the term “Jewish” refer to one’s nationality, although the source of authority lies outside the exclusive purview of the state. Indeed, even as Israel proclaims to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, it has no legal definition for the term “Jewish” other than a religious one: It is rabbis who determine for the Israeli state who is a Jew.

This failure to forge a coherently national definition of the term “Jewish” dates back to the inception of the Zionist movement. Since in order to forge the Jewish people into a nation it was necessary to bind them to a single territory and decide upon a collective language — territory and language being understood as two key features of nationality in the 19th century — Zionism grappled with various choices for both. These included Uganda and Argentina as possible territories, while German was the language of preference of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement.

And yet, despite the secularist impulses of mainstream Zionism, the territory ultimately chosen was the biblical Land of Israel and the language that of the Bible. And while the choice of territory may have made pragmatic sense at the time (that of language less so), the emergence of the Zionist movement could not help heightening rather than attenuating the religious underpinnings of the Jewish nation.

These are among the fundamental reasons why the character of the Israeli state remains a highly contested issue within Israel itself. What makes Israel “Jewish”? Is sovereignty over biblical lands essential to Israel’s Jewish self-identity (as the settler movement argues)? Is Israel the state of the Jews living in Israel or also of those living elsewhere in the world? (Netanyahu concluded his speech to Congress by stating “I speak on behalf of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”) Does Israel’s “Jewishness” preclude it from being the state of all its citizens, even the non-Jewish ones?

The debate inside Israel over these issues is passionate and ongoing. It prevents Israel from articulating a coherent definition of its own identity, let alone one that is accepted and recognized by the majority of its citizens, most of whom are secular and liberal by any Western standard.

Rather than asking the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, therefore, Israel has its own job cut out for itself. And while it is tempting to pass on the burden to others, it remains Israel’s duty — first and foremost to itself — to discover what it means when it says it is Jewish, and to make sure that such a definition be accepted, and recognized, by its own citizens.

Once it does so, Israel might be able to make a more coherent request to its neighbors — or more likely, feel secure enough in its own identity to move on.

Seven months into the Arab Spring, Israel’s leaders are getting over their initial alarm and confusion about how to react, and have begun to embrace the region’s new uncertainty. Increasingly, they see it as a diplomatic opportunity to affirm Israel’s importance to its traditional friends.

The West may dislike Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy toward the Palestinians — the new calculation goes — but Israel is the only country in the region that will certainly remain a stable, pro-American democracy. By that logic, it should be the West’s ally of choice in a volatile region.

That’s a windfall for the diplomacy of a man who wields power as Mr. Netanyahu does. But he has yet to recognize and seize Israel’s largest opportunity — a chance to avert a diplomatic fiasco this fall by working with President Obama to negotiate peace with the Palestinians. Time to do that is growing very short.

For most of the last 30 years, Israel could take comfort in the stability and predictability of neighboring authoritarian governments. Under Hosni Mubarak, Egypt kept its peace treaty and served as Israel’s bodyguard. And while the Syrian government founded by Hafez al-Assad was hostile, it sprang few surprises.

Israel came to think of any rapid political change in a neighbor as a danger, because it might bring a hostile Islamic movement to power — as happened in Iran in 1979. In recent years, as Mr. Mubarak aged and a succession loomed, there was talk among Israeli officials of Egypt’s becoming an “Iran next door.” But the speculation never went far because Israel’s intelligence analysts and academic experts predicted a smooth transfer of power.

In January, those predictions were defied with the uprising that drove Mr. Mubarak out. And as upheaval spread to other countries, something close to panic took hold in Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu increased defense spending, accelerated construction of a fence along the border with Egypt, and looked anxiously toward Iran. One of his close associates described his mood to me in one word: “Masada,” evoking the desperation of an ancient siege.

The low point seemed to come in May, when it became clear that Syria was in a sustained uprising. Israelis wondered who might get control of Syria’s missiles and whether its president, Bashar al-Assad, would try to divert the protests by provoking Israel. Indeed, in May and June he allowed Palestinian refugees to confront Israeli troops at border points.

But the trick failed. Syrians kept their fury focused on President Assad.

That was a turning point for Israel. As Mr. Assad faltered, Iran’s regional alliances seemed to weaken. Hamas, the Islamist movement now in charge in Gaza, was moving away from Iran and closer to Egypt. Turkey, cold toward Israel for a year, signaled a desire to turn from Mr. Assad and get closer to the American camp. Even Hezbollah, in Lebanon, was cautious; it stayed out of the Syrian fray. Most important, the transitional rulers in Cairo stuck to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel — always Israel’s deepest concern.

Mr. Netanyahu sensed an opportunity for his government to break out of the international isolation brought on by its intransigence vis-à-vis the Palestinians. He warmed up to Turkey. He began a diplomatic campaign to thwart a Palestinian bid for United Nations recognition in September. He persuaded Greece to block the departure of a protest flotilla bound for Gaza.

But diplomatic successes, like battlefield victories, can inspire overreach.

When he visited America in May, Mr. Netanyahu picked a fight with Mr. Obama over a formula for peace proposals. That raised his popularity at home and pleased Republicans in America. But in the long run, it could cost Israel dearly.

America needs Israel, but Israel needs America much more. The Palestinian problem will not go away, and the new uncertainty in the Middle East may only make it more severe. The region is bracing for a diplomatic crisis in September, when the Palestinians plan to go to the United Nations to seek recognition of statehood. And if protests in the style of the Arab Spring spread to the West Bank in advance of that diplomatic maneuver, they could turn a contest of words in New York into a third intifada in the Palestinian territories.

Mr. Netanyahu should have used this spring and summer to reach a new understanding with Mr. Obama based on confidence about the American-Israeli friendship. He should have worked out an agreement on how to reignite the peace process, rather than antagonize the American president.

It isn’t too late for Mr. Netanyahu to change course. He has reaped diplomatic fruits from the regional crisis, but has refrained from taking political risks at home. His timidity and cynicism will prove costly for Israel when the Arab storm reaches its shores. Before time runs out, he must leverage Israel’s new strength to join Mr. Obama in creative diplomacy to avert a diplomatic debacle in September and pursue a stable peace with the Palestinians.

Free speech in Israel was dealt a severe blow this month when the country’s Parliament passed antiboycott legislation that targets individuals or organizations publicly calling for a boycott against Israel or any area under its control.

Because I believe in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, equal rights for Palestinians and Jews, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes and lands in 1948, I support boycotting — and calling on others to boycott — all Israeli companies that help perpetuate these injustices.

But this new legal limit on free speech could bankrupt me.

Israeli officials will not throw me in jail for publicly supporting such boycotts, but settler groups can claim financial damages without even having to show any harm done. Furthermore, organizations supporting boycotts could be denied tax-deductible contributions and state funding. This week, I appealed the law to the high court.

Already, a member of the Knesset, our Parliament, Alex Miller, has threatened to sue me for my words — specifically my call, which I continue to make today, to boycott the illegal Jewish settlement of Ariel. Such a call would be unremarkable in a proper democracy with untrammeled free speech. The right to criticize a population that has dispossessed Palestinians and discriminated against us for decades should be protected speech.

Perhaps my parliamentary immunity will protect me, but that can readily be stripped. Moreover, parliamentary immunity will not protect Israelis who urge fellow citizens not to buy Ahava beauty products created from natural resources illegally extracted from the occupied shores of the Dead Sea and manufactured in a factory in an illegal West Bank settlement, to avoid wines from the occupied Golan Heights, or to hire construction companies other than those that build exclusive and discriminatory housing units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proudly taken ownership of the bill for his Likud party, declaring: “Don’t be confused — I authorized the bill. If I hadn’t authorized it, it wouldn’t have gotten here.” Given Netanyahu’s warm reception on Capitol Hill when he visited the United States a few weeks ago, I fear that most members of Congress will not offer a peep of protest, even as Israel, a key American ally that bills itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” strays into undemocratic and clearly bigoted lawmaking.

The Israeli Parliament’s antiboycott legislation is an unprecedented effort to undercut nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. Many people believe that making nonviolence more difficult will make violence inevitable. I do not. Approving such irresponsible and reactionary legislation highlights Israel’s long decades of injustice to Palestinians and hands us something of a political victory. Through this legislation, Israel has drawn further attention to its violent occupation of Palestinian territory and routine violations of international law.

Colonizing settlers and their elected representatives now rule Israel’s political landscape, and few dare to stand against them. This reticence in the face of repeated abuses by settlers reflects poorly on Israeli society and the U.S. government.

One of Israel’s leading newspapers, Haaretz, noted in an editorial that the antiboycott legislation “is a politically opportunistic and antidemocratic act, the latest in a series of outrageously discriminatory and exclusionary laws enacted over the past year, and it accelerates the process of transforming Israel’s legal code into a disturbingly dictatorial document. It casts the threatening shadow of criminal offense over every boycott, petition or even newspaper op-ed. Very soon, all political debate will be silenced.”

Haaretz may well be right. I prefer to believe, however, that the overreach of the extreme right in Israel will eventually rouse people of good will in the United States and Europe to put greater pressure on the Israeli government to change course. Despite the hopes of American politicians, Israel is not going to change on its own. Only very real international pressure will force the Israeli government to change. Until then, we can expect more discriminatory and undemocratic legislation from this Knesset.

Resulta difícil no asombrarse ante el contraste entre la energía de la economía y la sociedad civil –similares a las “asiáticas”- de Israel y el carácter puramente defensivo de su actitud ante el cambio político, tanto dentro como fuera del país. Una ley reciente prohíbe a los ciudadanos israelíes apoyar boicoteos occidentales encaminados a abandonar las políticas del país en materia de asentamientos y respaldar un Estado palestino independiente. Mientras que Israel nunca ha estado tan próspero, dinámico y seguro de sí mismo, tampoco ha estado nunca tan aislado internacionalmente.

Israel podría haber aprovechado la “primavera árabe” como una oportunidad y no haberla visto como un profundo riesgo. Si los ciudadanos árabes podían transformar su cultura de humillación en otra de esperanza, tal vez podrían haberse resignado a la existencia de Israel, pero los dirigentes israelíes reaccionaron de forma puramente negativa ante los levantamientos árabes. A su juicio, un ambiente regional complejo ha pasado a ser ahora más peligroso incluso, por lo que la prudencia resulta aún más urgente.

Para Israel, los déspotas del pasado inmediato, como el ex Presidente de Egipto, Hosni Mubarak, eran mucho más previsibles que las “masas árabes”. Si bien algunos de los manifestantes podían estar inspirados en ideales democráticos, no nos hagamos ilusiones, parecen estar diciendo los israelíes: las fuerzas islamistas resultarán ser los únicos triunfadores y son mucho más hostiles a Israel y a Occidente que sus predecesores.

Naturalmente, en vista de las matanzas por parte del régimen sirio de sus propios ciudadanos, algunos en Israel dicen que el sufrimiento de los habitantes de Gaza palidece en comparación, con lo que no les granjea tantos simpatizantes como en el año pasado, pero no por ello se debe olvidar el panorama diplomático general para Israel, que sigue siendo esencialmente negativo.

Uno de los resultados más irónicos de la configuración política en transformación de la región es el de que Israel advierte una convergencia estratégica con Arabia Saudí. Pese a las profundas diferencias de sus sistemas políticos, los dos son partidarios del status quo regional y comparten una sospecha obsesiva respecto del Irán.

Pero, ¿por qué no imaginar un nuevo triángulo estratégico que abarque a Israel, Arabia Saudí y Turquía, del mismo modo que los israelíes imaginaron un triángulo no árabe entre Israel, Turquía y el Irán del Sha? La consternada reacción de los turcos ante el brutal comportamiento del régimen sirio brinda una oportunidad que Israel debería aprovechar para intentar restablecer la privilegiada relación con el Gobierno de Recep Tayyip Erdoğan existente antes del bloqueo de Gaza, pero eso presupondría un pequeño gesto para con los palestinos, a los que los israelíes consideran tan profundamente divididos entre sí, que no parece posible avance alguno hacia un acuerdo de paz.

Los dirigentes de Israel parecen decididos a ganar tiempo tanto tácticamente, oponiendo resistencia a la suave presión del gobierno del Presidente de los Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, como estratégicamente, preparando al país para un mundo nuevo en el que potencias en ascenso como China desempeñan un papel cada vez más importante.

Sin embargo, será un mundo en el que Israel ya no podrá contar con los sentimientos de culpabilidad por el Holocausto para influir en las potencias más importantes, un mundo en el que las rivalidades monoteístas quedarán diluidas en un océano de credos politeístas y en el que Israel podrá depender sólo de sus méritos relativos ante los observadores cínicos y realistas que lo juzgarán exclusivamente conforme a sus propios intereses nacionales.

Israel puede ser “de Europa” y sus aliados principales pueden muy bien seguir siendo los Estados Unidos durante muchos años por venir, pero los dirigentes israelíes deben empezar a pensar en cómo puede prosperar su país en un mundo postoccidental. La más reciente “Conferencia de Presidentes”, celebrada en junio en Jerusalén con el patrocinio del Presidente de Israel, Shimon Peres, fue muy simbólica de esa evolución. En la sesión de apertura, el enviado especial de Obama, Denis Ross, fue acogido con un silencio ensordecedor cuando transmitió a los participantes los buenos deseos de su jefe. En cambio, el ministo de Cultura de China recibió una acogida muy calurosa cuando habló, en un sentido muy propio de su país, de la necesidad cada vez mayor de “armonía” mundial.

Según algunos pensadores estratégicos israelíes, Israel debe resistir firmemente durante dos o tres generaciones más para llegar a ser una realidad irreversible en la región y un legítimo “hecho consumado”  del sistema internacional. En ese momento, ¿quién querría boicotear a un país cuya proezas tecnológicas sean necesarias en todo el mundo?

En ese marco, la idea de un acuerdo de paz con los palestinos parece más abstracta que nunca. De hecho, hace que el status quo actual parezca cómodo. La distancia que separa actualmente a los ricos de los pobres en Israel puede recordar al Brasil, pero, ¿quién recuerda los ideales socialdemócratas de los primeros sionistas?

La prosperidad del país resulta sencillamente abrumadora. De Tel Aviv a Jerusalén, se están multiplicando los edificios de pisos lujosos. ¿Estamos en Singapur, Hong Kong o São Paulo? ¿Por qué poner en entredicho las certidumbres del presente con las incertidumbres del futuro?

Además, Israel no sólo ha llegado a ser mucho más próspero; también se ha inclinado decididamente hacia la derecha. La segunda Intifada puede muy bien haber resultado fatal para la izquierda israelí. El capitalismo triunfante, la idolatría de la tierra y las comodidades del status quo producen un cóctel que se sube a la cabeza, pero, embriagados con los beneficios de la mundialización y mientras esperan con una mezcla de entusiasmo y aprensión la llegada de un nuevo orden mundial postoccidental, los israelíes están bailando en el borde de un volcán.

Suddenly, all the major pro-Israel organizations are anguishing about “delegitimization.” Those who criticize Israeli policies are accused of trying to delegitimize Israel, which supposedly means denying Israel’s right to exist.

The concept of delegitimization has been used as a weapon against Israel’s critics at least as far back as 1975, when then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan accused the international body of delegitimizing Israel by passing a “Zionism is racism ” resolution. That may have been the last time the term was used accurately.

In a May speech, President Obama used it in reference to the Palestinian effort to seek recognition of their national aspirations at the U.N. General Assembly, as Israel successfully did in 1947. He said that “for the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure.” But he failed to explain just how a Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations would delegitimize Israel.

The Palestinians are not, after all, seeking statehood in Israeli territory but in territory that the whole world, including Israel, recognizes as having been occupied by Israel only after the 1967 war. Rather than seeking Israel’s elimination, the Palestinians who intend to go to the United Nations are seeking establishment of a state alongside Israel. (That state would encompass 22% of the British mandate for Palestine, approved by the League of Nations in 1922, with Israel possessing 78%.)

The whole concept of delegitimization seems archaic. Israel achieved its “legitimacy” when the United Nations recognized it 63 years ago. It has one of the strongest economies in the world. Its military is the most powerful in the region. It has a nuclear arsenal of about 200 bombs, with the ability to launch them from land, sea and air.

In that context, the whole idea of delegitimizing Israel sounds silly. Israel can’t be delegitimized.

So why are the pro-Israel organizations talking about it? The answer is simple: They are trying to divert attention from the intensifying world opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, both of which, by almost any standard, are illegitimate. They are trying to divert attention from the ever-expanding settlements, which are not only illegitimate but illegal under international law. They are trying to divert attention from the ever-louder calls for Israel to grant Palestinians equal rights.

The effort to change the subject from the existence of the occupation to the existence of Israel makes sense strategically. Israel has no case when it comes to the occupation, which the entire world, except Israel, agrees must end. But Israel certainly has the upper hand in any argument over its right to exist and to defend itself.

That is why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu routinely invokes Israel’s “right to self-defense” every time he tries to explain away some Israeli attack on Palestinians, no matter whether they are armed fighters or innocent civilians. If the Israeli-Palestinian discussion is about Israel’s right to defend itself, Israel wins the argument. But if it is about the occupation — which is, in fact, what the conflict has been about since 1993, when the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel — it loses.

It wasn’t that long ago that neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli lobby worried about the “forces of delegitimization.”

On the contrary, in 1993, after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s recognition of the Palestinians’ right to a state in the West Bank and Gaza, nine non-Arab Muslim states and 32 of the 43 sub-Saharan African states established relations with Israel. India and China, the two largest markets in the world, opened trade relations. Jordan signed a peace treaty and several of the Arab emirates began quiet dealings with Israel.

The Arab boycott of Israel ended. Foreign investment soared. No one discussed delegitimization while much of the world, including the Muslim world, was knocking on Israel’s door to establish or deepen ties.

That trend continued so long as the Israeli government seemed to be genuinely engaged in the peace process.

The most graphic demonstration of Israel’s high international standing back then occurred at Rabin’s funeral in 1995, which rivaled President Kennedy’s in terms of international representation.

Leaders from virtually every nation came to pay homage to Rabin: President Clinton, Prince Charles, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, every European president or prime minister, top officials from most of Africa and Asia (including India and China), Latin America, Turkey, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar and Tunisia. Yasser Arafat went to the Tel Aviv apartment of Rabin’s widow, Leah, to express his grief.

The world mourned Rabin because under him, Israel had embraced the cause of peace with the Palestinians. The homage was a clear demonstration — as was the opening of trade and diplomatic relations with formerly hostile states — that Israel was not being isolated because it is a Jewish state and hence illegitimate, but because of how it treated the Palestinians.

And that is the case today. It’s not the Palestinians who are delegitimizing Israel, but the Israeli government, which maintains the occupation. And the leading delegitimizer is Netanyahu, whose contemptuous rejection of peace is turning Israel into an international pariah.

Sure, Netanyahu received an embarrassing number of standing ovations when he spoke before the U.S. Congress. But that demonstrates nothing except the power of the Israel lobby. It is doubtful that Netanyahu would get a single standing ovation in any other parliament in the world — and that includes Israel’s. The only thing we learned (yet again) from Netanyahu’s reception by Congress is that money talks.

So let’s ignore the talk about delegitimization, even though Madison Avenue message-makers certainly deserve credit for coming up with that clever distraction. Israel’s problem is the occupation, the Israeli government that defends it and the lobby that enforces support for it in Congress and the White House.

Once again, Israel’s “best friends” are among its worst enemies.

Another major border dispute has broken out between Israel and Lebanon, one that offers each country the choice of sharing prosperity or inflicting on each other an economic catastrophe. The Israeli Cabinet on Sunday approved the coordinates of an exclusive economic zone delineating waters up to 200 nautical miles off its coast in which it claims oil and gas exploration rights. The borders of the area overlap with those submitted by the Lebanese government six months ago to the United Nations in delineating its own claims for an exclusive economic zone. The overlap area in dispute consists of about 5.8 square miles.

What makes the dispute particularly charged is that probes in the past year by offshore rigs in Israeli waters south of the disputed area have uncovered vast reserves of natural gas and oil valued at many billions of dollars, with a potentially far-reaching impact on the Israeli economy.

When Israel first announced these finds, Lebanese officials claimed that the waters were Lebanese and that Israel was stealing its resources. Israeli officials in turn warned that any attempt by Lebanon – or the dominant Hezbollah faction – to strike at the offshore facilities would elicit “strong” retaliation. In the Lebanese proposal submitted to the U.N., there is, in fact, no claim on the area where Israel has already discovered gas, but there is evident hope in Beirut that similar finds will be made in its own waters.

Although animosity between Israel and Hezbollah keeps them constantly on the edge of armed conflict, the very vulnerability of oil rigs to land-based missiles or airstrikes would be a major restraining factor for both sides. Unlike Israel, Lebanon does not have any oil rigs off its coast, but it is clearly in Israel’s interests that Lebanon eventually does make significant underwater finds. It would be clear then to the Hezbollah leadership and Lebanon’s business community that any strike on Israel’s oil facilities would bring the immediate destruction of Lebanon‘s. If this deterrent did not exist, Israel’s facilities would be at constant risk.

In the wake of the dramatic gas discoveries in Israel’s waters, Lebanon hired a Norwegian firm to conduct a seismic survey on the border of Israel’s claimed exclusive zone.

Both Israel and Lebanon have concluded agreements with Cyprus regarding the western edge of their respective exclusive economic zones. But the maritime border between Israel and Lebanon has never been established. Israel is demanding that the dispute with Lebanon be settled in direct negotiations. However, Lebanon does not recognize Israel and is leaving the matter to be resolved by the U.N.

For long, a country’s territorial waters extended only three nautical miles from the shore, the effective range of a cannon shot. In 1982, a U.N. convention on the Law of the Sea extended territorial waters to 12 miles and established for maritime countries exclusive economic zones extending 200 miles offshore except where there is overlap with a neighboring country’s claims. Australia has the third-largest exclusive economic zone off its shores, behind only the United States and France. One of the major extant disputes is that between China and neighboring countries over the area of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.