Aug 11, 2015

Yuval Diskin, the former Shin Bet head, wrote with bitter irony in a Facebook post over the weekend that Israel was becoming an apartheid regime, or, in his words, “a state based on Jewish halachic law in which a divided Jewish minority rules the Palestinian majority in its midst by force.” According to Diskin, instead of establishing a Palestinian state in the territories conquered in 1967, “a ’state of Judea’ has been established there, controlled by anarchist ideologies opposed to the state, violent and racist.” The man who headed the security agency from 2005 to 2011 stressed that Jewish terrorism — “a cancer in the body of the state” — has been developing for years before the very eyes of the top political, judicial and defense echelons. He diagnosed a lack of leadership and direction as the main cause of this dangerous malady.

And, indeed, Israel is experiencing an acute deficiency of leadership. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have successfully run a public relations agency. He may find a way to douse the fires set by that “state of Judea” that burn people in their sleep, damage mosques and destroy fields. But putting out fires is not leadership. Spreading lies about the Arab minority to delegitimize it (on election day, Netanyahu said, “They are heading to the polling stations in droves”) and boasting of superior Jewish morality (“We deplore and condemn these murderers. We will pursue them to the end.”) versus the murderous Palestinians (“They name public squares after murderers of children.”) are all, at best, a dead end, and in the worst case, these roads lead to a precipice.

Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip, where a military achievement was turned into a diplomatic failure, clearly illustrates the price of the absence of leadership and lack of strategic direction. Soon after the operation, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that Hamas found itself in diplomatic and strategic distress. Quite right. But the question is what Israel gained from this distress. Ya’alon went on to boast that the organization “has lost touch with the Muslim Brotherhood and with Syria and Iran.” Too true. But one should examine how Israel took advantage of the enemy’s diplomatic isolation.

A year after the operation, it now seems that Israel is the one finding itself in diplomatic and strategic distress, the likes of which it has not known for years. Its government has weakened the special relationship it maintained with much of the world. The Israeli Cabinet itself unanimously declared that the six strongest states on Earth had signed a “bad deal” with Iran, the entity considered in Jerusalem to be an existential threat to the Jewish state. Criticism of the occupation keeps mounting, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is gaining momentum. Internal tensions in Israeli society, especially between right and left and between Jews and Arabs, are growing stronger.

On the other hand, Hamas, which lost out on the battlefield, is racking up achievements in the diplomatic arena. In contrast to Israel, the organization has learned its lessons from the latest conflict and is putting them to good use. While the Israeli leadership is bogged down in its all-or-nothing quagmire, Hamas is adopting a pragmatic approach. The extent of the change can be gauged from a new article on the official Hamas website written by Yousef Rizka, the former minister of information in the Hamas government and a close adviser to former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Matti Steinberg of the Israel Democracy Institute told Al-Monitor that Rizka’s lengthy article, published in Hamas’ electronic library, reflects a dramatic change in the movement’s political thinking. The writer states that the organization’s charter (which calls for the destruction of the “Jewish entity”) is no longer relevant to its diplomatic conduct.