CHAPTER 6

The Battle for Moral Clarity

ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2000, a day when Israelis were celebrating the Jewish New Year, the second “intifada” began. Unlike the first intifada thirteen years before, this was no spontaneous uprising. The pretext for the violence was the visit two days earlier of then opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount, the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, the holiest place for the Jewish people and the site of the world-famous Al-Aqsa Mosque. Absurdly, many people around the world called Sharon’s visit a “provocation.” In fact, not only was it coordinated with the appropriate Moslem religious authorities in advance, but Israeli ministers and members of Knesset often went to the Temple Mount without incident and continue to go there today. I myself was there recently as part of my duties as minister of Jerusalem affairs.

The calculated campaign of terror was designed to gain through violence what could not be achieved through diplomacy. Prime Minister Barak had agreed to offer Arafat everything the PA leader was believed in the “West” to have wanted: a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Jerusalem, even a formula for resolving the Palestinian refugee issue. But Barak demanded one thing in return: that Arafat end the conflict, something the Palestinian dictator had no intention of doing. For six years, Arafat built a society based on fear, maintaining his repressive rule by mobilizing his people for war against the Jewish state. He was not about to give up the enemy that stabilized his control over the Palestinians or end the conflict that was his lifeblood.

Barak’s offer temporarily wrong-footed Arafat: By refusing it, he became the obstacle to peace. To turn the diplomatic tables on Israel, Arafat waged war. That Arafat would seriously think he could force Israel, with its vastly superior army and in an ostensibly strong diplomatic position, into making concessions may seem hard to believe. But Arafat knew he had an ace up his sleeve: the lack of moral clarity in the free world, which allowed Arafat to be seen as a victim of Israel’s superior military capability. Ironically, by conferring legitimacy on him, and by calling on others to do the same, Israeli governments, including those in which I served, had contributed to this lack of moral clarity.

In a world that did not recognize the moral difference between free and fear societies and in a world that expected democracies at war to act like democracies at peace, Arafat had a huge advantage. In this moral confusion, he could turn the aggressor into a victim and a state defending itself according to the highest human rights standards into an international pariah. The wall-to-wall support that Israel should have received from the democratic world in repelling the unprecedented terrorist war Arafat launched never materialized. And with moral clarity in short supply, the boundaries of legitimate criticism of the State of Israel became blurred, helping trigger a new wave of anti-Semitism the likes of which the free world had not seen for sixty years.

For the last decade, many in the free world were convincing themselves that the rise of anti-Semitism in the Middle East was an unfortunate but passing episode on the way to peace. Now, it appears as though the peace process was a passing episode on the way to a revived anti-Semitism.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS CONFUSION

One way to see today’s lack of moral clarity is to take note of the confusion that continues to surround the question of human rights. Rather than serve as a sacred principle that leaves little room for doubt, human rights have always been mired in controversy. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted at the United Nations in 1948, it was adopted without dissent, but with abstentions by Soviet bloc nations, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.¹ As is true of any attempt to bridge the unbridgeable moral gap between dictatorship and democracy, the declaration stood for everything, and hence, for nothing.

This was good news for the Soviet Union, which always tried to undermine efforts to bring moral clarity to the issue of human rights. As Western leaders justly denounced the human rights record of the communist superpower, Soviet leaders consistently attacked liberal democracies in the language of human rights by wrapping them in the mantle of “social justice”—a social justice that was being used by those same regimes to justify the murder of tens of millions of their own subjects.

Still, for those who were not totally blinded by the egalitarian newspeak of tyrants like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, the Cold War offered something of an antidote to the obfuscation of human rights issues. By splitting the world into two, the struggle between the totalitarian East and the democratic West helped clarify the conflict—at least for those willing to open their eyes—as a battle between good and evil, right and wrong.

For dissidents within the former Soviet Union, these moral lines were practically self-evident. Unlike philosophers and rights activists in the West, we dissidents did not feel the need to split hairs over the precise nature of human rights.

We knew that to determine whether or not human rights were being generally upheld in a particular country, we only had to ask a few simple questions:

Could people in that country speak their minds?

Could they publish their opinions?

Could they practice their faith?

Could they learn the history and culture of their people?

 

We understood that for those living in a fear society, the answer to most of our questions, if not all of them, was no. The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies. While these structures are not always sufficient to ensure the protection of human rights, our experience had convinced us that without them, human rights would inevitably be crushed. Every political prisoner in the Gulag recognized the moral chasm that separated free societies and fear societies. We recognized that a free society did not guarantee the protection of human rights, but we knew that a fear society guaranteed their violation.

Yet the connection between democracy and human rights that seemed so clear to us dissidents was often ignored in the West. The blindness to this connection by many of those whom we saw as natural allies in the human rights struggle was a source of constant disappointment for those fighting for freedom within the Soviet Union. We dissidents could ready ourselves psychologically for a life of risk, arrest, and imprisonment. But we could never fully prepare ourselves for the disappointment that came from seeing the free world abandon its own values. And nowhere was this disappointment more bitterly experienced than from the confines of a prison cell.

An example was the trip of the world-famous evangelical preacher, Billy Graham, to the Soviet Union in 1984. For many years before and since, Graham and his followers have been a driving force for moral clarity in world affairs. But on this particular trip, Graham helped the cause of moral equivalence. When he arrived in the Baltic Republics, a region with a large number of Protestants, Graham was permitted to deliver his riveting sermons in packed stadiums. In an interview following one of those sermons, he was asked to describe freedom of religion within the Soviet Union. After remarking that he had been free to preach wherever he wanted, Graham observed that challenges relating to religious freedoms were not particular to the USSR. “You have some problems with religion,” he told the Soviet journalist, and “the United States has problems with religion.” Both countries, Graham said, could do better.

Sitting in my prison cell, I read about Graham’s visit in Pravda, the government-controlled newspaper we were permitted to read. Pravda’s editors naturally gave pride of place to the American preacher’s comments about freedom of religion inside the Soviet Union. I was dumbfounded. How could Graham possibly place religious freedom in a free society like the United States on a par with religious freedom in a fear society like the Soviet Union? Did the heated debates in America over the separation of church and state blind Graham to the fact that individuals in the USSR were completely denied the right to practice their faith? Did Graham not understand that he was giving legitimacy to a system that sought to eradicate religion completely?

Though Graham was free to preach to tens of thousands of people, my own cellmate, Vladimir Poresh, who was Greek Orthodox, was given a seven-year sentence for teaching Christian “propaganda” to fewer than ten people. Our fellow prisoners included many of Graham’s fellow Pentecostals, who were first exiled to Siberia and later persecuted for trying to teach religion to their own children.

When I mentioned Graham’s remarks to Poresh, it reminded Poresh of his own trial. During his pre-trial interrogation, his Bible was taken away from him. The authorities gave it back to him the day before the trial and then used his possession of it as “proof” that freedom of religion was protected in the USSR. Of course, immediately after the trial the Bible was taken from him again. Ironically, when Graham was praising religious freedom in the USSR, Poresh was on a hunger strike. Why? To get back the Bible our jailers had once again taken from him.

At least Graham later regretted his remarks. But the same cannot be said about the many peace activists in the early 1980s who showed a similar lapse of moral clarity. In response to the Soviet buildup of intermediate range nuclear missiles, President Reagan and Western European leaders were determined to deploy Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe to deter any possible Soviet attack on the Continent. Millions of people took to the streets in Western European capitals protesting that the real aggressors were the warmongering American president and his European allies, not the Soviets. The leaders of the anti-nuclear rallies pointed to the “peace activists” from the USSR who were denouncing Western aggression and marching alongside them as proof that the Soviets wanted peace. But those who were marching in Europe were a handpicked delegation sent by the Soviet regime to increase pressure on Western governments to reverse their position and remove the Pershings. Meanwhile, the real peace activists in the USSR, those who had demanded that the Soviets disarm, were languishing in prison with me.

While Graham and the peace activists certainly did not intend to crush the spirits of dissidents inside the USSR, that was the effect of their actions. I am sure Iranians fighting for their freedom felt a similar dejection when an official in the American State Department recently referred to their country as a democracy.

THE MORAL MUDDLE IN ISRAEL

When I arrived in Israel in 1986, I was inundated with hundreds of telegrams from across the world. One stuck out in particular, as it was sent from three PLO activists in Europe. At that time, contact with the PLO was against Israeli law. The telegram read: “You fought for human rights in the Soviet Union and we are fighting for human rights in Palestine. Your struggle is our struggle.”

At first, I was amused. The idea that anyone could seriously claim the PLO and I were engaged in the same “struggle” seemed absolutely preposterous. I assumed that everyone could instantly recognize this fact by asking themselves the same simple questions we dissidents asked ourselves in the Soviet Union.

Could Palestinians subject to Israeli rule speak their minds?

Could they publish their opinions?

Could they practice their faith?

Could they learn their own history and culture?

Since the answer to all these questions was yes, I was quite certain that the two “struggles” were worlds apart. But there was also another important difference. Champions of human rights would never deliberately kill civilians to advance their agendas, nor support any movement or person who did. In fact, the dissidents I knew did not resort to any form of violence whatsoever, knowing that this would only cede the moral high ground that was so essential to our struggle. For the PLO, however, terrorism was a calling card. They murdered Olympic athletes, executed kindergarten schoolchildren, hijacked airliners, set off bombs in public places, and committed a host of other acts of terror.

Despite these obvious differences, I soon realized that the notion that our two struggles were the same was a widespread delusion. In my first few days in Israel, I spoke to many foreign journalists who invariably got around to asking the same question: “Will you now continue your human rights activism by fighting for Palestinian human rights?” To these journalists, my struggle and the Palestinian struggle were one and the same.

Unlike the PLO, who were simply using the human rights issue to batter the Jewish state, many of the journalists who asked me this question had a genuine regard for human rights. They were concerned with the miserable conditions in which many Palestinians lived and felt that the world had an obligation to improve them. On this point, I wholeheartedly agreed with them.

By the time I arrived in Israel, two generations of Palestinians had already been raised in squalid refugee camps, pawns in the Arab world’s struggle against the Jewish state. Hundreds of thousands became innocent bystanders caught in the middle of a war that Palestinian terrorists and the Arab states were waging against Israel. The roadblocks, closures, curfews, and other measures Israel was forced to take to defend its citizens often left Palestinians unable to get to their jobs or visit their families.

Yet despite my sympathy with this suffering and my desire to see it redressed, I could never understand how anyone could equate Israel’s free society with a fear society. In the Soviet Union, a true fear society, there was no dissent, no free speech, no free press, no freedom of religion, no independent courts, and no human rights organizations. Indeed, the members of the Helsinki Group had been arrested merely for reporting human rights abuses. For Palestinians under Israeli rule, the situation was vastly different. They could speak freely, publish their ideas, practice their faith, appeal to independent courts, and contact human rights organizations.

When a human rights organization I deeply respected also chose to ignore the important moral distinction between free and fear societies, I realized the full extent of the problem. Amnesty International, an organization dedicated to fighting human rights abuses around the world, is well known for its support of prisoners of conscience and the right of dissent. I felt a strong personal connection to Amnesty International: Several of my friends were sentenced to prison for collecting information on its behalf, and I myself had been a beneficiary of their indefatigable efforts to raise awareness about political dissidents and to fight for their release. I thought of Amnesty as an organization with which I could completely identify.

Soon after I arrived in Israel, I met with Amnesty officials. It felt like a reunion of old comrades. I gave them information on other prisoners and the conditions of the camps in which I had stayed. They gave me a copy of their annual human rights report and told me about their ongoing campaigns for dissidents around the world. I was honored when they asked me to speak at a meeting later that year in London.

But when I began to flip through the pages of the annual report I immediately noticed that something was terribly wrong. There were pages and pages of material about human rights abuses in my new country, Israel, and very little on the nondemocratic states that surrounded us. It appeared as though Israel was a bigger violator of human rights than Saudi Arabia, a country where there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, and no freedom of religion. In fact, the impression one got from the report was that Israel was one of the worst human rights abusers in the world, if not the worst. When I was given the opportunity to speak to Amnesty supporters in London later that year, I decided to address the matter head on.

I pointed out that precisely because Israel is an open society where the press is free to criticize the government and where human rights organizations are free to issue damning reports, it is much easier to garner information on human rights abuses in Israel than in closed societies. While I told the audience that I did not believe human rights abuses in Israel should ever be glossed over or hidden from the public eye, I offered what I thought was a constructive suggestion. Why not divide the report into three sections, one for totalitarian regimes, one for authoritarian regimes, and one for democracies? Without those categories, Amnesty was creating a dangerous moral equivalence between countries where human rights are sometimes abused and countries where they are always abused.

The reply of Amnesty officials following my speech was extremely disappointing. “We are not going to label countries,” they told me. “We will simply show the picture as it is.” Nearly twenty years later, Amnesty has not changed its policy. It continues to proudly state that it “does not support or oppose any political system” because it is “concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.”² But how can a human rights organization be impartial about political systems that are inherently hostile to human rights? No doubt, its dedicated activists believe that this impartiality between fear and free societies does not undermine the cause of human rights. But it does.

HOW FREE SOCIETIES RESPOND TO HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

In the post 9/11 world, many democratic governments now have a better appreciation of how difficult it can be to find the appropriate balance between providing maximum security to your citizens and protecting human rights. In debating issues like the Patriot Act or the rights granted to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Americans are confronting a dilemma that Israel has faced since the day it was established.

Human rights violations can and do take place in democratic societies. But one of the things that sets democracies apart from fear societies is the way they respond to those violations. A fear society does not openly debate human rights issues. Its people do not protest. Its regime does not investigate. Its press does not expose. Its courts do not protect. In contrast, democratic societies are always engaged in self-examination.

For example, look at how the United States dealt with the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. Even before the abuse became publicly known, the army had suspended those involved and was conducting a full investigation. And as soon as the disturbing pictures of the abuse were published, America’s democracy was shocked into action. The Congress, determined to find the culprits, immediately convened public hearings, and demanded a full account of what led to the abuse. Politicians and opinion makers insisted that the people responsible for the abuse be held accountable, including those at the very top of the chain of command. The media mulled over the details, pursuing every allegation, tracking down every lead. The American people openly discussed what the abuse said about their own country’s values, its image in the world, and how that image would affect the broader War on Terror. The U.S. president, for his part, apologized to the families of the victims and said that those responsible would be punished.

But let’s not forget that the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib under Saddam was far worse than anything America was accused of. Yet were pictures distributed of Saddam’s soldiers murdering, raping, and torturing Iraqis? If they had been distributed, would Iraq’s parliament have conducted public hearings? Would the Iraqi media have reported it? Would anyone have publicly called for the resignation of Saddam’s defense minister, let alone Saddam himself? Would Saddam have denounced the brutality and apologized to the victims and their families?

Far from showing that all societies are the same, the human rights abuses that sometimes occur in democracies often help illustrate the tremendous moral divide that separates free and fear societies. While I have not always agreed with the decisions made by my government on issues related to human rights, my experience has made me confident that these issues are thoroughly discussed and debated and that the need to protect human rights is never ignored. I suspect that in most other free societies the situation is much the same. Every democratic state will choose its own balance between protecting security and protecting human rights, but concern for human rights will always be part of the decisionmaking process. The free world is not perfect, but the way it responds to its imperfections is only further proof that human rights can only be protected in democratic societies.

A DEMOCRACY AT WAR

The failure to acknowledge the moral difference between free and fear societies with respect to human rights is a problem for all democracies. But for a democracy at war, such as Israel, this lack of moral clarity proves particularly debilitating. The same disregard for context that leads an organization or an individual to place fear societies and free societies on the same moral footing will also result in the condemnation of a free society that is merely defending itself. Indeed, by detaching the concept of human rights from the concept of a free society, human rights can be turned into a weapon against those countries that cherish them most.

When I arrived in Israel, the biggest human rights issue was Israel’s policy of administrative detention, under which prisoners are held without an open trial for up to six months and are unable to see the evidence against them. (According to Israeli law, before an administrative detention can be enforced a judge must authorize it based on his review of the evidence.) I was often asked my opinion on the issue. On the face of it, the policy seemed unwarranted. But I knew that human rights could never be judged in a vacuum. In a fear society, the entire system was a violation of human rights. In a free society, however, there are certain circumstances in which some rights may have to yield to defend other rights.

Being new to the country and having already seen how politicized the human rights struggle in Israel had become, I wanted to study the issue before expressing any view. At the time, the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza was subject to Israeli rule, and almost all of the administrative detentions applied to Palestinians who lived in those areas. I asked for a meeting with the chief coordinator of the territories to discuss the issue. He informed me that there were about a dozen cases of administrative detention (this was, of course, before the first intifada began, after which the number ballooned to a few hundred). He maintained that each detainee constituted a serious security threat and that due to the classified nature of the cases he could not go into too much detail.

But he did give me a brief overview of one of the cases. He told me about the case of a Palestinian journalist who was allegedly serving as a courier for the PLO, passing along information to those who were charged with carrying out terror attacks. He was caught when, unbeknownst to him, he supplied information to an informant. The informant brought the journalist to the attention of his Israeli handlers. The Israeli security services feared that if they allowed the defendant or his lawyer to see all the evidence, the informant would be killed, and the identities of many other informants would be exposed. Israel’s informant network, he argued, had been critical in preventing terror attacks in the past and would be critical to the future. He warned, therefore, that taking the person out of administrative detention and granting an open trial (rather than having only an Israeli judge review the evidence) would cause great damage to Israel’s security and endanger the lives of many of its citizens.

While there could be disagreement over whether any specific case warranted administrative detention, I acknowledged that in principle there could be circumstances when this policy might be acceptable. But for some people, administrative detentions are never acceptable. By taking such a position, these people surely feel that they are protecting human rights. They are not. By indiscriminately condemning a free society that upholds human rights but which is sometimes forced to encroach on certain freedoms to save lives, they do not advance the cause of human rights. Protecting the right to life, the most precious human right of all and the right that makes the exercise of all other rights possible, is the highest obligation of any government. Of course, it can be very tempting to use a security argument to justify abuse. It is much easier to hold someone in administrative detention than to hold a trial. That is why it is so important to limit administrative detentions as much as possible and why democracies must be constantly on alert for abuses. As a minister, I was among those who were constantly insisting that the criteria for applying administrative detention should be as narrow as possible. I also did not hesitate to ask security officials to justify their detention of a number of prisoners. But to argue that in principle, administrative detentions are never justified, that I was not prepared to do.

Those fighting for human rights who do not distinguish between free and fear societies will be shorn of a moral compass. Sadly, by detaching moral concepts from the context that give them meaning, human rights activists are just as likely to find themselves championing a genuine human rights cause as unwittingly defending dictatorial regimes. Thus, it is no wonder that there is little appreciation for the challenge Israel faces as a democracy trying to maximize the security of its citizens and at the same time protect the human rights of Palestinians.

THE TERROR BEGINS

Given this moral confusion, it was not surprising that when the Palestinian intifada began, a dangerous moral equivalence was introduced. In an effort to be “evenhanded,” statesmen, politicians, diplomats, and journalists would often refer to the “extremists on both sides” who were trying to undermine peace efforts. One would think that they were referring to two groups of fanatics, each dedicated to killing innocent people. But no: The extremists on the Palestinian side were terror organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad that were wholeheartedly opposed to any compromise; and on the Israeli side were those Jews who were unwilling to transfer any territory to the Palestinians under any circumstances. Is there really not a moral difference between the two?

Leaving aside the difference in the goals of the two sides, the difference in the means employed to advance those goals should preclude any comparison. The Palestinian extremists use terrorism and the blackmail that accompanies it to achieve their objectives. They systematically blow up buses, discos, cafes, and pizza shops, murdering and maiming scores of innocent people. In contrast, the so-called Jewish extremists try to advance their Greater Land of Israel agenda by convincing a majority of their fellow citizens of the justice of their positions. They are not murderers. The phrase “extremists on both sides” in fact describes two completely different phenomena. In the Palestinian case, it refers to terrorists. In the Israeli case, it refers to people who are part of a democratic process and respect democratic laws, but who hold views that are not considered mainstream.

Another obvious moral difference between Israel’s free society and the Palestinian’s fear society is how each treats the real extremists. The Palestinian Authority turns them into martyrs, naming public squares and soccer teams after suicide bombers, encouraging hundreds of thousands to join funeral processions for mass murderers and trying to indoctrinate a generation of Palestinians to emulate their actions.

The response of both the government of Israel and the people of Israel to the handful of real extremists that we do have in our society is very different. The horrible attack of Baruch Goldstein, a Jew who massacred Palestinians worshipping in a Hebron mosque, is considered by almost all Israelis as a mark of shame on the country.

Another phrase that is often mistakenly applied to the conflict, the “cycle of violence,” is no less morally obfuscating. There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli counterterror operations. The Palestinian terrorists are deliberately targeting civilians. Israeli military operations do sometimes unintentionally harm innocent civilians, but Israel never targets civilians. It targets terrorists. Israeli counterterror strikes are meant to save innocent life and Palestinian terror attacks are meant to take it. Indeed, whereas the more innocent Palestinian lives are lost in an Israeli military operation, the more the Israeli government considers the operation a failure, the more a Palestinian terror attack claims innocent Jewish lives, the more the terrorists consider that attack a success. To see the behavior of both sides as equally reproachable requires a complete moral blindness.

Ironically, if there is a “cycle of violence,” its origins lie in Israel’s policy of trying to ease the suffering of the Palestinians. After the terror attacks started in September 2000, Israel was forced to adopt a series of measures to thwart them, including imposing closures and curfews on parts of the territories, establishing checkpoints, and setting up roadblocks. While these measures helped reduce the security threats to Israel, they also made life extremely harsh for Palestinians. With Palestinians not able to work in Israel, there was massive unemployment and widespread poverty. Freedom of movement within Palestinian areas was severely restricted. Some children could not get to their schools, and the transfer of goods to and from the territories ground to a snail’s pace.

Still, from the beginning of the intifada, the question of how to improve conditions for the Palestinians was discussed in the Israeli government at least as much as how to fight Palestinian terror. Again and again, the government would authorize a relaxation of the military’s hold on the territories and allow Palestinian workers to enter Israel. But with Israel’s guard lowered, the terrorists would invariably use the opportunity to perpetrate new attacks, sometimes within hours of restrictions being removed, forcing us to adopt the harsh security measures once again.

Here, too, moral clarity was abandoned. When Israel’s free society was defending itself against an unprecedented campaign of terror, most of the international community was calling for an end to the “cycle of violence” and a return to the negotiating table. When the Palestinian terrorists struck, international condemnation of the attacks did not lead to a newfound appreciation for Israel’s need to maintain the closures, checkpoints, and roadblocks that improved its security. On the contrary, Israel was condemned for imposing “collective punishment” on the Palestinian population. When Israel chose to target individual terrorists with precision air strikes, its actions were condemned as illegal extrajudicial assassinations. It seemed as though in the eyes of many, the Jews had a right to defend themselves in theory but could not exercise that right in practice.

After much hesitation, two years ago, Israel decided to build a security fence in the West Bank. After the initial assault on the Palestinian’s terrorist infrastructure, our government understood that there were three options to maintain an acceptable level of security for our citizens. The first was to wage a total war against Palestinian terror using weapons that would claim many innocent Palestinian lives. The second was to keep our reserves constantly mobilized to defend the country. The third option was to build the security fence.

Had the Palestinian Authority become a partner in fighting terror, as it was obliged to do under all the agreements that it signed, none of these options would have become necessary. But lacking a trustworthy partner, Israel had to choose. The first option was unacceptable to us because of the price it would exact from Palestinian civilians. The second was unacceptable because of the price it would exact from Israelis. The fence was the most just and least harmful choice.

To date, no anti-terror measure that Israel is prepared to use has proven more effective against suicide bombers than the security fence. Of the hundreds of suicide bombers who have targeted Israel over the last few years, only one came from Gaza,³ where hostility toward the Jewish state is at least as high as it is in the West Bank. Why? Because there is a fence around Gaza.

In places where the West Bank fence has been completed, suicide bombers have been stopped. Yet despite the fact that it saved lives, in mid-2004, the fence was declared illegal by the UN appointed International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague on the grounds that it encroached on Palestinian lands and harmed Palestinians. The first part of the claim was demonstrably false, since the West Bank is disputed territory whose final status, according to U.N. resolutions, must be determined through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. As for the second, some Palestinians were indeed harmed by the fence—property was confiscated along the proscribed route, some farmers were separated from their lands, and a few villages were even split in two. But the harm caused by the fence to Palestinian life cannot be judged in a vacuum. In the last four years, Palestinian terrorists have savagely murdered 1,000 of Israel’s citizens. The fence is stopping these murders. To address the issue of the fence while ignoring Palestinian terrorism makes a mockery of human rights. But that is precisely what the International Court did, mentioning the word “terrorism” only twice in its sixty-page decision, both times in citing Israel’s position on the fence.

In contrast, Israel’s Supreme Court, in its own 2004 ruling on the fence, sought to balance Israel’s security needs against the need to prevent unnecessary harm to Palestinians. The Israeli Supreme Court has proven itself over the years fully capable of making these types of judgments. In fact, it is the only Supreme Court in the world that makes decisions during the course of a battle, deciding what methods can and cannot be used by the army, and thereby immediately changing the nature of military operations. As to the fence, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that in places where harm to the Palestinians’ quality of life was unjustified, the fence must be moved.

The difference between the two rulings was to be expected. One cannot expect moral clarity from a court which is appointed by a United Nations that is an amalgam of both democratic and nondemocratic regimes. Passing judgment on a free society defending itself from terror is something the UN appointed court is ill-equipped to do.

JENIN: THE BIG LIE

Two years before the ICJ’s decision on the fence, the moral confusion of the international community reached a nadir during the battle of Jenin. On the evening of March 29, 2002, in the dining hall of the Park Hotel in Israel’s coastal city of Netanya, scores of Israelis were celebrating the traditional Passover Seder with their families, recounting the Jews’ exodus from ancient Egypt that marked their journey from slavery to freedom. A suicide bomber walked into the middle of the dining hall and blew himself up, killing 29 Israelis and wounding dozens more. The attack brought the Israeli death toll during that month to 130, by far the most lethal month of terror since the violence began.

The next day, I was called to an urgent government meeting that started at 9 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. the following day. Members of Prime Minister Sharon’s national unity government, then in power for little more than a year, agreed that a change of policy was needed. Instead of merely trying to use checkpoints and roadblocks to intercept suicide bombers heading toward our cities, we would have to enter the Palestinian-controlled population centers from where the bombers were being dispatched. We authorized Operation Defensive Shield, sending our forces into Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, and other cities and towns in the West Bank in order to destroy as much of the terrorist infrastructure as possible.

Jenin would be the most dangerous military operation of all. Fully 25 percent of the bombing and shooting attacks against Israel had been carried out by terrorists from Jenin. In the center of the city of 45,000 people is a refugee camp. More suicide bombers had been dispatched from this relatively small refugee camp in the previous two years than from any other place in the world. Even Palestinian Authority forces, who themselves were no strangers to terrorism, were afraid to enter the camp during the eight years in which it was under their control. The camp was considered a stronghold of Hamas, one of the world’s most ruthless terrorist organizations. Our troops knew that a bomb could be hidden underneath any car and that a terrorist could be waiting behind any door. We also realized that just as the terrorists deliberately target civilians, they also intentionally use them as human shields. This exacted a heavy price on much of the Palestinian population who lived in fear of Israeli reprisals for terror attacks, because not even Israel’s precision strikes were perfect. In the Jenin refugee camp, the terrorists had holed up in an area where nearly 1,000 Palestinian civilians were living.

Israel’s government had to decide what action to take. There were many precedents of other countries conducting military operations in densely populated areas to which we could turn for guidance. Syria’s regime, facing resistance from Muslim fundamentalists in 1982, leveled the town of Hama, killing 20,000 people. Russia, confronting a similar situation in Chechnya, flattened Grozny with heavy armaments and killed hundreds of civilians.

For Israel, such indiscriminate action was unacceptable. Still, recent history showed that democratic governments had gone to great lengths to minimize risk to their own soldiers, even if it meant greatly increasing the chances of civilians being harmed. For example, after Serbian forces expelled Kosovars in 1999, NATO pilots bombed Serbia’s infrastructure while safely flying at very high altitudes, an operation that lowered the risk to themselves but resulted in over 500 Serbian civilian deaths. Only a few months before the operation in Jenin, American and British pilots in Afghanistan were doing much the same and achieved similar results at a high cost in civilian life.

In Jenin, Israel’s government decided to pursue a course that placed much greater risks on Israel’s soldiers but that greatly reduced the dangers to Palestinian civilians. We announced over loudspeakers our intention to clear out the terrorist infrastructure in the camp and warned everyone to leave. Then, instead of bombing from the air or using tanks or heavy artillery, our soldiers were sent on a harrowing mission. They painstakingly went from house to house, moving through a hornet’s nest of booby traps, bombs, and armed terrorists. After thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed during one mission, we still refused to use our air force or heavy artillery. We pressed on, making tactical changes, such as using armored bulldozers to flatten houses that were being used by the terrorists for cover, that decreased the risks to our troops without increasing the dangers to innocent Palestinians.

But in an environment that lacked moral clarity, one of the finest examples in history of a democracy protecting human rights in wartime became infamous as a horrific assault on human rights. Relying on phony information produced by Palestinian sources and claiming that Israel had killed over 500 civilians,⁴ leveled a hospital, deliberately shot children, and executed prisoners, almost all the foreign press harshly criticized the Israeli action. The vilification rang out across the world, but the British press was in a class all by itself. The Independent called the Israeli operation “a monstrous war crime.”⁵ A. N. Wilson, writing for the Evening Standard, called it a “massacre, and a cover-up of genocide.”⁶ The Guardian, not to be outdone, ran a lead editorial opining that “Jenin was every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man made, as the attack on New York on September 11.”⁷

The truth was very different: At the end of the operation, fifty-two Palestinians lay dead, almost all of whom were armed.⁸ On the Israeli side, twenty-three soldiers had been killed by Palestinian terrorists. This extremely high casualty ratio was a function of Israel’s willingness to endanger the lives of its own soldiers in order to save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian civilians. Indeed, Israeli soldiers died to save innocent Palestinian lives.

Working its way through the Israeli court system today is a lawsuit against the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli government brought by some of the families of the soldiers who died in Jenin. The petitioners contend that the government’s primary obligation should have been to defend its own troops, even at the cost of more Palestinian civilian casualties. Whether Israel, unlike every other country facing similar threats, should have imposed such risks on its own citizens in order to save innocent Palestinians is certainly a matter of legitimate debate. One thing, however, is certain: The operation in Jenin was an expression of an unprecedented commitment to the human rights of a foreign civilian population during wartime. It is actions like this that allow the noted legal expert Alan Dershowitz to state confidently that “no country in history ever complied with a higher standard of human rights.”

To far too many people, such a statement may seem shocking. In the last few years, Israel has been portrayed, and therefore perceived, as a brutal occupying power that represses Palestinians. The fact that this perception, often fueled by graphic television images with little context, is not true does not make it less real to the people who hold it. Nor are the realities of checkpoints, searches, and closures pleasant ones. The suffering of Palestinians is real and therefore the sympathy for suffering is also real. But moral clarity demands more than sympathy. It demands an understanding of context, of cause and effect. It demands a sense of proportion. Only then will the painful choices that Israel makes, which are nonetheless moral choices, be understood.

THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM

A lack of moral clarity has also hampered Israel’s fight against a wave of anti-Semitism that has spread across the world over the last few years. Whether this “new anti-Semitism” is different from its predecessors is debatable,⁹ but few could argue that it is focused on the State of Israel. Everywhere one looks, the Jewish state appears to be at the center of the anti-Semitic storm.

The rise in viciously anti-Semitic content against Israel disseminated through state-run Arab media is quite staggering. Arab propagandists, journalists, and scholars now regularly employ the methods and the vocabulary used to demonize European Jews for centuries—branding Jews Christ-killers, charging them with poisoning non-Jews, fabricating blood libels, and the like. In a region where the Christian faith has few adherents, a lurid and time-worn Christian anti-Semitism boasts an enormous following.

In 2003, the Syrian authorities, following in the footsteps of the Egyptian government, produced and broadcast a rabidly anti-Semitic film during Ramadan (which would ensure the highest ratings for the twenty-nine part miniseries), in which rabbis were portrayed slashing the throats and draining the blood of non-Jewish children to use for making Passover matza, and wealthy Jews were depicted plotting a global conspiracy to dominate the world. In fact, the only difference between one of the episodes in the Syrian film and Hitler’s infamous anti-Semitic film Eternal Jew was that the latter was in black and white. Using modern technology the original authors of the Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, couldn’t even imagine, Arab satellite television broadcast these films to tens of millions of Muslims throughout the Middle East, and millions more in Europe.

In Europe, the connection between Israel and anti-Semitism is equally conspicuous. For one thing, the timing and nature of the attacks on European Jews, whether physical or verbal, have largely revolved around Israel. For example, the anti-Semitic wave itself, which began soon after the Palestinians launched their terrorist campaign against the Jewish state in September 2000, reached a peak in April 2002 during Operation Defensive Shield.

Though most of the physical attacks in Europe were perpetrated by Muslims, most of the verbal and cultural assaults came from European elites. Thus, the Italian newspaper La Stampa published a cartoon of an infant Jesus lying at the foot of an Israeli tank, pleading, “Don’t tell me they want to kill me again.” The frequent comparisons of Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler, of Israelis to Nazis, and of Palestinians to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not the work of a handful of hooligans spray-painting graffiti on the wall of a synagogue but of university educators and sophisticated columnists. No less a figure than the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago declared ringingly of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians: “We can compare it with what happened at Auschwitz.”¹⁰

The centrality of Israel to the revival of a more generalized anti-Semitism is also evident in the international arena. Almost a year after the current round of Palestinian violence began, and after hundreds of Israelis had already been killed, a so-called “World Conference against Racism” was held under the auspices of the United Nations in Durban, South Africa. It turned into an anti-Semitic circus, with the Jewish state being accused of everything from racism and apartheid to crimes against humanity and genocide. In this theater of the absurd, the Jews themselves were turned into perpetrators of anti-Semitism, as Israel was denounced for its “Zionist practices against Semitism”—the Semitism, that is to say, of the Palestinian Arabs.

The Israel-centered focus of this latest wave of anti-Semitism poses a unique challenge in a world lacking moral clarity. Classical anti-Semitism is easy to see. The films that show Jews draining the blood of non-Jewish children or plotting to take over the world are immediately recognizable as anti-Semitic. When I showed the clips of the Syrian anti-Semitic film to European and American leaders, they were shocked. When the French prime minister saw it, he immediately took steps to stop the film from being broadcast to French Muslims via satellite. There was no debate whether the film was a “legitimate criticism of Israel.” It was seen as anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

But the new anti-Semitism is far more subtle. Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people and Jewish religion, the new anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish state. Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is much more difficult to expose. Making the task even harder is the fact that this hatred is often advanced in the name of values most of us would consider unimpeachable, such as human rights.

I have never believed that the Jewish state should be above criticism. Indeed, a democratic state like Israel can appreciate that criticism is not only legitimate but an essential means to effect positive change. But we must separate legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism, something we cannot do in an environment that lacks moral clarity.

After I became the minister of diaspora affairs in 2003, I thought a great deal about this problem and I tried to come up with a “test” to resolve it. I call it the 3D test, but only the name is original. The test itself merely applies the historic criteria that once identified anti-Semitism.

The first D is the test of demonization. Demonization has always been a primary expression of anti-Semitism. Jews were portrayed for centuries as the embodiment of all evil. They were accused, among other things, of deicide, drinking the blood of non-Jewish children, poisoning wells, and controlling the world’s banks and governments. To determine whether criticism against Israel today is legitimate or whether it is anti-Semitic we must ask ourselves whether the Jewish state is being demonized. Are its actions being blown out of all sensible proportion? For example, the comparisons between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz—comparisons that are heard practically every day within “enlightened” quarters of Europe—can only be considered anti-Semitic. Those who live in refugee camps clearly live in miserable conditions. But even those who would wrongly blame Israel for the fact that four generations of Palestinians have lived in these camps cannot legitimately compare these camps to Auschwitz. Those who draw such analogies either do not know anything about the Holocaust or, more plausibly, are deliberately trying to paint modern-day Israel as the embodiment of evil. This criticism is excessive, grotesque.

The second D is the test of double standards. For thousands of years, a clear sign of anti-Semitism was treating Jews differently from other peoples, from the discriminatory laws that many nations enacted against them to the tendency to judge their behavior by a different yardstick. A different yardstick means double standards, and double standards mean anti-Semitism.

Similarly, today we must ask whether criticism of Israel is being applied selectively. It is anti-Semitism, for instance, when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of serial abusers, like China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored. It is anti-Semitism when the only meeting ever held by signatories to the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war in the more than half century that the convention has been in operation, and in which there have been millions of abused prisoners of war, is used to condemn Israel. Likewise, it is anti-Semitism when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross.

The third D is the test of delegitimization. In the past, anti-Semites tried to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish religion, the Jewish people, or both. Today, they are trying to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state. It has become acceptable in many quarters to question whether or not Israel has a right to exist. While criticism of an Israeli policy need not be anti-Semitic, the denial of Israel’s right to exist is always anti-Semitic. If other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland as well.

If we are to fight the new anti-Semitism, we must make sure that we do not blur the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. Like a pair of glasses in a 3D movie that allows us to see everything with perfect clarity, the 3D test will ensure that those lines remain clear.

Clarifying the line between good and evil, and between right and wrong, will do more than help win the fight against anti-Semitism. It is the key to overcoming so many of the challenges that now confront Israel. Without moral clarity, Israel will be lost, uncertain of the justice of its cause and unable to defend its own rights, let alone the rights of others. With moral clarity, the people of Israel will find the strength to overcome any challenge that confronts them, from waging a just war to forging a true peace.