CHERRY PICKING

I’m ‘cherry picking’ again, this time from an op-ed written for the Jerusalem Post by Dan Perry and Steven Graubart. Commenting on the government’s judicial reform plans, the authors made the following cost estimate: -

“A survey of how much Israel stands to lose is genuinely breathtaking. The country of barely 10 million has more unicorns (private companies valued at $1 billion,) than Europe and in 2021, the money its tech firms attracted from venture capital and IPOs was half the figure of the European Union, which has 40 times its population.

Moreover, the innovators who are responsible for the miracle of Start-Up Nation, in fields from biotech to ad tech to fintech to cyber, are overwhelmingly modern people who are mobile and will not remain in such a country.

The government’s plans to turn Israel into a Jewish version of Turkey will ultimately leave it with a tech sector at the level of Turkey and a currency that is as distressed as the Turkish lira, which lost 44% of its value in 2021 alone.

The lack of investor confidence in Turkey was driven in part by the Turkish president’s impractical introduction of Islamic principles into monetary policy. There is a striking parallel with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s belief that religion should anchor economic strategy.”

Despite this dismal forecast, the coalition government is forging ahead with legislation to effect the judicial reform.

Let’s move on, or rather backwards to the ‘much too promised land’ I wrote about last week.

Avi Shlaim is one the “New Historians”, a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel. In his essay “The Balfour Declaration And its Consequences.” Shlaim wrote-

“British imperialism in the Middle East in World War I was intricate, to use a British understatement. In 1915 Britain promised Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, that they would support an independent Arab kingdom under his rule in return for his mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally in the war. The promise was contained in a letter dated October 24, 1915 from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, to the Sharif of Mecca in what later became known as the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. The Sharif of Mecca assumed that the promise included Palestine.”

Margin note: Reading through the McMahon-Hussein correspondence it’s difficult to understand why Hussein didn’t state unequivocally “Palestine is included!!”. Arguably, the fact that the letters were written with Arabic and English translations, could have caused a misunderstanding that led Hussein to assume that McMahon had promised to include Palestine in the agreement.

Back to the main text;-

“In 1916 Britain reached a secret agreement with France to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence in the event of an allied victory. Under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Palestine was to be placed under international control. 

In 1917 Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Thus, by a stroke of the imperial pen, the Promised Land became twice-promised. Even by the standards of Perfidious Albion, this was an extraordinary tale of double-dealing and betrayal, a tale that continued to haunt Britain throughout the thirty years of its rule in Palestine. Of the three wartime pledges, the most curious, and certainly the most controversial was the Balfour Declaration. Here, wrote Arthur Koestler, was one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation. * Koestler dismissed the Declaration as an impossible notion, an unnatural graft, a “white Negro.”

C. P. Scott, the ardently pro-Zionist editor of the Manchester Guardian, played a significant part in persuading the British government to issue the Declaration. In an editorial article, Scott hailed the Declaration as an act of imaginative generosity. “It is at once the fulfilment of aspiration, the signpost of destiny.” Elizabeth Monroe in “Britain’s Moment in the Middle East” conceded that to the Jews who went to Palestine, the Declaration signified fulfilment and salvation. But she also notes that to the British the Declaration brought much ill will, and complications that sapped their strength. “Measured by British interests alone,” argued Monroe, “it is one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history.”

*The preamble I quoted from last week included the following passage: - “Understandings and plans were drawn up long before there was a significant Jewish presence in Palestine (the region known later as Mandatory Palestine) and before the indigenous Arabs in that region realised that they constituted a separate national entity.”

Admittedly, earlier, before WW1 a few Arab intellectuals in the Holy Land/Palestine defined themselves as a separate national group, but the majority of the Arabs in Palestine held no more than village and small-town affiliations.

Well, some historians will no doubt continue to lambast the Balfour Declaration. Nonetheless, Israel is an irrefutable fact. The IDF is a force to be reckoned with, and until recently this startup nation was one of a kind. It is also the ‘proverbial comeback kid.’ So, don’t give up on it yet. 

I’ll conclude with some more cherry picking, this time from an article written by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of The Financial Times. Wolf is one of the world's most influential journalists, notably regarding economic matters,

“Israeli politics is in crisis. A large number of people have demonstrated on the streets against the rightwing coalition’s extensively criticised “judicial reforms”. The president, Isaac Herzog, has even declared that “We are no longer in a political debate but on the brink of constitutional and social collapse.” The programme of this government is of evident importance for the future of the country. But it is also of wider significance. This is partly because of Israel’s role in the region. It is also because what is happening raises questions about how a democracy can turn into an autocracy via unbridled majoritarianism. Larry Diamond of Stanford University argues that liberal democracy has four individually necessary and collectively sufficient elements: free and fair elections; active participation in civic life of the citizenry; protection of the civil and human rights of all citizens; and a rule of law that binds and protects all citizens, including the most powerful. Those who have won elections are not entitled to threaten any of those essential elements of liberal democracy. If they seek to create such a state, they are subverting democracy. Democracy then is a system of majority rule, constrained by institutional checks and balances. Of those constraints, none is more important than the rule of law. This is why the EU has such difficulty with the “illiberal democracies” of Hungary and Poland. It is also why the Israeli government’s proposed legal “reforms” are so controversial. To opponents, the reforms will rip up protections against arbitrary action by the government, threatening individual freedom and legal predictability in a country dependent on foreign investment and a dynamic market economy. This is, needless to say, not how the government sees it. It believes the Supreme Court has undermined its ability to govern by assessing even the “reasonableness” of its actions. This also puts government legal advisers in an objectionably powerful position in the development of policy. In addition, the court has opened the floodgates to litigation by allowing anybody the right to sue the government, thus paralysing necessary economic activities. In brief, the Supreme Court has vastly over-reached, threatening prosperity and democracy. This is what I learned from talking with a senior member of the government. To find out whether it makes sense I talked to Netta Barak-Corren, a professor of constitutional law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Barak-Corren agrees that the Supreme Court has indeed lowered the thresholds for filing a suit against the government. It has also overruled it, not frequently, but consequentially. This has created ripple effects on the role of the government’s legal advisers, which affect the government’s ability to function. Yet, she explained, this activism was largely a response to the inadequacy of the democratic structure, which consists of just one house of parliament, in which a simple majority is sufficient to pass any law, including one of constitutional import. Potentially, this structure would give a majority unchecked powers unmatched in other democracies. Thus far, these powers have been constrained more by political culture and circumstances than by law. Barak-Corren’s big point, however, is that the coalition’s proposals — namely, to politicise judicial appointments, including to lower-level courts, and make it extremely difficult for the court to over-rule the government, while enabling the Knesset to overturn its rulings — are neither necessary nor sufficient to rectify the problems with the structure of Israeli democracy and the behaviour of the judiciary. This account persuades me that the reforms are mainly a power grab. They would allow the executive to operate with little judicial accountability and fill the judiciary with (possibly incompetent) loyalists, even in areas that have little to do with policy. These changes also have potentially important economic implications, including to the highly successful high-tech sector, which has been an important contributor to the growth of the Israeli economy. Remarkably, Israel’s real gross domestic product per head is now much the same as in the UK or France. The great economic danger created by illiberal democracy, one we can see in many other countries, is of “crony capitalism”. It becomes too easy in such systems for the corrupt to succeed in politics, government, the judiciary and in business. That in turn discourages the entry of honest new competitors into the economy, because it is they who are always most reliant on an independent judiciary and bureaucracy. Insiders have power on their side. Outsiders depend on the rule of law. Needless to say, the arrival of this new government has created many other concerns, not least for the future of the occupied territories. The idea of annexation of the West Bank, for example, is potentially lethal to a democratic Israel unless full citizenship is granted to Palestinians, which would turn Israel into a binational state. But in the narrower area of legal reform the issue is whether the government is prepared to limit what it seeks to change in order to deal with the real problems, or whether it is determined to obtain political control over the legal system, thereby undermining the rule of law. It is worth noting in this context that Israel’s economic history demonstrates that the legal system about which the government now complains so bitterly did not prevent its past success. That also suggests that these dramatic reforms are unneeded. Benjamin Netanyahu must think again before he does irreparable damage."

Well, I intended to pick a few cherries and ended up picking almost the whole crop.

 

Have a good weekend

 

 

Beni,                           23^rd of February, 2023