A Cover-Up in Israel

David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com
2/11/2008

Imagine the outrage of the Bush administration's critics had the Iraq Study Group gone easy on President Bush because an alternative might result in the election of a Democrat to the White House. Such a scenario has just come to pass in Israel, where the Winograd Commission's report has rhetorically cushioned Prime Minister Olmert for his misconduct of the 2006 war with Hezbollah. “If we think that the prime minister will advance the peace process, it is a serious consideration. The peace process, if successful, will save so many lives as to give it considerable weight. It is not right to look only at one side [of the issues].” Thus spake Prof. Yehezkel Dror, a member of Israel’s Winograd Commission, in an interview widely reported in the Israeli media last Wednesday.

Dror had been asked by the daily Maariv why the commission didn’t call for Olmert’s resignation over his bungling of the Second Lebanon War. As Dror further explained: “We must think about the consequences. What do you prefer, a government with Olmert and Barak, or new elections that will put Netanyahu in power?”

Also asked if the bereaved parents of the Second Lebanon War should not have been a consideration, Dror said: “I am thinking about the bereaved parents in a future war. If the peace process will prevent a war in the future, so think about those parents, who won’t undergo the greatest pain there is.” Or as he summed up: “The needs of the future must balance the need for justice in the present.”

In other words, the cat got out of the bag in Israel on Wednesday: the Winograd Commission was politically motivated. Indeed, as I noted, it had been appointed by Olmert himself. Those two of its five members who are public intellectuals, Dror and Prof. Ruth Gavison, aren’t flaming leftists but certainly not on the Right either: Dror has a Labor Party background, and Gavison is on record favoring a Palestinian state.

Dror’s words put the Israeli political system in an uproar. Even radical peacenik and Oslo architect Yossi Beilin said, “Prof. Dror’s remarks are chilling and prove that the committee is operating under somebody’s auspices.”

Zevulun Orlev, moderately right-wing head of the State Control Committee of the Knesset, said the “remarks raise suspicion of severe political corruption.” Orlev’s committee has summoned Dror to explain his statements.

The Winograd Commission’s final report was indeed scathingly critical of the political echelon’s performance during the hapless war back in summer 2006. But it was eerily silent when it came to directly reproving Olmert by name, so that Israel’s pro-“peace process,” Netanyahu-hating media was able to spin the report as “surprisingly” mild and allowing Olmert to remain in office.

It was Dror’s words that, inadvertently, dispelled the “eeriness.” While his words did not exactly disclose something that most Israelis hadn’t already surmised, they displayed it in a glaring light: the Israeli establishment protects its own; is deeply and incorrigibly corrupted by the notion of a peace process however bitter the countervailing experience; and will do anything to prevent the emergence of a Right-of-Center government even if that is the express will of the people.

And it wasn’t that the wish for an end to the Olmert government and new elections was a right-wing phenomenon: the reserve soldiers and bereaved parents who have spearheaded the antigovernment activism since the war are nonpartisan and span the political spectrum. Polls since that time, though, have consistently shown that it is Netanyahu who would win new elections, and it is that outcome that the Winograd panel at least tacitly saw itself as entrusted by Olmert to prevent.

For that large majority of Israelis, then, who either want Netanyahu to replace Olmert or just want venal, incompetent Olmert removed come what may, Dror’s faux pas was a grim revelation of just how boxed in they are: how not only a charlatan like Olmert but even well-respected figures are willing to sacrifice integrity and democratic norms on the altar of the “peace” that since at least the early 1990s has turned the state of Israel into a self-destructive delusional.

Dror, after all, spoke of a peace process while rockets keep raining on Israelis; while the Gaza-Sinai border has been breached and Sinai is becoming yet another base of anti-Israeli terror; while Gaza civilians reacted to the suicide bombing in Dimona by handing out flowers and sweets.

He spoke of peace while “partner” Mahmoud Abbas—an impotent figurehead and ex-Arafat lackey—rules out recognizing Israel as a Jewish state or renouncing the Palestinian “right of return”; while the Al-Aqsa Brigades of Abbas’s Fatah engage in almost daily terror acts; and while the schools of what’s left of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority teach Israel’s annihilation as a core value and three Palestinian Authority newspapers have glorified the Dimona attack—let alone the ethos in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

It would take something like Dror’s appalling words to rouse Israel’s sane majority from its listlessness.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.