Aharon Nathan

Representation in Democracy (AV Modified is what the Con-Lib coalition needs)

2010-07-02T10:22:00.000+01:00

AV Modified is what the Con-Lib coalition needs in order to provide what the Lib-Dems require and what both Conservative and Labour MPs can be persuaded to swallow.

1. The Con-Lib coalition is a wonderful expression of the character of our political traditions of compromise and practicality. We should all welcome it as a step on the road to re-enforce our representative democracy which has been smothered under adversarial ideologies fostered by the FPTP System. This Coalition-Government, unlike other governments for decades, is a majority government, elected and backed by 59 % of the voters. However it is based on a freak result that is unlikely to recur while FPTP rules in its present form. The adoption of AV will not only increase democratic representation but it could bring about much wider participation of the electorate from the recent low levels of around 60 per cent.

2. Most important of all is that together with Labour that has pledged to back a referendum on AV in its Manifesto, the proportion of the actual voters of the last election backing AV stands at 88 per cent representing the votes of the three big Parties. Therefore a referendum on AV becomes mandatory in this Parliament. The terms of this referendum and how it will operate however should be explained clearly in a simple and unambiguous manner to the public leaving no place for confusion. Only a single YES or NO answer to one clear question can be effective and can induce a majority of the public to participate.

3. A big advantage of AV over other systems is its flexibility; this makes it possible to introduce it gently without going against the grain of our traditions where the relationship of the MP to his/her constituents is sacrosanct. The British balk at revolution. AV provides the evolution which we all prefer. AV retains the FPTP System with its backbone of the Constituency. It simply modifies the FPTP slightly without drastically changing its essence. In addition if AV is applied wisely it can strengthen rather than weaken the status of Parliament and Parliamentarians, lying so low lately in the eyes of the public. Moreover by keeping the FPTP system intact, AV can preserve the stability of future governments. The doors for Hang Parliament is not open ajar.

4. For all these reasons it is imperative that while introducing AV we are careful not to disturb the way voters have been accustomed over the generations to cast their votes. Voters are used to vote with one X for one individual candidate that belongs to a party. Even an independent is deemed by the constituent voters as belonging to a one-member party. Changing that will result in even less participation as indeed happened at least in England both in the elections for the European Parliament and the London Mayor. If you ask a voter who represents him/her in either institution they will tell you which party but very rarely can an actual voter point out which elected individual represents him/her.

5. Some MPs and certainly many Conservatives consider AV in its present form as giving two votes to those who sticks to the traditional one ballot to choose one individual candidate. So how to proceed? The answer is simplicity itself. Instead of confusing the busy citizen with a list of candidates to choose one and grade the others in a long list of preferences the voter can choose his/her preferred candidate and his/her party as is the case today. If that specific vote doe not succeed in electing the Constituency MP “CMP” in a simple majority that vote goes to that candidate’s party and added together with such other unsuccessful votes nationwide to elect a limited number of Party MPs “PMP”. Say 100 PMPs or a 20 per cent of the present total MPs.

6. By substituting the long lists of graded preferences and passing on the unsuccessful votes to the candidate’s party, this version of AV gives some weight to the votes of unsuccessful candidates and brings fairness into the electoral process. AV in this modified version preserves the Westminster model of FPTP for the traditionalists and infuses it with a dose of PR to satisfy the innovators ensuring a greater representation. Thus AV in this way carries electoral reform without an upheaval.

7. This modification of AV is borrowed from another electoral system called TR Total Representation. (A brief summary of it can be found on : http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=154 which is the Electoral Reform Society website. I urge all those interested in electoral reform to read it.) This modification of AV renders it more effective and useful if we really are serious at reforming our present system of FPTP.

8. The Lib-Dems’ zero option of “PR or nothing” kept them for decades as a protest party. And so they would have stayed after the recent elections. It is the failure of the Conservatives to gain those extra 20 seats that gave an unexpected opportunity to Nick Clegg. To his credit he exploited it to the full. Now a door is opened both to improve the Lib-Dems’s present and future influence in politics while reforming the electoral system for his party’s sake as well as that of the country. Politics is the art of the possible. A bird in hand is better than five on the tree. If the Lib-Dems push now for this version of AV and secure a YES vote in the referendum they can at least be sure of achieving a partial reform that both big parties could reluctantly swallow while giving the Lib-Dems the non-recurring chance to double their seats in the Commons. An AV simulation of the results of the recent elections that follows using this version of AV shows just that. It is based on re-calculating the figures from the real results.

9. AV needs one ballot paper with one vote. By retaining the votes cast for the unsuccessful candidates and using them to elect Party MPs, instead of throwing them to the dust bins, it secures direct representation to every vote cast albeit with different weighting, In this way AV injects a limited dose of PR into the system without destroying it. AV accommodate both Systems of FPTP and PR Proportional Representation in a form of co-habitation.

10. This version of AV requires all candidates (including those competing in Party Lists) to start off by running in the constituencies. It dispenses with long list ballot papers which mix party allegiances and confuse the busy citizen in the voting booth.

11. The PR element of AV 2010 gives an active role and leverage to the runners-up in the constituencies by keeping their hopes alive in between elections even in “safe seats” They are given a chance to compete for a PMP seat at any General Election depending on their level of support or wait for another round at the next. Thus AV converts the rival runner-ups into vigilant watch-dogs, monitoring the incumbent MPs and guaranteeing their constant accountability.

How AV 2010 works
12. AV in both versions, is a constituency-based system. For it to work properly, constituencies need to have roughly similar number of voters each to avoid gerrymandering. This is fair and indeed what David Cameron wants. The majority of seats in parliament, say 80%, will be awarded to the winners in simple majorities of these races, just as they are under the Westminster system today.

13. So each party puts up candidates for election in the various seats. Their names appear on the ballot paper in alphabetical order and next to each name is the party he or she represents. However, these candidates also appear on their own party’s national “list” of all its candidates headed by the party leader.

14. Voters go to the polls and put a cross against their preferred local candidate. Whoever wins a simple majority of the votes becomes that Constituency’s Member of Parliament (CMP) – again, just like today.

15. From then on, the innovations begin. All the “successful” ballots drop out. So if you voted for candidate X and candidate X wins, your ballot is judged to have already secured representation. As for the “unsuccessful” ballots (for example, if you voted for candidate Y, but candidate Y did not win in your constituency) these are placed in a giant nationwide pool – and it is from these unsuccessful votes that the remaining seats (20%) are decided using the PR method and awarded to the various parties to select Party Members of Parliament (PMPs)

16. These remaining seats are allocated proportionally amongst the parties according to a quota of a minimum number of required votes per seat. This is reached by dividing the nationwide number of “unsuccessful” votes by the number of the allocated seats of PMPs. Obviously in an 80/20 FPTP/ PR as recommended here the legitimacy and the status of the PMP is assured by the fact that he/she needs often 3 to 5 times as many party voters countrywide to be elected as that needed by the CMP in the constituency.

17. Unlike in other list-based systems, the way these seats are awarded depends crucially on how the candidates performed in their constituencies. The party leader – if failed to secure a CMP seat directly–should automatically be allocated the first PMP seat secured by that Leader’s Party to avoid disrupting the party in the wake of a general election. All the other PMP seats available to each Party are awarded in priority to the highest scorers of that Party’s Candidates in the Constituencies in the early First-Past-The-Post part of the election. They are most likely also to be the strongest runners-up in their constituencies. Their number in each party depends on the number of votes nationwide that their respective parties gain. Everything therefore depends on the number of votes each potential PMP candidate and his/her party secures.

Arguments in Support of AV(2010)
- Each voter is required to cast only one ballot.
- No votes are “wasted”, with most going on to secure at least some level of representation, albeit with different weightings.
- Its PR element is relatively simple to understand and easy to operate
- All MPs would have to start off as constituency candidates, and all votes are worth fighting for even in “safe seats” because there is a potential prize also for coming second.
- It gives minority views the chance of a voice in parliament without giving them undue influence, because the system is still weighted heavily towards First-Past-The-Post.

Arguments against AV (2010)
- It creates two “classes” of MPs (CMP and PMP) However unlike in other such systems, most of the “Party” MPs would also have to score at least second in their constituencies and therefore would continue to retain a close link with the constituency waiting for the next opportunity notwithstanding the fact that they don’t serve as constituency MPs.
- The centre of the duties of the CMP is the constituency, that of the PMP is to add strength to the Party in Parliament while preparing for the next round of elections.
- All existing constituency boundaries would have to be redrawn periodically (as the case is now) but more to ensure similar and comparable sizes of the number of the electorate in all constituencies in line with the Conservatives’ thinking.

Israel Arab Conflict (Post Annapolis)

2010-03-26T21:41:00.010Z

Three years post Annapolis, the solution remains the same - unilateral disengagement.

In my article of 15 Dec 2007 on Annapolis I concluded:

The leaderships of the two main protagonists of Annapolis are too weak to deliver an agreement; but of the two, it is the fragmentation of the Arab side that will eventually scupper any possible resolution.

So what is left for Israel to do when this year [2007] passes without conclusion? The answer is to be prepared to declare that it would implement withdrawal from the West Bank unilaterally along the lines and spirit of the agreement reached by president Bush and Prime Minister Sharon as embodied in their exchange of letter of 14th April 2004 and take immediate steps to implement them. The majority of Israelis, including Israeli Arabs, will support that move. And so will the electorate if a general election or referendum is called.

With Sharon sadly incapacitated it was left to Ehud Olmert to lead Kadima in a General Election. His Manifesto centred around the Peace Process. He won on that basis and therefore had a mandate, indeed an obligation to do just that. But the Lebanon War, the lack of support from Tsipi Livni and the misguided subsequent Vinograd Commission sapped all his strength. Actions and reactions by politicians and media were taken over by form of words rather than substance of contents. Olmert nevertheless battled bravely to the last minute of his tenure with tenacity and single mindedness. At the end with “et tu Brute” behaviour of Ehud Barak joining the cabal and a legal indictment hanging over his head, he was left with no choice but to leave it to Tsipi Livni to take over. She failed to form a government and led the country into another divisive general election at the end of which she failed yet again to form a government. Livni’s frontal attack on Shas paradoxically gave a golden opportunity to a defunct Likud to revive and lead the extreme Right. Sharon’s Kadima lost its Sharon’s central ground and moved to the Left. And the real victim of all this Byzantine politics was of course the peace process. So another three years passed of paralysis of the leaderships of both sides and the sufferings of their ordinary citizens

What Now?

Since then another war in Gaza; and more bereaved and more orphans on both sides. Israel’s image in the world, unjustifiably and unjustly, has been left tarnished. We are weary, the Arabs are weary and America is exasperated. We lost a big chance handed to us by President Bush and our good friend Condoleezza Rice. And that was when Binyamin Netanyahu took the wrong decision at the time by opposing, indeed sabotaging, instead of embracing Sharons’ policy of unilateral disengagement first from Gaza and then from the un-defendable parts of the West Bank. Sadly for him, and unfortunate for us, Sharon is unable any more to help guide us to see the light which could lead us to the end of a tunnel we have been stuck in since the end of the Six-Day War. Netanyahu and Ehud Barak failed separately in the past to broker peace for us. Would they jointly now achieve a breakthrough? It looks doubtful. However a new hope appears on the horizon: The Mofaz Plan. With politics paralysed as a result of a dysfunctional system of government and with Prime Minister Netanyahu tossed around by a chaotic coalition with a non existent sense of collective responsibility, he is unable to pursue a cohesive policy for peace. He is letting the Israeli media and daily events inside and outside the country buffet him and dictate his moves. Democracy, and certainly representative and participatory democracy, has become a misnomer in Israel. The Knesset is becoming the laughing stock of the Israeli public.

It is at this juncture that MK Shaul Mofaz, an ex Chief of Staff and a former Minister of Defence under Sharon, boldly went public on November 11, 2009 with his Plan. He proposed to move in two phases to a peace agreement with the Palestinians with the immediate establishment of an independent disarmed Palestinian state in the West Bank and in Gaza, preempting a possible move by the Arabs while simultaneously engaging in direct dialogue, State to State, with the Palestinians on the final status issues. He says (and his words are paraphrazed below):

I believe that a permanent Palestinian state with temporary borders and simultaneous negotiations on the core issues: borders, refugees and Jerusalem, will allow us to rebuild the trust between the two sides, and totally change the atmosphere in our region. In this process, we must have the support of the moderate Arab countries, the European countries and the leadership of the United States.

The second phase of my plan would be the implementation of the agreements reached between the two sides on the final status issues.

Before implementing final status agreements, the Palestinians must provide a clear statement about the end to demands and end to the conflict. We have to build a mechanism for potential mediation if gaps still exist between the two sides; and I call for a referendum in Israel to approve what was achieved during the negotiations on the core issues before implementing the second phase. I have full confidence that the moment the Prime Minister of Israel adopts this plan, and the moment the President of the U.S. approves of it as the right direction to move forward, we will be able to achieve an agreement.

And then Mofaz added remarkably that in certain conditions he would talk with Hamas and that if they are elected subsequently by the Palestinians he would have no problem in dealing with them as the legitimate government.

It is important to read his statement and interviews in full. It still needs some modifications and adjustments esprcially with regard to Gaza. But here is a policy and here is a man who can move it forward. This is the voice of Mofaz and the hand of Sharon. We better listen to this Plan coming from a statesman with impeccable credentials, integrity and authority. He reiterated since then that with neither Prime Minister Netanyahu nor the Leader of the Opposition, Tsipi Livni, following a clear declared policy he finds himself unable to support either. But he emphasised that he is prepared to support one or other or both if they come up with a clear declared policy. Naturally he favours the general lines of his Plan, but he did not say that they are set in stone.

And turning to the paralysis of the body politics in Israel that is preventing both Government and Opposition to act decisively Mofaz wisely added recently a second proviso for his support. That is a clear, well defined reform of the electoral system that could lead to a stable government and a true representative democracy.

Mofaz did not specify his position on Jerusalem wisely leaving it vague. I believe the problems of Jerusalem are not insurmountable and in this context it is folly to ignore the views of Meir Shetreet and Haim Ramon who both served under Olmert. The Arab villages around Jerusalem were never part of historic Jerusalem notwithstanding their inclusion within the Municipal Borders of the Capital today. Moreover it is important to remember that even Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph, the Spiritual Mentor of Shas Party might, when the chips are down, opt for sparing Jewish Life over adding Jewish Land when confronted with seeking a painful balance between the two. He expressed such views at the time of the evacuation of Gaza.

And finally in dealing with all this it is important not to get swept overboard by the recent episode of the meeting in the White House of President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. It will prove to be an insignificant passing cloud. Obama is a friend of Israel but he is also the President of the United States and leader of the free world. We err if we try to read into the way that meeting was conducted a sudden change of US policy. There are deep and enduring mutual interests between the two countries which have solid strategic basis. The analysis of the different sides including the US to the Arab Israeli Conflict in my article of 2007 has not altered. Geography and demography don’t change overnight. But it is important that we move swiftly to help reduce tension with our strongest ally and the best way to do that may lie in the Mofaz Plan.

Aharon Nathan, 26th March 2010

Israel: A Federation of Ghettos or a Unitary State

2009-12-31T17:25:00.012Z

About the website

1. This website is a collection of essays that I have written over many years commenting on the development in Israel vis-à-vis its conflict with its Arab neighbours. My view today is that we have reached an impasse in our relations especially with the Palestinians and that only through complete separation can we rebuild cooperation and trust. The mutual hatred between them and us is so great and the wounds are so deep that it will need a long time to heal. The theme of these essays is that years of missed opportunities on both sides made it gradually impossible for us to co-exist in peace. Moreover, outside mediators, individuals and countries, far from assisting reconciliation and healing added to the divide through supporting one side or the other. Based on my intimate knowledge and experiences of Israelis and Arabs alike only a Three State, not a Two State solution, with separate states on the West Bank and Gaza, can pave the way to an enduring peace in the Holy Land and the region.

2. My feeling is that we, on the Israeli side, out of frustration have stopped thinking realistically and have withdrawn into ourselves mentally. Our preoccupation with the ups and downs of our internal political quarrels and our obsessive touchiness about what the world thinks of us and needs us to do have been dividing our people and thus making it more difficult for us to be consensual in finding new solutions to the conflict. We have to stop fighting the last war and correct the last failure to reach accommodation with our neighbours. Time and time again we have been missing opportunities because of the inability of successive governments to gather domestic support only to have to face a more difficult next round. Moreover this internal division is causing confusion amongst friends and foes of Israel worldwide. They don’t know anymore who speaks for Israel in Israel.

3. Israel started as the outward looking embodiment of the Zionist Movement of emancipation and slowly drifted back into an inward looking country reviving in its soul the very Ghetto concept that it sacrificed so much to shake off. And even worse than that. The shettetel village mentality so much derided by the early Zionists seems to have been revived in the psyche of the ruling elite in Israel today. Our people are divided politically and socially into ghetto-groups not only in ideology and political orientation but even in the way they think, in the way they reflect on events. The premises on which these processes are built are so divergent that the more they probe the more they find themselves torn apart. In my continuous dialogue over the years as a committed Zionist with my fellow Israelis, I stressed our need to face realities and not hide behind slogans and wishful thinking. Ideas and proposals that looked outlandish at the time turned out subsequently to be right leaving Israel always behind the Curve of Peace that we all yearned to achieve. I believe that so will it be with my idea for a three-state instead of two-state solution that I have been advocating for so long.

4. As a keen observer I attempt to see events with the finality they lead up to. When one freely and dispassionately projects events against the objective realities on the ground it is not difficult to foresee their eventual consequences. And when circumstances change it is important to modify and adapt these proposals rather than to wring the hand and bury the head in the sand. My views and forebodings although voiced since the day of my discharge from active military service after the 6-Day War were recorded on a Website at least from 2001 onwards. Unfortunately when my Israeli friends read my pleading they respond politely to what to them looks, coming from an Israeli now living abroad, as the views of someone they perceive to be out of touch. But it is because I live abroad and detached that I can see things clearer.

5. While tracing our own mistakes over the years it is as important to emphasise that the responsibility for these missed opportunities is shared and is as much caused by the actions and lack of initiative by our Arab neighbours. While their boycotts and hostilities served to strengthen us, their disengagement from us served to weaken them and almost to lull them into a state of inertia and slumber activated only by outbursts of violence against Israel and just as often against each other. They also have closed their minds to positive compromises that are as much in their interest to contribute towards a peaceful co-existence. And yet when Jews and Arabs meet away from the glare of cameras and public media both sides quickly realise that what unites them in common interest in the region outweighs what keeps them apart through slogans and public rhetoric. Today the acute and violent divisions and fraternal in-fighting amongst the Arabs stand in their way to help themselves let alone help our common objectives. There are many Palestinians as well as Israelis who could see the truth of the arguments in this book but they are over-ruled and overwhelmed by their politicians and their hostile public and media. When I have the occasion to talk to Arab friends inside Israel or abroad they often tend to react positively and certainly more rationally to my analysis than my Jewish friends whose emotions get the better of their cool judgement.

6. Israel’s conflict with the Arabs started long before the birth of the State. It persisted as such till the Yom Kippur War of 1973. From that time onwards and specifically after the Peace Treaty with Egypt and Jordan the conflict was re-focussed and was converted into a narrower Israel-Palestinian Conflict. The Arab countries conveniently washed their hands of their responsibilities to their Palestinian brothers for their joined debacles of the 1948 War and 6-Day War and left them to their own devices. Instead, the Israel Issue became a tool in their leaders’ hands used to suppress and divert attention from their internal dissents and protests. Israel is portrayed as the Satan, the danger, the threat. The fact though, and the Arabs know it very well, is that the tiny strip of land that is Israel and even the total number of Jews worldwide can never constitute a threat to the Arabs when matched in comparison with their huge lands, populations and resources. Far from the Arabs in Israel who are portrayed as being a minority, it is Israel’s Jewish population which is in fact a tiny minority within the Arab World surrounding them. And this situation cannot change in the future owing to the fact that Jews were never proselytising both as a nation and as a religion. The real crisis today is that the leaders of the outdated regimes of the Arab Sunni countries suddenly woke up to dangers from within to their class, wealth and privileges. These come not from Israel but from new movements of militant nationalism and a bigger danger of radicalised religion inside and the threat of Shiite Iran from outside. The Nasserite secular elite in Egypt, the ruling Bedouin Royalty of Jordan and the sectarian Alawyte dictatorship of Syria could see that the disgruntled Palestinians are becoming the new real threat to their regimes and their stability. That is why they have been distancing themselves from them. However they found it convenient to fan the flame, to perpetuate the Bogey, in order to blame everything on Israel away from these internal problems. Instead of keeping the responsibility for Gaza in Egypt’s hands and that of the West Bank in Jordan’s, we foolishly swallowed this new narrow positioning of the Conflict and acquiesced without questioning its consequences. It is Israel’s fault that it did not take its opportunity to insist on keeping Egypt and Jordan involved with the disastrous results which are unfolding today.

7. Along the borders of Egypt and Jordan Israel became unwittingly the policeman preventing safe passage and infiltration of Palestinians slowly into other Arab countries and beyond creating a huge pressure cooker waiting to explode. Thus Israel has been protecting the Arab regimes from “contaminating” their local restive population by the enlightened Palestinians who learnt the benefits of democracy from their Israeli occupiers. This new vested interest in keeping the Conflict on the boil is becoming dominant not only in Egypt and Jordan but also in other Arab countries and recently in the hands of Ahmedi-Nejad in Iran who carried it to the ridiculous denial not just of medieval or biblical myths but of the undisputed recent history of the Holocaust. It is tragic that these same countries forget that they have themselves aggravated the plight of the Palestinians through their policies of Judenrein and their clinical ethnic-cleansing of their own Jewish communities. Instead of looking into their dire need to modernise their economies and repair their fractured societies they seem to vent their frustration on tiny Israel which they themselves strengthened with the swelling numbers of Arab Jews driven by them into Israel.

8. Israel, without being aware of it, is responding on queue and plunging itself in the even bigger conflicts of the region by aligning itself absolutely on the side of the West instead of displaying neutral and moderating influence. The Arabs of Israel, 20 per cent of its population, could have been instrumental in this respect. Jewish Israelis are free to be in touch and even use Jews abroad to comment and even exert pressure in the internal affairs of Israel. Not so are Israeli Arabs. They are prevented and even accused of treason when they try similar ways in their relationship with Arabs or Muslims outside the country. Israelis look at them as the fifth column and lately they themselves started behaving as such. But relationships of Israeli Arabs across the Border could have been to the advantage of Israel in all fields, political, social and international. Imagine the reactions of Western Public and Media to our Arab Knesset Members forming part of our official delegations and our own Arabs from Israel occupying key positions in our embassies abroad.

9. The UN following the 1948 War of Israel Independence helped initially through its Aid Agencies to ameliorate the conditions of the Arab Refugees then but not the Jewish Refugees from Arab countries. However while alleviating day to day sufferings they indirectly served to perpetuate the problem of those refugees. Indeed the UN created a whole bureaucracy with a life and a vested interest of its own. One is forgiven to speculate when these UN Agencies intervene (always against Israel) whether they do that out of carrying out UN policies, which anyway they themselves initiate, or simply for institutionalised self preservation to protect jobs for life to which they became too accustomed to let go. UNRWA developed into a self-perpetuating self-renewing fixture. Who remembers today the Indian Refugees from both sides of a similar conflict which occurred at the same time in 1948 when the British Colonial Power left both India and Palestine with the legacy of years of Divide and Rule. This comparison struck me suddenly when I saw on television President Musharraf of Pakistan on a state visit to India taking tea amicably and without recrimination with the Indian occupants of his abandoned family house where he was born in New Delhi.

10. Europe cannot escape its responsibility either. Its ambivalence towards the Jews may be explained by 2000 years of religious indoctrination but can never be morally justified in the 21^st century. Immediately after the Holocaust, the one country in Europe, Britain, which led the war against Nazism, actually led the way to deny the Jews the very fruit of the seed that their own Balfour Declaration had sown to provide a haven to the Holocaust survivors. Apart from Denmark, I cannot think of any other country in Europe which can honestly absolve itself of guilt. After few generations some countries, notably Germany, are bravely wrestling with their past to exorcise the ghosts which continue to cry out from the rafters of their Cathedrals. The most inexplicable attitude today however is displayed by Sweden and Norway. Apart from the personal example of King Haakon’s behaviour during World War II, neither country can claim complete innocence. Why their governments are leading the condemnation of Israel with so much ferocity is beyond comprehension. Instead of this idle holier than thou attitude towards Israel, Europe could solve the conflict overnight at a stroke by offering to take some Arab Refugees openly instead of granting refuge status invoking Human Rights to a stream of Islamists and economic migrants. After all they got rid of six million Jews that by now would have swelled into tens of millions. Europe is short of manpower. The Palestinians are mostly educated, intelligent and hard-working. And so that nobody might be tempted to pop up the question why not solve the Conflict by Europe taking back the descendants of its own Jews from Israel instead, the stark answer is that the Israelis have lost faith in Europe and are determined to die for the only country they can claim to be theirs historically and by UN sanction.

11. What is the solution then? Is Israel doomed? Of course not. Israel is there to stay, not because of its army, not because of its history, not because of the Holocaust, but because the 6 million Jews in Israel (more than half of whom are descendents anyway of ethnically-cleansed Arab Jewish Refugees) have nowhere else to go. They have no choice but to stand up and fight even if it is in a war of mutual destruction with their enemies. Only this realization will convince the Arabs to seek mutually acceptable solutions. So to sum up on our Israeli side I have been trying to illustrate in these essays the three unresolved-problems facing us today: defining stable borders, strengthening our participatory democracy and repairing our damaged image abroad. These are three intertwined themes of my writing over many years. I put my early life on the line for Israel. Now I am devoting what is left of it to advocate my tentative solutions to these three problems in order to help secure the future of my people and the future of the Alien that has chosen to continue to live amongst us.

12. The legacy politics of Israel’s founding fathers was gradually replaced with career politics. This is a sickness at the heart of our politics that needs to be cured. And the cure is simple. I have devoted the last 5 years advocating a change from our pure Proportional Electoral System to Total Representation, a new electoral system that fuses the two major electoral systems of first-past-the-Post and proportional representation. I have argued the case for this change in the President of Israel’s Commission, in many books and articles and recently in an English edition in cooperation with Prof. Ivo Skrabalo of Zagreb. (Total Representation: A New Electoral System for Modern Times).

I hope these essays are read by Arabs as well as by Jews. By getting to the core of the problems, their aim is to help create a realistic climate of co-existence that may help to propel forward the peace and reconciliation process.

Aharon Nathan, Wimbledon, 31^st December 2009

Representation in Democracy (TR - The Total Representation Electoral System)

2009-06-15T21:14:00.005+01:00

TR is One Response to the MPs’ Expenses Crisis

TR, Total Representation, is a simplified version of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) It preserves a large element of the Westminster model and infuses it with a dose of PR to ensure a greater representation of voters’ preferences. TR’s appeal is in the way it carries out reform of parliament with minimum upheaval. Its distinctive feature of giving weight to the votes of unsuccessful candidates appeals to the deep sense of fairness of the British people.

Unlike similar mixed or hybrid systems TR is easy to understand and operate. It needs only one ballot and requires all candidates (including those competing in party lists) to start off by running in the constituencies.

The PR element of TR gives an active role and leverage to the runner-ups in the constituencies by keeping their hopes alive in between elections even in “safe seats” Thus TR converts the rival runner-ups into watch-dogs, monitoring the incumbent MPs and guaranteeing their constant accountability. In such situations it could have helped to avoid the present Expenses Crisis thanks to the permanent vigilance and opposition of the rival candidates throughout the duration of a parliament.

How TR works
TR is a constituency-based system. For it to work properly, each constituency needs to have roughly the same number of voters to avoid gerrymandering. The majority of seats in parliament (say 80%) will be awarded to the winners of these races, just as they are under the Westminster system today.

So each party puts up candidates for election in the various seats. Their names appear on the ballot paper in alphabetical order and next to each name is the party he or she represents. However, these candidates also appear on their own party’s national “list” of all its candidates headed by the party leader.

Voters go to the polls and put a cross against their preferred local candidate. Whoever wins a simple majority of those votes becomes that Constituency’s Member of Parliament (CMP) – again, just like today.

From then on, the innovations begin. All the “successful” ballots drop out. So if you voted for candidate X and candidate X wins, your ballot is judged to have already secured representation. As for the “unsuccessful” ballots (for example, if you voted for candidate Y, but candidate Y did not win in your constituency) these are placed in a giant nationwide pool – and it is from these that say the 20% of the remaining seats are decided using the PR method and awarded to the various parties to select Party Members of Parliament (PMPs)

These remaining seats are allocated according to a quota (ie a minimum number of required votes per seat). This is reached by dividing the number of “unsuccessful” votes by the number of the remaining seats. So, if there are 150 PMP seats available, and there were 15 million “unsuccessful” votes in the election, each party needs 100,000 votes to elect one PMP.

Unlike in other list-based systems, the way these seats are awarded depends crucially on how the candidates performed in the constituencies. With the exception of the party leader, who – if unsuccessful first time around – may be given first choice of a PMP seat, all the other PMP seats will end up being awarded either to those candidates who did best in the first-past-the-post election (in other words, the strongest runners-up), or to constituency candidates of minority parties who may have significant support nationwide but lack strength in any particular constituency. Everything depends on the number of votes each candidate secures.

Arguments in Support of TR
- Each voter is required to cast only one ballot
- Few votes are “wasted”, with most going on to secure at least some level of
representation, albeit with different weightings.
- Its PR element is relatively simple, and easy to understand and operate
- All MPs would have to start off as constituency candidates, and all votes are worth fighting
for even in “safe seats” because there is a potential prize for coming second.
- It gives minority views the chance of a voice in parliament without giving them undue
influence, because the system is still weighted towards first-past-the-post.
Arguments against TR
- It creates two classes of MPs (CMP and PMP) thus leading to the possibility of conflict between them. However unlike in other such systems, most of the “Party” MPs would also have to have performed relatively well in the constituency vote and would retain some link with that locality. While the centre of the duties of the CMP is the constituency, that of the PMP is the Party in parliament.
- All existing constituency boundaries would have to be redrawn. However any reform will anyway necessitate redrawing of boundaries.

By way of contributing to the present debate on electoral reform, a book on TR is being published, which will fully describe the TR system and its applications to parliament in Westminster. The book will be up-to-date and takes in recent political events. Dr Ken Ritchie, the Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, is contributing an introduction, which evaluates this new electoral system.

Aharon Nathan, 15th June 2009

Israel Arab Conflict (Address to the Academy for Political Development in Zagreb)

2009-04-15T14:56:00.005+01:00

Seeking solutions for the Israel-Arab Conflict

Historical Background:

1. The Israel/Palestine conflict we witness today started as an Arab/Jewish confrontation at the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of nationalism. The Jews were being persecuted in Eastern Europe but found no refuge in the West. They needed a national home and the only place they could claim any historical connection with was the Holy Land, the ancient home of the wandering Jew. Meanwhile, the Arabs were trying to free themselves, first from the yoke of their Muslim brothers, the Ottoman Turks, and then from the colonialist powers. Nationalism was the order of the age everywhere.

2. At the time, there were also the Middle Eastern Jewish Communities who lived, co-existing with other peoples, in Arab countries, sometimes tolerated but often not. As nationalism bubbled up everywhere they attempted to join and identify themselves with their Arab majorities – but they were never accepted. Their story is often overshadowed by the myriads of books written about Europe’s Jews and the establishment of Israel. Yet today, these descendants of Jews from Arab countries make up half of Israel’s population. Their claim to the right to live in peace in Israel is stronger than that of the European Jews, and even more so than that of the Palestinians. Unlike the Palestinians, with the whole of the huge Arab world open to them, Middle Eastern Jews have nowhere else to go but to live in tiny Israel. Think about it in another way. Let us for argument’s sake accept the Arab contention that Palestine, together with Israel, are all part of the Arab Land. It follows therefore that what in fact actually happened was that Eastern Jews have moved from one corner to another within the same Land. They are not invaders, not settlers. They are natives, and their ancestors were natives before the Arab conquest swept the Middle East in the seventh century. They are not the Crusaders that the Arabs today like to call Jews of European origin. To fully understand the present ME conflict it is important to learn about this aspect of it to see that there is not one set of ME refugees but two. And no better way to introduce this aspect of the conflict than to tell my own personal story. I was both witness and victim of the cruel process that made me a refugee in my own land.

3. I was born in Iraq, and was immersed in its culture and shared in its national aspirations. I was an Iraqi Jew growing up together with Iraqi Muslims. But my personal effort to integrate into the social and political fabric of the country, and God knows I did try, was always met with a rebuff by them. To them I was an alien. And by the time Israel was born in 1948, this rebuff became literally persecution. When all the doors were closed in my face, together with so many other Jews of my generation who were denied exit visas, we had to find a way to escape; literally to flee the country by crossing the border on foot. In my case that was via Iran, whose people I will always be indebted to for my safe passage at my desperate time of need.

4. There was no other country but Israel which would give refuge to me and to some 150 000 Jews who followed in 1950/52. These people could trace their ancestry back through 2500 years of continuous life in Iraq – long before the Arab Conquest. I arrived at the absorption centre in Israel in 1949. I found there a mixture of people: all dejected, all helpless. My fellow refugees from Arab countries were desperately trying to rebuild their lives out of nothing in a land of nothing. But it was the sight of the remnants of the Holocaust camps that broke my heart and my spirit. I saw frightened shadows of human beings, dazed, confused and broken, trying to regain their existence as humans. But worst of all, instead of natural hatred, rage and bitterness I found many of them trying to remove the concentration camp numbers on their arms because they felt guilty for being alive and ashamed of not having put up a fight before allowing themselves to be led as sheep to the Gas chambers. It is the combined images of the ethnically cleansed Arab Jews who lost their countries, and the Holocaust remnants of European Jews who lost their dignity, that are engraved in my being and in the mind of every Jew who says: “never again” That is why Israelis feel the need to keep their military power and even their nuclear shield –not because they are on a Samson-like suicidal mission. It is because they are determined to live with the pride and dignity denied to them in other countries throughout the ages. They are determined now that if they must die, they want to die fighting. For the Arabs, if they want to coexist with Israel, they should first remember this.

5. These fears, as reflected in my own personal story, must also be understood against wider Jewish history. Two thousand years of persecution, execution and forced conversion to Christianity and Islam, culminated in Hitler’s Final Solution, a solution which wiped out almost half the world’s Jewish population on the watch of the civilised world.

6. Today, it is worrying Israelis and Jews alike that what happened in Germany under the Nazis in the early 1930s is being re-enacted in a startlingly similar way in Europe. Every aspect of life in Israel, its people, its institutions, its places of learning, even its acclaimed courts of justice, are being demonized. Recently, this demonizing has been organized and reinforced by concerted bans and boycotts here in Europe in protest they say against the occupation of Palestinian lands, which in fact the majority of the people of Israel would be happy to hand back. All this sends shivers down the spines of Jews everywhere, reminding them of the anti-Semitic demonizing propaganda of the 1930s in Germany, which was the precursor of, and prepared the ground for the Holocaust. As Condoleezza Rice stated recently: Anti-Semitism is not just a historical fact but a current event.

7. The Arab World has played and continues to play its active part, too, in the Jewish tragedy. During World War 2 they made Jewish life in their midst a living hell. By the early 1950’s, when the safe haven of Israel opened, some 900,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed to Israel from Arab countries leaving most Arab countries what the Nazis called Judenrein, lands without Jews. Therefore what the Nazis failed to do the Arab countries accomplished and perpetuated. And the world accepts that as normal.

8. In contrast, today, 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs who enjoy full rights. They sit in parliament and can find their way, as indeed they have done, to sit in the various national institutions – even in the cabinet and in the Supreme Court. Nobody denies their right to be where they are, having lived in Israel even before the creation of Israel. But in Iraq, there is not one single Jew now living there.

9. Iraqi Jews were part of the tide of 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Their plight and fate are forgotten because Israel did not leave them in camps to rot and did not ask the UN to set up agencies to perpetuate their misery and status as refugees. With help from Jews worldwide, these Jewish refugees with their bare hands gave themselves dignity, security and a future in stark contrast to the way rich, very rich, Arabs treated the then 700,000 Palestinian Refugees and disgracefully continue to treat their descendents since. Consequently, today only the Palestinian Refugees are remembered.

10. This, however, is not to gloss over the events of the 1948 War when the Arab Armies attacked the Jews in Palestine. Here no excuse or justification should wipe out or absolve either side of the wrongdoings, whether these were committed by State armies or by individual political leaders and local commanders. We need to deal not only with the memories but also with the outcome of that war. Irrespective of which side was to blame, the Arab countries which attacked, or the nascent State of Israel which needed to defend itself. It is the outcome that matters. Unless a just practical solution is found for the Palestinian refugees in the same way the Jews dealt with their own Jewish refugees, the Middle East will have no peace. But this will not happen until – in the words of Prince Hassan of Jordan – both sides begin to internalise the disaster and the suffering that befell each of them as a result of that war.

11. The Arabs, and recently even the historians of the conflict, name what happened to the Palestinians in the 1948 War “The Naqba”: in Arabic, the Disaster. But they conveniently ignore the Arab Jews’ corresponding Naqba. The reason for this is that while the Palestinian Naqba was a consequence of a war, the Arab Jews’ Naqba had much deeper historical roots. It was the culmination of the Judenrein process which threw the Arab Jews out of Arab countries, a process that is still reflected right now in Arab attitudes and prevents any compromise or solution of the Arab/Israeli conflict that has been festering since the creation of Israel.

The Islamist Version of Judenrhein:

12. Judenrhein is land pure and clean of Jews. This is a dream that Hitler designed for Europe, but the Arabs fulfilled it in their countries. This is the Arab side of the Holocaust, the real tragic “NAQBAH” of the Jews who lived for centuries in Arab countries. Today every nation in Europe tries to apologise for this policy. Not so the Arabs. They are proud of their achievement, which they declare day and night as a matter of religious piety.

13. Unfortunately for the Arabs, as was so unfortunate for the fanatical Germans this is not helping the Arabs themselves. In fact it is at the heart of their problems, pulling them back to the dark ages. Islamic learning and tolerance brought the Enlightenment into Christian Europe, but recently it seems – sadly – to be receding from their own nations.

14. The solution to the Arab and especially the Palestinian plight in their relationship with Israel could have been resolved long time ago, if only their leaders had grasped the immorality of the concept of Judenrhein, and even more so if the West stopped accepting it as the norm in Arab countries. This acquiescence fostered its encouragement, with disastrous effects for the Arabs themselves.

15. If, as recently as at the time of the evacuation of Gaza by Prime Minister Sharon, the Palestinians had stood up and said: we claim back Gaza as land belonging to the State of Palestine, restoring the status quo ante before the 6-day War, but we have no problem with the Jewish settlements there staying as part of Palestinian Gaza, with Israelis living the way they live today in Germany, England and the USA…. If the Palestinians had done this, today Gaza would have been the new Hong Kong of the Middle East, with Israel as its hinterland and market and source of finance. Unfortunately, they missed this chance, because the Judenrein that shaped their attitude towards Jews got the better of them. It continues to be the obstacle in the way of practical and mutually beneficial solutions.

16. Such a chance to act sensibly is still open and could prove to be the way forward today for the Palestinians with regard to the future State of Palestine. The ball is also in the court of the Syrians to start a process which will bring real peace and prosperity to the region. Bashar Al-Assad, the Syrian leader, who clamours for the Golan, should take the initiative and suggest that the Jews in the Golan Heights could stay – after the withdrawal of Israel – as citizens of Syria or as Israelis-in-residence in a Syrian Golan – subject, just like other citizens in Syria, to Syrian law. This is exactly the same way that foreigners live in England, France or Germany today. It is then that Israeli resistance to withdrawal on security grounds will melt away, and a great and prosperous Golan can offer itself to millions of tourists from all over the world, who will enjoy the fusion of Arab and Jewish culture reminiscent of the glorious days of Cordoba and Toledo.

The Way Forward:

17. Unfortunately the Arab countries surrounding Israel are facing acute internal problems of social strife, political bankruptcy and overwhelming population explosion. The Palestinians have been left to themselves, and they are revelling in their infighting and delusions, making it impossible to reach any accommodation with Israel. They have become a plaything in the hands of Arab countries who are fighting each other for supremacy; they are also a proxy in the Islamic tug-of-war between the Shiaa of Iran and the Sunni of Saudi Arabia and Bin Laden. New Nassers and new Arafats are popping up everywhere without the Arabs asking themselves what good their old heroes did for them and what purpose the new ones serve. With this hopeless situation prevailing, it was right and practical for Israel to build the controversial Security Wall and it was wise to act unilaterally to give both sides time to find a solution for co-existence. Although they acted late, Sharon and Olmert proved to be foresighted both in building the Security Wall and in evacuating Gaza.

18. Amidst this confusion, Arabs can only accept co-existence once it dawns on them that Israel is there to stay, not because of its army, not because of its history, not because of the Holocaust, but because the 6 million Jews in Israel (more than half of whom are descendents anyway of ethnically cleansed Arab Jewish Refugees) have nowhere else to go. They have no choice but to stand up and fight even if it is a war of mutual destruction with their enemies. Only this realization will convince the Arabs to seek mutually acceptable solutions.

19. On our side, the Israeli side, our social fissures and political instabilities are creating hesitancy and lack of resolve which are sabotaging the implementation of our only available policy: i.e securing ourselves unilaterally and quickly within defendable borders. These new borders have to be defended militarily and, even more importantly, they have to be acceptable in due course internationally through negotiation. We cannot solve these problems without introducing real changes in our political structures. Social divisions are impeding the process of fusing together our Jewish communities and integrating our Arab minorities. These, together with the political instability of governments, stand in the way both of our negotiations with the Arabs and the implementation of our only available policy of securing ourselves unilaterally. The new electoral system I have proposed: TR -- Total Representation – is key to the urgent changes needed to overcome these difficulties. At its core is the direct accountability of Parliament to ordinary citizens, making it easy for a broadly representative parliament and a stable government to evolve, and empowering them to make brave decisions for peace.

Conclusions and Solutions:

20. Unlike Christian or Muslim countries, Israel cannot be treated in isolation from the Jewish people worldwide. After what happened in Europe and in the Arab countries, Jews everywhere believe that the defeat of Israel would mean annihilation. Israel is all the Jewish People’s refuge of last resort.

21. Lasting Peace is not a matter of goodwill. It lasts only if it is based on the absence of potential future conflicts on the ground. In the aftermath of the recent tragic and unnecessary Gaza War, we Israelis, have to ask ourselves fundamental questions. These questions need to be daring, deep and all-encompassing. There is no doubt that for one century now our Arab neighbours have not accepted us. In turn we, on our side ceased long ago to try to understand them. A mental curtain has descended between the Arabs and us, and that includes our own Arab citizens. In fact we seem to live parallel lives – so much so that we have become accustomed to a view of each other only through telescopic gun-barrels.

22. The only thing that will work is maximum defensible real, physical separation of the two states of Israel and Palestine on the ground. The recent wars of Lebanon and Gaza and all the ensuing killing and destruction make separation more urgent and necessary – indeed mandatory. Gaza is at the core of the problem. It needs to be developed economically along the lines of Singapore or Hong Kong; it has to become a viable entity supporting its population. Some of its refugees have to be given means and opportunities and encouraged to resettle in the West Bank and in Arab Countries, including the sparsely-populated, labour-hungry Gulf. Its border to Sinai and Egypt has to be opened for free trade and interaction with the world beyond. Otherwise Gaza will remain a pressure cooker waiting to explode.

23. But Gaza also needs to cease being a potential threat to Israel. A situation has to be avoided where it can become the western arm of a future Palestinian pincer that together with Hebron on the eastern border of southern Israel will fuel future rising tension, leading to a conflagration that can have only one result: either Israel or Palestine will have to be divided into two halves, thus stoking up more violence. The solution here will have to be for Gaza to become an independent state. Europe has many examples of such small states that sprang into being out of realpolitik necessity. Today, the Palestinian President Abu Mazen’s West Bank is already separated from Hamas’s Gaza. Why not keep them that way for the sake of peace both for Israelis and Palestinians? Thus, four states will arise out of the old Palestine: Israel, Jordan, Palestine and the republic of Gaza. The result will be the final end and the last nail in the coffin of the ill-conceived British Mandate. These four states can join together in an economic Common Market that will bring stability, peace and prosperity to all their inhabitants.

24. How would the Egyptians react to the establishment of a separate state in Gaza? I believe they will welcome this solution which in effect would solve their own problem which is even more thorny and complex than that of Israel. Terrorist Gaza as it is today is a threat to Egypt through illegal infiltration. Hamas members find internal allies and homes amongst the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The border with Sinai is porous and out of control because both sides of it are united in their hatred of Israel. All this will change once it becomes the border between two Arab sovereign states controlled by passports and visas the same way that Egypt today protects its border with Libya and the Sudan. Egypt can facilitate the filtering of refugees to other Arab countries from the State of Gaza where the latter’s government becomes responsible for taking back undesirable elements. The inhabitants of the State of Gaza will be more interested in their livelihood and sooner or later will themselves throw out Hamas. In the new situation Israel can legitimately in the eyes of the world defend vigorously and effectively its border against a hostile state which will be responsible for its actions. Israel and Egypt will then have identical common interest instead of the present ambivalent attitude towards the Gazans and towards each other.

25. Jerusalem has to be divided into: Jerusalem Capital of Israel; and Al-Quds Capital of Palestine - Twin Cities with a clear SEPARATION between the two. Without this no peace will survive. Arab inhabitants in Jerusalem (those who were annexed after the-6 Day War) should revert to Palestine citizenship but can live as residents in Jerusalem if their residence falls within Israeli Jerusalem. Likewise, Jews who choose to stay in Al-Quds can retain their Israeli citizenship but continue to live as residents in Palestine subject to its laws after a period of protection by Israel.

26. Similar status should apply (after a period of protection by the Israeli army) to all Israelis who choose to stay in the new Palestine. This includes the Jewish enclave in Hebron. The same arrangement should be accorded to the cluster of Jewish settlements which fall on the borders of Palestine, in accordance with the spirit of the exchange of letters between President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon of 14th April 2004. If the enclave of this cluster of settlements on the western border of new Palestine is allowed to remain within the sovereignty of Palestine then no need remains to the tortuous business of exchange of territories. Otherwise such exchange needs to be carried out by negotiations.

27. It is not our business to interfere and certainly not to decide for the Palestinians which government or leaders are best for them. The Palestinian President, Abu Mazen, is not in control. Hamas has to be brought directly into any negotiation for an enduring settlement. If either or both do not accept these or similar proposals, Israel should unilaterally implement them on its side of the new borders the way Prime Minister Sharon implemented the evacuation of Gaza, UNILATERALLY.

Aharon Nathan, Zagreb, 21st April 2009

Representation in Democracy (A New Electoral System Removes Major Existential Threats)

2008-07-13T14:49:00.004+01:00

A New Electoral System Removes Major Existential Threats
An Address to Limmud London on 13th July 2008

1) Israel looks to be facing existential dangers today. Of course as long as it maintains a strong army and as long as its solid alliance with America endures it will continue to have adequate deterrents. The question of course is for how long? This is not a rhetorical question. America’s self interests and public opinion may sway and our neighbours’ military capabilities, regular or guerrilla, may improve. The only alternative therefore is settling the borders and normalising the relations with the Arab countries, and the sooner the better as the cost will mount.

2) In the short term Hezbollah, Hamas and the surrounding Arab countries are not immediate dangers. But the wave of Anti-Semitism which is poisoning opinions against Israel outside and the social and political disintegration inside the country are the real threat in the long run. No wonder we find such incongruous voices spelling this obvious observation: Ex–Knesset Speaker Avrom Burg, Nobel Laureate Prof. Oman and most recently Ahmedi-Nejad.

3) Central to these real threat is the break-down of Israel’s political structure that renders its three arms of the state dysfunctional. The people are exasperated and an irresponsible media is revelling in feeding their frustration. It sounds almost blasphemous but it needs to be said : the Israeli Media is unwittingly assuming a dual role of the Forth Arm and the Fifth Column in Israel. The most important controlling cure is reforming the electoral system which Israel has failed to do for 60 years.

4) The political structure is vital in shaping any country and gelling together its society. And at the heart of this structure is the electoral system which connects the sovereign people with their government. Unfortunately Israel chose by default the wrong electoral system for its specific requirements in 1948 and despite repeated attempts did not succeed to change it since .

5) Total Representation “TR” is an electoral system which can be adopted to suit many countries or adapted to improve existing systems. The purpose of this essay is to explain what TR is and how it works; and then to analyse why it is vital for Israel to adopt TR soon in the context of stemming the existential threats which Israel will be more and more exposed to in the future.

6) What is TR?

TR Total Representation is a new electoral system based on the premise that every single vote cast in an election has to end up with some representation in parliament, whether directly or indirectly.
It avoids the most serious defect of the Constituency First-Past-the-Post System familiar to us here in England, under which votes cast for the successful candidate are represented in parliament, while all the rest of the votes i.e. those cast for the unsuccessful candidates are left unrepresented, though they may make up most of the total vote in some constituencies.
The Proportional Representation System “PR”, as practiced in Israel on the other hand, does allow representation to all votes cast and gives them equal weight, but it encourages small political parties and splinter groups, resulting in weak coalition governments where factional rather than national interests take over. Its greatest deficiency, however, is the lack of a direct link between the members of the electorate and their individual representatives in parliament; unlike the Single Member Constituency System it transfers this link to the political parties.
‘TR’ Total Representation offers a solution by combining the positive elements of both systems, i.e. the dominant element of representation in Proportional Representation and the direct link with the voter of the Constituency First-Past-the-Post System.
According to TR parliaments would have two classes of MPs who would be equal in every way save for the manner by which they were elected. One class would be the accountable Constituency MPs (CMPs) who would be elected by a simple majority on a constituency first-past-the-post basis, exactly as they are elected today in the UK. The other class, Party MPs (PMPs) would be elected by pooling all the votes cast for the unsuccessful candidates in all the constituencies and dividing them proportionally amongst all the Parties which fielded candidates in the same constituencies.

7) The advantages of TR are:

Government stability balanced with adequate representation. Stability is essential for governments to govern effectively and carry out long term planning. True representation is essential to translate the will of the people to supervise governments through parliament.
Built-in Legitimate Sovereign Opposition to counter the tyranny of the majority and guarantee gradual change, thus rendering society open and not closed to necessary adjustments as they arise.;
A voice for the losers. This devise declares the death of “Arithmetical Democracy” where the 51 per cent winner takes all.

8) Let us see now how TR can benefit Israel. Our tribal waves of immigration are not gelling and are not cohesive yet. The inhabitants of the borders and peripheries are abandoned. The gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. The Arab minorities are getting more radicalised by the day. The rich and the oligarchs are allied with the political establishments and the Media. The Seculars are in mortal conflict with the Religious. The Supreme Court has by default appropriated to itself legislative powers and Judges are asked to direct the Executive and even the military operations of the Army. Governments became unstable and their authority undermined. The Knesset, the voice of the people between elections is so weak and divided that it is no more taken seriously, in fact it is discredited.

9) TR is a systemic tool that can help alleviate if not solve some of these problems because the first thing it does is to strengthen the Knesset and give it the authority it needs to intervene effectively to solve these problems. As a direct result of TR this new authority will be derived from every citizen in every corner of the land.

10) Let us see how in practice it works on the ground: The introduction of TR will bring the Knesset nearer to the people through their locally chosen regional MKs. who will individually be held accountable. It strengthens its authority in the eyes of the public and makes it easier for it to back and sanction difficult decisions taken by a stable governments. It asserts the primacy of the Legislator in the eyes of the citizens over the recently overpowering Judiciary.

11) The cornerstone of TR is the single MK Constituency. In the case of Israel it is of paramount importance to draw during the process of election all the voters in that locality together and to push the candidates to assume central political positions away from extremism in order to attract all the voters. Multi member regions as advocated by some colleagues in the recent President’s Commission on Government would deepen the division of the local communities along immigrant, ethnical and religious lines. It replants the defects of the present PR system into the regions. It can bring about the Lebanonisation of Israel.

12) But the most important outcome of the introduction of TR Total Representation is to integrate and Israelise our minorities without infringing on their religious beliefs or ethnic aspirations. The process of canvassing under TR, especially but not exclusively, in mixed Jewish/Arab localities would help to interweave and enmesh them into Israel’s political and social institutions. It would prevent the emergence of an internal Hamas from amongst their extremists, which is a far more dangerous than external Hamas.

13) And in the same process TR can through its implementation bind together the “new Jewish tribes” of Israel into local rather than disparate immigrant communities thus hopefully slaying the ghosts of Ashkenazi / Mizrahi / Russian / Ethiopian etc. that the PR system galvanizes and reinforces.

14) And finally and most importantly TR stabilises the government, allows it to plan long term and gives it the authority to take painful decisions with regard to fixing the borders and normalising Israel’s relations with all its neighbours.

Aharon Nathan was a member of the President’s Commission on the Governance of Israel. He set up and headed the first Civil Administration in the Gaza Strip in 1956.

Aharon Nathan, 13th July 2008

Representation in Democracy (Electoral Draft Law of 2nd April 2008)

2008-07-08T19:09:00.002+01:00

The Electoral Draft Law in the Knesset

1. Following on from the President’s Commission’s Final Report, and after much deliberation and lobbying, on 2nd April 2008 four senior MKs from the three big parties in the Knesset tabled a Draft Law (“Draft”) which embodied the main principles of TR – with some modifications.

2. These four MKs were: Professor Menachem Ben-Sasson of Kadima, Chairman of the Law and Constitution Committee; Mr Ophir Pines Paz, an ex-minister and current Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee; Mr Eitan Cabel , another ex-minister and current Chairman of the Labour Party in the Knesset (both Labour); and Mr Gideon Saar, Chairman of the Likud Party in the Knesset. Together, these three parties have 60 out of the 120 members of the Knesset. Surprisingly the Electoral Law in Israel is not a Basic Law. However to secure the passage of changes in it, the votes of 61 MKs are needed although only a simple majority and not an absolute majority is necessary. So these three parties need the support of all their own members – by no means a foregone conclusion – and therefore they need the support of at least one other party. And of course it also needs to surmount the opposition of the partners of the ruling Coalition Government, currently mainly the Shas Party.

3. The most important improvement in the draft is the rejection of multi-member constituencies in favour of single-member ones. This is an improvement on the President’s Final Report and a leap forward for TR (Total Representation) Otherwise, the Draft Law follows the Final Report in offering a 60/60 mix of constituency CMKs and party PMKs. In this and a few other details it has somewhat deviated from the basic principles of TR. The following is a summary of these deviations. I will analyse them one by one, looking at the rationale behind them and at how to overcome them in order to confer the full benefits of TR on the new law.

Ratio of 60/60 Constituency/Party Membership of the Knesset
4. In this, the Draft follows the Report. On the face of it, it looks symmetrical and reasonable. The real motive behind this, however, is rather different – although of course it is not plainly expressed. Today, most of Israeli candidates and the order of their appearances in the Election Lists for the general election are determined by the leadership and/or by the central organs of each party. They are in fact appointed by them and not elected. And even where primaries are held by some parties to elect candidates these primaries are mostly manipulated and in fact corrupt and lead to the choosing of candidates who are beholden to the leadership and are unrepresentative of the supporters of those parties in the country at large. It is natural that MKs who have been selected in this way (and who are the same people that will have to vote the Draft law on its journey towards ratification) are afraid that most of them will lose their seats under a new election regime. In a matter of fact, their declared support for any change towards regional and therefore accountable seats in the Knesset is not derived from good will or sound judgement, but because of pressure from the public.
We know that turkeys do not vote for Christmas. So these people hope that the 60 regional CMK seats will be a sop to satisfy the public demand for regional reform, while giving enough space through the other 60 party seats for most of them to manoeuvre their way back to the exclusive club that the Knesset provides them with.

5. There is another compelling reason why the present MKs want to preserve at least 60 Party seats to safeguard their immediate future survival. The majority of the present MKs reside in Tel Aviv and its surrounding areas. Their natural fear is, of course, that regional candidates from outside this orbit will push them out and slim down their chances of being chosen, particularly if a 90/30 ratio is used. The current Draft Law feeds these fears because it stipulates that candidates need to be residents of their constituencies. But this condition is not necessary and may in fact cause many able potential candidates to shy away from putting their names forward and start disrupting their home life even before their hopeful, but not certain, election. And although some candidates – once elected – may choose to move to their new constituencies or to acquire secondary accommodation there to gain local popularity, this should not be a pre-election condition. Moreover, keeping this condition will psychologically create two types of MKs: one local complete with certified residency and the other national, which of course is not the intention behind the division of 60/60 or the 90/30. Dropping this onerous condition will help allay the fears of the current MKs – and help solve the problem of fixing the ratio between the two.

Counting the Votes
6. Although it is not completely clear from the Draft Law, the assumption is that votes for the candidates and their parties are counted only once, in the first instance to choose the CMKs. Once the CMKs are elected by the votes of the majorities in each constituency, all the remaining votes are aggregated and distributed amongst the parties for choosing their PMKs. Any idea, as some have suggested or the Draft may perhaps implied, of using the votes again in their entirety to choose the PMKs would be tantamount to counting the CMK votes twice. In the case of Israel, such double utilisation of votes could give a huge advantage to the Arab and Jewish Religious Haredi because of their concentration in some localities. It could turn out to be that these minority parties would be given two bites of the cherry-once to elect their CMKs and then using these votes again together with what remains to give them PMK seats. Once this idea is excluded, we are left with the simple TR method of sharing and dividing the same votes between the CMKs and the PMKs.

Order of Priority in Party Lists
7. Another pitfall that the Draft needs to rectify is the order of priority of party lists. The most efficient and fair method is that offered by TR. Before the general election, it is natural that each party wants to display its star candidates to attract votes through the canvassing process. Therefore, it needs to put their names at the top of its list to show the public who their prominent and eminent future MKs from amongst its candidates would be. However, once the results of the general election are declared for each constituency, and therefore each successful CMK is declared and named, the original list of each party should be re-shuffled and rearranged in accordance with the number of votes each candidate has scored. The rearrangement of priorities could be made by each party before allocating their share of PMKs. This would provide an incentive for the various candidates to fight for each vote during the election, as that could be crucial in their being prioritised as the chosen PMKs by their parties. However, this procedure desirable as evidently it is may be left for each party to decide for itself, although it might be equally advisable to embody it in the electoral law. Moreover this simple procedure dispenses with pre-election primaries.

8. Retaining, post-election, the order of the candidates on the pre-election List could create anomalies after the election. How?! Let us take an example. Three candidates – A, B and C – from three parties are competing in one constituency. A secured 48 per cent of the votes, B secured 47 per cent and C secured 5 per cent. A won a CMK seat. But if B is, say, numbered 55th in his Party’s List, he will not secure a PMK seat, while C who is, say, numbered 3rd in his Party’s List would probably secure a PMK seat. So the 47 percent candidate lost, and the 5 percent candidate won the right to sit in the next Knesset. A situation like this would reflect badly both on the chosen PMP and his/her party.

9. Another thing that could help the existing MKs to swallow the change to 90/30 is to increase the number of Knesset seats available. The Knesset’s present membership of 120 has remained static for 60 years despite a over 10 fold increase in population. With many MKs continuing in their positions for decades without being replaced, the membership has become stale, and this has contributed to the image of the Knesset as an ancient, exclusive club, closed to and remote from ordinary citizens. Increasing the membership to 160 would facilitate dividing them into a ratio of 120/40 or even 100/60, instead of the proposed 90/30. This move would also make the proposed law more palatable for the present MKs, as it would increase their chances to survive under the new regime. Linking this measure to the appeal of introducing the regional representation of TR would also make it more acceptable to a public that has recently grown dismissive and sceptical of anything connected with the Knesset.

To Secure the Party Leader
10. The order of priority of each party’s candidates list would be declared beforehand, putting the party leader at the top in a reserved slot to ensure his/her place in the Knesset, whatever happens. The reason for this is that in a First-Past-the-Post system, the opposition will throw all its weight behind its candidate in the constituency of the leader of its rival party, in order to defeat him/her and embarrass his/her party. The reserved top spot for the leader also helps avoid upsets and confusion in the aftermath of a general election if the leader fails to win his/her constituency seat which, though unlikely, is of course, possible. Some parties may likewise want to secure the places of their Secretary or Chairman, and their Election Operation Officer, as these two would need to devote their full time to serving the party during the election period and might not be able to attend adequately to canvassing in their respective constituencies. But again, this issue is the business of each party and may not necessarily need to be stipulated by the electoral law.

11. Once the Draft Law takes care of all the above points, the exact ratio of CMKs to PMKs becomes less crucial, and although a ratio of 90/30 is the optimum, a slightly higher proportion of PMKs might be more suitable for Israel’s population make up. However, a ratio of 60/60 will definitely gives the PMKs too much power, and will not serve the purpose of the desired electoral reform, as it will immediately drag the system back into a preponderance of the Proportional Representation element.

Blocking Threshold
12. What is left is the blocking threshold. The Draft suggests that each party has to gain at least 2 per cent of the total votes and to win at least one CMP seat before qualifying to enter the Knesset. These conditions are added to what is inherent in every electoral system. These are grossly unfair measures that affect the minorities as they deny representation to their small parties and groups. It amounts to blocking their way to obtaining support amongst the electorate and is tantamount to disenfranchising them. Such a blatant blocking mechanism increases resentment and nourishes extremism and conflict. And anyway even a 10 percent blocking threshold used in Turkey did not prevent the religious party from getting a majority in the end, and forming a government by entering the leading party and controlling it from within. Of course, having said all that, we should remember that every electoral system has an inherent blocking mechanism – and so has TR. Under a regime of 90/30, to gain one Knesset PMK seat, a party needs 1/30th of the total votes left for allocation to PMKs. This is four per cent of these votes and is even a much higher percentage of the total votes. The way TR is constructed, as explained in Part One, of this book is to obviate both the necessity of blocking thresholds post elections and the reasons for holding primaries before the general elections. And yet it is so simple to explain to the public and so simple to operate.

13. Whether the Draft Law will proceed and overcome all the stages of legislation to become the new electoral law is an open question – it cannot be taken for granted. But the genie is out of the bottle, and it is too big to be squeezed back in. Regional election is in the air and in the public domain. Any political party aspiring to lead in Israel will ignore its call at its peril. Some form of regional /constituency system will have to be introduced primarily to ensure direct accountability of individual MKs to their voters. This after all was the prime reason cited by the President’s Commission. There is no compelling reason why full TR should not be chosen as the model for this fundamental change in order to repair the fractured political structure of Israel and to strengthen the Knesset – it could ultimately help in turn to solve many of the social and security problems of the country.

Supplementary Measures and Regulations
14. The weakness of the political structure in Israel is not entirely due to Proportional Representation (PR). Holland is another country with pure PR, and yet its system functions properly, and has been functioning for centuries, without causing the kind of instability that Israel suffers from. The reason for this difference is that Israel’s population lacks the social cohesion and the long tradition of parliamentary democracy that underpins Dutch politics. The make-up of the Knesset reflects the national religious and cultural divisions of what Haim Ramon, the present Deputy Prime Minister, has described as Israel’s tribalism. And although TR can help enormously in bringing about cohesion and integration, it alone cannot bridge these wide social divisions overnight.

15. Therefore, to ensure stable government and efficient governance, the introduction of any new electoral system needs to be supplemented by structural changes and regulations relating to the internal working of the Knesset and the government. The most important of these changes centres on the cohesion of political factions in the Knesset, and the tenure of the Prime Minister and the manner of his/her appointment and dismissal. Only such supporting regulations can ensure that the Knesset completes its term and that the government will therefore last the full four years. These changes can be incorporated into the electoral law or instituted internally by the Knesset and the political parties. The following are few of these regulations: some are essential; others are optional.

Political Parties in the Knesset
16. Under TR, MKs are allocated seats in the Knesset as members of parties. It is logical therefore to register their allegiances to these parties in the new Knesset. As candidates in the General Election, most of them would anyway have declared their link or loyalty to one party or the other who sponsored them as its candidates in the regions. In general, these allegiances need not be 100 per cent binding on them as MKs. Not being delegates, but representatives of their voters, they should have the right to change their views and their votes in the Knesset according to changed circumstances and their conscience. However, for MKs whose party forms part of the government, the situation is different. Some measure is needed to avoid the slow disintegration of the government during the Knesset term, and to prevent changing party allegiances (in Israel called Kalanterism; in Britain is referred to as taking the Party Whip.)
So, I propose that every MK whose party forms part of the government is deemed to have declared allegiance to his party at the time of the vote of confidence in the new government of which that party forms part. Each MK has the choice at that stage to cast his/her vote in favour of forming that government or withhold it. Thereafter, except for free votes declared by their parties (e.g. on conscientious ground), MKs who vote against their government should be deemed to have resigned and would be replaced by the next in line on the party list or through a by-election. In Israel, this needs to be embodied in the parties’ respective constitutions, and together with other regulations specifically on financing parties, may need to be anchored in State Laws. The logic of this measure is obvious. As a Party/List MK (PMK), his/her position is derived from the Party which gave him a seat on its priority list. Therefore if he is voting against the party, it is logical that he should surrender back to the party his position by resigning. If he is an MK representing a Constituency (CMK), then naturally he should resign because he represented himself to his constituents in the general elections as a member of that party and pledged his allegiance by voting for it in the government. By revoking his pledge given free when the government is formed he should resign and offer himself if he so wishes for re-election in a by-election as an independent candidate. This is both decent and logical, but it needs apply only to the party or parties of the coalition and not to all MKs.

Appointment of the Prime Minister
17. At present, the business of forming a government after a general election is too long and tortuous. The initial role of the President is superfluous. Once the results of the general election are announced, the party leader with the highest number of MKs should automatically try to form a government. He should immediately set out along broad lines his party’s or his coalition’s programme and proceed to ask for a vote of confirmation in the Knesset. If he fails to present his government within, say, three weeks, only then the President should intervene and start a procedure to ask another acceptable MK to form a government. Under the new TR system, with a ratio of 90/30, the emerging first party after the general election is bound to have the support of close to half the Knesset. If not, it is still unlikely to need the partnership of more than one other party to form a stable coalition

18. The confirmation of the Prime Minister designate and his government should require a majority of 61 MKs out of 120: an overall, that is an absolute - not a simple – majority (i.e. a 51 per cent of the Knesset, ignoring abstentions or absentees) His dismissal should be effected by the same majority – but only on a specific motion of no confidence in the government. Such a vote would then signal the start of a procedure for the dissolution of the Knesset and the declaration of a new general election. The constructive dismissal of the Prime Minster, as is sometimes suggested, is problematic and creates the very instability in the system that we want to avoid even though it is used in other countries. There are good reasons why, for example in the UK, it is the Prime Minister who chooses the time of dissolution of Parliament during its maximum five years term. That is one of the reasons why the UK premier is more powerful throughout his term – right up until the last day – than the US President, who in the last months of his predetermined time in office is often looked at as a lame duck.

19. The PM should appoint an MK to be Deputy PM. This appointment also needs a parliamentary vote of 61 MKs. The same majority is required for a replacement should the PM decide to replace him/her. Thus with this backing of parliamentary authority, the Deputy can accede without an upheaval to the position of the Prime Minister in case of his death or incapacitation.

20. A constructive vote of no confidence is not practical, and indeed is not necessary, under the above proposition, simply because those MKs who had supported the government will have to resign once they voted against their government. This avoids electing a government and immediately afterwards exposing it to the danger of collapsing. This routine practice has gradually become unacceptable to the public in Israel.

Appointment of Ministers
21. The PM should appoint all ministers and their deputies and should have the power to dismiss and replace them. MKs thus appointed need confirmation by 61 votes, en bloc initially when the government is voted in, or individually if appointed later on. Ministers appointed by the PM from outside the Knesset should be subject, in addition, to a Knesset Committee Hearing followed by confirmation by 61 MKs.

22. The PM is to be free by Law to appoint no more than half of the ministers and deputy ministers from outside the Knesset. They can be dismissed and replaced by him as above. This is designed to bring into the government professionals with experience. In some countries this professionalism is provided by the corps of the civil service. Unless the outside ministers are restricted to no more than half the government, we will be creating a presidential system through the back door.

23. Each ministry must have either the Minister or his/her Deputy as an MK. In cases where a Minister is appointed from outside the Knesset and has no deputy, an MK is appointed by the Minister, with the approval of the Prime Minister, as Knesset Liaison Secretary to represent and answer for the Ministry in the Knesset. This ensures the supremacy of parliament without compromising the authority of the PM or the Ministers.

24. All the above keeps a balance between the Knesset and the government and renders irrelevant the very unusual so called “Norwegian Law” advocated by some in Israel whereby an appointed minister has to resign his seat in parliament and is replaced by a deputy, who in turn has to vacate the position once the minister leaves the ministerial post and returns to parliament. The Norwegian arrangement may suit the circumstances of some other countries but it would be cumbersome in the much wider political and cultural environment of Israel

25. Many ask how the party leaders are elected under the TR System, especially when primaries seem to lose their importance. This question is dealt with in Part One of this book. Basically, each leader of each party except the Prime Minister, is elected or re-elected in the middle of the Knesset term by the candidates of the party in the last election (not by the Party’s MKs, who will naturally not include all the candidates). All these candidates cast the actual votes each obtained in the preceding general election – these are added together in selecting their leader. These votes are those of the real supporters of the party in the last election, and not the votes of paid members who often are recruited for that purpose. The selection becomes clean, with no corrupt practices. The procedures for re-elections of party leaders should be declared in mid term but if no candidate challenges the incumbent leader the re-election is dispensed with as the incumbent becomes automatically re-confirmed.

26. The prime minister need not submit himself to re-selection because he won his mandate by coming top ahead of the other leaders, and thus fulfilled his role and his party’s manifesto, and is therefore entitled to continue his role as leader of his party. This exception also adds to the stability of the government and is normal in other progressive democracies.

Aharon Nathan, 8th July 2008

Representation in Democracy (The President’s Commission on Electoral Reform)

2008-07-01T18:52:00.003+01:00

The President of Israel's Commission for Examining the Structure of Government and Governance in Israel

Background
1. On February 17th 2003, at the opening session of the 16th Knesset, the President of Israel, Mr. Moshe Katsav, stated: “I call for the establishment of a Public National Commission consisting of public figures and experts that will discuss and recommend reforms concerning the structure of government.” In this chapter, I try to give a bird’s eye view of the deliberations of this Commission and its final report. The deliberations covered almost every aspect of debates about electoral systems and related fields of governance. The records of the minutes and submissions have been preserved and could be invaluable for future students of this subject.

2. The Citizens’ Empowerment Centre in Israel (CECI), spearheaded the formation of this Commission, and on September 25th 2005, The President’s Commission for Examining the Government and Governance of Israel was established under the Chairmanship of Professor Menachem Megidor, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Upon delivering its mandate, President Moshe Katsav said:
· “I request that you analyse carefully the Israeli government structure, to examine the suitability of every alternative to the Israeli reality and the needs of the country, and to try to create a proposal that will assure increased power, stability, and effectiveness. I intend to submit these proposals to the Knesset and the cabinet.” The President went on to say: “Israeli democracy has, in my view, succeeded through the years to withstand the test of time, despite the many upheavals…the mounting elitism of the power structure can undermine the strength of the democracy more than security threats…
· Power instability can cause more extensive damage to the strength of the democracy. Despite it having withstood the trials of time, I think that power instability also prevents governments from properly fulfilling their tasks. If a recently elected government is immediately threatened by further elections, it is unable to fulfil its task properly…
· I am concerned with the decline of the status of the Knesset -- precisely because I appreciate that it is primary among power structures, and a sovereign authority. For that reason I am much concerned with and regret its negative public image.
· I am also concerned with the fact that the executive authority has almost unlimited power over the legislative branch. It is able to do whatever it wishes with the Knesset, while the Knesset, the legislative branch, has developed an intolerant dependency on the judicial branch. They apply for court ruling for every little thing while such decisions should have been reached in the Knesset itself without this insufferable dependency.
· I know there has been a lot of talk about changing the electoral system and I have my opinion on the subject though I will not voice it here. This issue must be examined versus the consideration and the consequences of such change. The national and state interests must be weighed. The question when, if at all the cultural, sectional and regional interests may be preferred over the national interests must be answered.
· I beseech you to analyse carefully the Israeli government structure to examine the suitability of every alternative to the Israeli reality and the needs of the country to try and create a proposal that will assure increased power stability and effectiveness and to propose a structure that would ensure meeting the challenges which confront the state of Israel in our generation.
· I intend to submit these proposals to the Knesset and the cabinet and for public discussion, and I hope that the Commission’s recommendations will gain the widest possible acceptance”

3. I have quoted the President’s statement at length, as it authoritatively encapsulated the weaknesses of Israel’s political structure that the Commission was given the task of grappling with. After months of deliberations, its final report was handed on 1st January 2007 to the President, who in turn presented it – as he had promised – to the Speaker of the Knesset and the Prime Minister. In the aftermath of the Second Lebanon War, its findings, conclusions and recommendations were becoming more urgent and relevant.

4. To carry weight with the public, such a report had to take a clear-cut and unified approach on the issue of how to bring about an effective and representative Knesset and a stable government. Structural recommendations based on changes to the electoral system and changes in the Knesset and Government needed to be presented in a clear, straightforward package for the public to judge them. I offered the Commission my submission for the electoral reform part of the package. I stressed that I believed that no reform would endure and no system would be accepted by the electorate in Israel unless it was anchored and based on “Single Vote, Single Ballot, Single Constituency”. Explaining the case for TR-Total Representation to the members of the Commission, I put it to them that TR is simply the good old Westminster system which has been functioning successfully for hundreds of years in its native Britain – modified and adapted to the social and political needs of Israel. Its adoption by the Knesset would avoid forays into new, untested grounds which had given rise to the debacle of the direct election of the Prime Minister.

5. Unfortunately, instead of sticking to the guidance of its mandate for clear recommendations, the Commission cast its net so wide that it lost focus in the process. Much time was wasted on reviving the debate about a Presidential versus a Parliamentary System, especially amongst the academic members. This was largely caused by the way the sub-committees were divided. Instead of there being just one committee discussing electoral reform, responsibility for this basic issue was spread between three sub-committees. This was bound to result in divergent views that Commission Chairman Professor Megidor, a clear thinking physicist found hard to reconcile.

6. Whatever its value to students of political science and government, this long and hard-fought debate seemed to me to be irrelevant and unnecessary in the context of the Commission’s terms of reference. In the heat of the battle raging between the sub-committees, the protagonists forgot a fact that they should have understood: the two examples par excellence of the presidential and parliamentary systems – the USA and the UK respectively – both draw on the same theoretical background of John Locke, Montesquieu etc. The essence of both systems is representation of the people, and a government that is subject to checks and balances.

7. The Commission was also sidetracked into trying to find a system that would produce a strong leader, which is what they believed – rightly – the public was clamouring for. But why did they ignore the fact that the powers of the British Prime Minister actually exceed those of the US President? Israel’s Prime Minister lacks power because he/she lacks solid parliamentary backing. Professor Doron, despite his passion for a presidential system for Israel, was aware of the sterility of concentrating on the label rather than the content: he suggested a solution based on a strengthened parliamentary system based on the internal reform of the parties and consolidating their cohesion thus giving more stability to the Knesset and in turn the government. I believe that, irrespective of the recommendations of the Commission, the Doron Solution will be the one that both the public and the Knesset will eventually go for – but only after reform of the electoral system.

8. Another way in which the Commission became sidetracked was in debates on how to reach recommendations that would satisfy and be acceptable to politicians. This was further complicated by some members fighting for their own narrow political affiliation, instead of grappling with the whole spectrum of party political platforms. This was, of course, the wrong approach to the issues, because suddenly we found ourselves seeing things from the point of view of a 3,000-strong political establishment, rather than minding the interests of 3,000,000 voters. It is, after all, these last who will ultimately push for and force the Knesset to legislate for an electoral system that guarantees direct elections of individual members of the Knesset who can be directly held accountable to their constituents. And it was this element of accountability that the President stressed most in his brief. The ultimate outcome of this confusion resulted in the final report missing this cardinal ingredient in its recommendations.

9. From my perspective as a member of the Commission, I had to contend with yet another tug-of-war on electoral reform, between academic advocates who favoured Proportional Representation at all costs, and others who pushed for the regional or constituency principle. And the compositional mix of the membership did not help us converge. The blunt black-and-white views of army ex-generals and the legalistic argumentation of ex-senior judges clashed with the “on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other” style of the 33 senior professors who were members of the Commission. And all this debate was often conducted in a very theoretical fashion – with less emphasis on what was suitable for the specific conditions of Israel’s society and its population-mix.

10. In the end I managed to get the message across to my colleagues in the Commission that in choosing an electoral system, we should not only aim for the best in theory, but also aim for what was most suitable to answer the basic problems facing Israel today. These problems are: a fragmented Knesset, unstable coalitions, a failure to draw our Jewish tribes together and, above all, to integrate our minorities, Arabs and religious Haredi Jews into the mainstream of our political and social life. We have to contend with the combination of all four problems when reforming the PR system that has sharpened and sustained the divisions in the country. Electoral reform is a powerful systemic tool that can help social convergence in the long run. Such structural systemic change in Israel can only endure if it takes account of all these problems together.

11. For years, the PR system has not only done little to solve the socio-political problems of the country; it has actually helped to sharpen and perpetuate them. In 1948, Israel adopted its present system by default. The Pre-Mandate Jewish Agency needed it to ensure representation for the whole mosaic of ideologies and religious sectarianism that characterised the Jewish people inside and outside Israel. The system played havoc in the post-independence period, and ever since has continued to rot Israeli society and fray the fabric of its politics. The merits of Proportional Representation are not inconsiderable – but in practice it is a system that has been proven to create and sustain instability in government after government. A succession of opinion polls have produced the same answer: people say they want a strong leader. Maybe they yearn for the good old days when, with his towering personality, Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, provided such leadership. But, for all his sterling qualities as a great leader and despite his efforts to play the democratic game, Ben Gurion was and acted as a benevolent dictator in the circumstances of those days – and the country loved it! The world has changed since then, and Israel desperately needs to change too. Today, the PR system is actually weakening the internal cohesion of the country and preventing its government from governing in the national interest. Tinkering around the edges will only make things worse and create a breakdown of the people’s trust in their political institutions. For instance, those who aim at disenfranchising segments of the electorate in order to achieve stability by raising the blocking threshold percentage to five per cent or more, are playing with explosive fire in the segmented Israeli society. It is paradoxical that the very principle of representation in PR needs blocking thresholds which denies representation to the voters who are blocked out.

12. To ensure a stable governments and efficient governance, the introduction of any new electoral system needs to be supplemented by structural changes and regulations relating to the internal working of the Knesset and the government. These are also needed for another reason: to prevent the rejection of the parliamentary system by the people in favour of a narrow, restrictive presidential system. The most important of these changes centres on the cohesion of political factions in the Knesset, and the tenure of the Prime Minister – the manner of his/her appointment and dismissal and his right to appoint some Ministers from outside the Knesset (albeit subject to hearings and confirmation in parliament). However, this series of issues was dealt with by other sub-committees of the Commission; as a result, the crowded agenda of the Commission and its deliberations became even more disjointed, and it made it very difficult for the Chairman to concentrate on the core issue of electoral reform in isolation.

13. The whole purpose of the President’s Commission was to find an alternative to Proportional Representation. My presentation of TR as an alternative provoked many reactions in the Commission, some positive and supportive, others negative and hostile. Zeev Segal, a notable professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, told the Commission that TR represented new thinking because it took care of the losers, which was its innovative approach. Thus he hit on one of the essences of the concept of compensation in TR: i.e allowing the voices of voters who did not manage to win seats for their candidates still to be represented in the final outcome of the election (albeit with lesser weight) – thus bringing all voters by proxy inside the sovereign tent of parliament.

14. Prof Doron, on the centre-left, Mr Yoash Tsidon Chatto, on the centre-right, and Mr Jamal Majadle, a member of the Commission who provided the Israeli Arab perspective, never wavered in their support for TR and kept its caravan on the road throughout. On the other hand, Professor Naomi Chazan, the chairman of a sub-committee, led many members of the Commission in fighting tooth-and-nail for preserving the status quo of pure PR. Belonging to the Meretz Party, a splinter Labour group in the Knesset, it was obvious that her narrow interest in its independent survival took precedence over her better academic judgement. In the end, she lost the battle of ideas and – together with a few of her supporters in the Commission – refused to sign the final report.

15. Professor Kaniel of the Hebrew University sought a solution in some mathematical formula based on De Hondt. He could not be convinced that none of the Commission members, let alone the general public, could fathom its intricacies. Professor Brichta of Haifa University, on the other hand, produced a challenging but clear and readable alternative to TR. He claimed that TR did not accurately translate the results of the elections into seats in the Knesset. He said that Israel was a sectarian and divided society and the new system needed to reflect this pluralism. He further assumed that a reform that took the representation of small parties out of the Knesset could not recruit their present MKs to support TR and would therefore be doomed – or if it succeeded, it would drive them underground, on to the streets and squares outside. But where does Professor Brichta’s point lead him? He could not see that he was in fact negating the very purpose of setting up the Commission. Moreover instead of healing the division in search of unity his proposals sought to perpetuate them.

16. The whole purpose of the President’s Commission was to find an alternative to PR, not to find new tools to confirm its validity. How can the core PR principle of proportionality of votes be changed whilst being preserved? Advocates of adhering to proportionality of votes in order to convert them into seats seem to miss the whole point of correcting PR. What, then, is the use of modifying PR when all they are proposing is to gain on the swings what they are prepared to lose on the roundabouts? I believe that the reason behind their obstinacy is rigid theoretical thinking based on old theories which seek authority in antiquity. But innovations can only come about when the past is studied critically and respected, and used not to obstruct but rather to pave the way for new thinking based on new situations on the ground. With the final report leaning to a great degree to the principles of TR, Professor Brichta too ended up refusing to sign it.

17. It was obvious that Professor Megidor, the Commission Chairman, was torn between the two camps of the TR and PR systems. Shimon Shetreet, Professor of Law and a brilliant biblical scholar, mild in manner and conciliatory in tone, recommended a compromise composite recommendation. Fatigue set in, and the Chairman of the Commission, in his final report on electoral reform, accepted the compromise, which is basically a modified version of TR, but opting for multi-member instead of single-member constituencies. Thus he confirmed the main principle of TR: i.e. to elect the candidate and his/her party with one vote, using one ballot paper. Together with the majority of other members, I signed with alacrity, knowing full well that the next stage – sooner rather than later – would be to fight to change the multi-members constituencies to single-member ones.

18. It is incredible that it escaped those who helped the Chairman to write his conclusions that they missed the central requirement of the President’s brief and the Commission’s own self-imposed guidelines: i.e. to embody the principle of accountability of the MK to his/her constituents. This is what the Chairman stated in his preamble to his report:
The Commission examined several voting systems within the framework of the following principles:
The need to boost the accountability of elected representatives to voters.
The need to foster stability by encouraging the formation of larger political blocs.
The need to maintain a reasonable level of representation, especially for minority groups.

19. Indeed, Professor Gideon Doron asked, in a penetrating commentary published by the Citizens’ Empowerment Centre in Israel (CECI) in the wake of the publication of the Final Report: who in a multi-member constituency (as recommended by the Report) is accountable to his/her constituents in order to hold him/her accountable and therefore punishable in the next election? The answer to this question challenged those members of the Knesset who set out to implement the Commission’s recommendation. Senior MKs representing the three biggest parties – Kadima, Labour and Likud – tabled a Draft Law in the Knesset on 2nd April 2008. It replaced multi-member constituencies with single-member ones, and thus incorporated all the principles of TR. The next chapter is an attempt to correct in time the deficiencies of this Draft which chose a ratio of 60/60 instead of the 90/30 ratio of CMPs and PMPs recommended by TR.

20. The following is the official summary of the Final Report that the tabled draft adopted in parts:
The System of Knesset Elections
The Commission believes that the system of Knesset elections should be changed to encourage the formation of large political blocs and greater accountability to constituents; i.e., giving greater weight to personalities in the electoral process. At the same time, the Commission believes a reasonable degree of representation must be maintained.
To counterbalance these two requirements, the Commission recommends the following changes:
1. Half the number of MKs, (i.e. 60) will be elected from national lists, the current practice.
2. The other 60 MKs will be elected from 17 constituencies as per the (Ministry of the Interior) breakdown into districts and sub-districts; the number of representatives per constituency will vary according to voter population (in practical terms, this means two to five representatives per constituency….
3. To encourage party consolidation, voters will vote in a single ballot for both regional representatives and a national list (In other words, voters will not be able to split their ballots).
4. To correct somewhat the distortions of proportional representation resulting from regional divisions, there will be a compensatory mechanism to transfer party votes “lost” in regional elections to that party’s national list in order to strengthen it. (The proposed mechanism is described in detail in the full report below).
5. To some extent, voters will be able to determine the composition of the national and/or regional list/s by preferential votes (The mechanism of which is elaborated in the full report).
The election threshold will be raised to 2.5% of the valid ballots in national elections or to party victory in at least three separate constituencies in regional elections.

Aharon Nathan, 1st July 2008

Israel Arab Conflict (Judenrhein and the Golan Heights)

2008-05-01T12:58:00.002+01:00

1. Judenrhein is land pure and clean of Jews. This is the unrealised dream that Hitler designed for Germany, but which the Arabs fulfilled to the full in their countries. This is the Arab side of the Holocaust, the real tragic “NAQBAH” of the Jews who lived for centuries in Arab countries. Today every nation in Europe tries to apologise for associating themselves with this policy. Not so the Arabs. They are proud of their achievement, which they declare day and night as a matter of religious piety.

2. Stealthily or deliberately they managed to put this abomination into practice. And they find it natural, may be because it is embedded in their history and culture. The concept of Dar Al Islam (land of Muslims) and Dar Al Harb (land of enemies) is believed by them to be a religious dictate. It is what the almighty directed them to do. And they have indeed done it very well. Once you are converted to Islam you cannot go back. It is a one way street under sufferance of assassination and so is the case with land. Once it is conquered by Muslims, it is Muslim’s for ever. That is why Arabs are today reclaiming Spain right to the town of Poitiers in France, where Charles Martell stopped their advance and Europe to the gates of Vienna where the Polish King Jan III Sobieski stopped Kara Mustafa.

3. That’s all very well and could have been taken light heartedly today by the rest of the world had it not been for the West, which with tolerance and alacrity seem to accept as natural this attitude as long as it is directed towards the Jews. Even the rise of Bin Laden never woke up Europe to this phenomenon. The new “religion” of human rights and multiculturalism seem to gloss over the Arab attitudes and policies to Jews in general and to Israel in particular. Unfortunately for the Arabs, as it was so unfortunate for the fanatic Germans this is not helping them, the Arabs, in fact it is at the heart of their problems pulling them back to the dark ages. Islamic tolerance brought the enlightenment into Europe, but sadly skipped over their own nations elsewhere.

4. The solution to the Arab and especially the Palestinian plight in their relationship with Israel could have been resolved long time ago, if only their leaders grasped the immorality of the concept of Judenrhein and even more so if the West stopped accepting it as normal in Arab countries. This acquiescence fostered its encouragement with disastrous effect on the Arabs themselves. Unless some Arab leaders woke up to this situation, the Middle East will be engulfed in a sea of blood.

5. If the Palestinians as recently as the time of the evacuation of Gaza stood up and said: we claim back Gaza as our land , but we have no problem with the Jewish settlements there to stay as part of Palestinian Gaza with Jews living the way they live today in Germany, England and the USA, Gaza would have been today the new Hong Kong of the Middle East with Israel as its hinterland and market and source of finance.

6. A last chance to act sensibly lies today at the door of the Syrians to start a process, which will bring real peace and prosperity to the region. The Syrian leaders, who clamour for the Golan should take the initiative and suggest that the Jews in the Golan Heights can stay after the withdrawal of Israel to the shores of Tiberias as citizens of Syria or as Israelis in residence in a Syrian Golan subject, as other citizens in Syria, to Syrian law in the way the Jews live in England, France or Germany today. It is then that the Israeli resistance to withdrawal will melt away and a great and prosperous Golan can offer itself to millions of tourists from all over the world who will enjoy the fusion of Arab and Jewish culture reminiscent of and recalling the glorious days of Cordoba and Toledo.

Aharon Nathan, 1st May 2008

Israel Arab Conflict (Post Annapolis)

2007-12-15T19:19:00.000Z

Post Annapolis solution is unilateral disengagement

There are four sides to the Annapolis initiative. Each one of them can contribute to its success and all of them for the time being are going in the same direction. However internal problems in Israel and more so amongst Palestinians and Arabs will lead them to no conclusion. And therefore the only possible solution will have to be Sharon’s Solution i.e. for Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank to the borders agreed in the Bush-Sharon exchange of letters of 14th April 2004.

1. The US side: A general view is prevalent that if only America can lean on Israel, everything will come right. This is a naïve understanding of the situation on the ground. America is poised between two main allies and influences and at this minute in time luckily for us they coincide; but for how long? America sees Israel as its Hawaii in the Middle East. It can not trust any other country in the region. In the Mediterranean, Lebanon is erupting, Syria is scheming and Egypt is imploding. Further inland Iran casts its shadow on Iraq and the Gulf gaining succour from Russia and China. A nascent Cold War is showing signs of revival. America does not need to lean on Israel. Israel has no alternative but to be de facto the 51st State. Its situation dictates that and indeed it has been acting that role in all spheres since Suez. America adopted that stance from 1967 onwards.

2 The Israel side: Inside Israel today public opinion and the balance of political forces in the Knesset are nationalistic right wing. And yet despite that, the vast majority of the population are for peace, once they believe it is real. The US administration knows this and Olmert knows this too, that is why from their different angles they need and want to catch the opportunity to put a stop to a conflict that is harming both countries.
Sharon realised that the occupied territories had become an existential threat for Israel. He acted unilaterally on Gaza because he knew he could not attain his objective in a lengthy process. He concluded that he needed to walk out while it was possible. Olmert is of the identical opinion. But his fragile coalition dictated that he needed to give up the West Bank through negotiations. He too realised that if he waited too long Israel might not find a "taker" The alternative then will be a one unified state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean that would evolve - by default.

3. The Arab side: America’s other real allies in the region are Saudi Arabia and its Gulf satellites. Iran is a threat to their economic interests: the oil and the vast dollar-absorbing financial centres in the Gulf. There is a clear and complete identity of interest there. That is why Saudi Arabia was at Annapolis now and in Beirut then with its famous initiative.

The historic rivalry between Shia and Sunni provides a historic backdrop of enmity that accentuates the underlying material conflicts today. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are using this theological camouflage which echoes well in their streets to hide the real conflict of their rulers.

It is convenient for all parties to use Israel as a proxy and a patsy. Russia is resuming its Cold War with the West using the historical buffer country of Iran. Europe, as always, wants to have the cake and eat it. Sheltering under the US umbrella they can afford to pretend neutrality.

4. The Palestinian Side: Israel should be worried about the pincers of Gaza and the West Bank arching over it. For the sake of an enduring co-existence and avoidance of future conflagrations, these two parts of Palestine need to be separated and made to orientate in different directions. Hamas today is a great help! However instead of relieving this tight grip, Israel seems hell bent on converging them. In fact they are playing into the hands of the supposed Palestinians’ protectors and Israel’s presumed peace partners: Egypt and Jordan. Egypt has kept Gaza under Israeli rule to prevent spilling political turmoil into their country. A similar situation prevailed since the 6-Day War on the Jordan River. Their interest is to keep the status quo. It is incredibly foolish of the Israelis to be blind to this situation for so long. While keeping Gaza isolated from the West Bank Israel should encourage open borders between Gaza and Sinai to give vent for a pressured population to find vents and escapes.

The Saudis too were happy till recently to keep Israel as the whipping baddy. But instead of helping the refugees they doled out enormous amounts of money to corrupt Palestinian leaders in order to keep a convenient status quo. Here comes the threat from Iran and all the three suddenly need Israel, the only power in the region to stand up to Iran and to ensure that America moves in the same direction.

But instead of perceiving non-Arab Iran as a natural ally like Turkey, Israel’s politicians went out of their way to position themselves at the head of Iran’s enemies harming America diplomatically without gaining any added advantage. Instead of working quietly inside the anti-Ahmedinejad pack Israeli politicians position themselves at the top and rushed vociferously to lead it.

5. HAMAS: The Palestinian streets are growing restless. The Palestinian leaders, well-dressed, well-fed and enormously endowed find themselves unable to control their communities. They managed to gobble the vast funds provided by Donor Countries leaving little to trickle down to their people. A vacuum is created which is quickly filled by HAMAS and an internal struggle ensued.

6. LEBANON/SYRIA: To the Lebanese the Palestinian Refugees constitute an existential threat. In Syria they have become another Sunni bone in the throat of the Alawite Junta. It is Lebanon and Syria (not Egypt and Jordan) who need an Israeli/Palestinian resolution to push their refugees out and into Palestine. But both are helpless.

Therefore it is not realistic to expect all these conflicts to end quickly.

7. In conclusion: Ahmedinejad is the fulcrum that is holding all this structure together. What if Rafsanjani replaces him and Iran seeks accommodation with America and the Gulf ? The precarious structure will fall apart and the status-quo-anti will return. Israel will have to continue the occupation of a West Bank that might not want to be separated from Israel.

The leaderships of the two main protagonists of Annapolis are too weak to deliver an agreement. But of the two, it is the fragmentation of the Arab side that will eventually scupper any possible resolution.
So what is left for Israel to do when this year passes without conclusion? The answer is to be prepared to declare that it would implement withdrawal from the West Bank unilaterally on the lines of the Bush-Sharon’s letter of agreement and take immediate steps to implement it. The majority of Israelis, including Israeli Arabs, will support that move. And so will the electorate if a general election or referendum is called.

Aharon Nathan, December 2007

www.AharonNathan.com

Israel Arab Conflict (Gaza versus Sderot)

2007-09-07T10:55:00.000+01:00

The Solution: Release the Pressure Cooker

There is no better time than pre Yom Kippur to reflect on our omissions and commissions towards our suffering people. Heart breaking scenes from Sderot contrast with anarchical and sterile debates amongst the great and good on the TV screens. As the participants seem to cancel each other’s arguments, leaving us confused in thinking and tortured in spirit, a different angle and different solutions are called for.

1. Sharon, by confining Arafat to Ramallah effectively moved the centre of political gravity (and its corrupting pot of gold) from Gaza to the West Bank. Resisting the building of any bridge, flyover or tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank should be the follow up to this vital move. Any Palestinians’ sovereign physical link crossing Israel will only stoke conflict and hostility for the future and undermine any future peaceful coexistence. Uniting the two parts of Palestine in any form, directly or indirectly will result in cutting Israel in two in its most vulnerable belly and expose it to future pincer violence simultaneously applied from Hebron and Gaza. All movements between the two parts of Palestine have to be by passports and transit or term visas. In this way the population of Gaza will be orientated and will gravitate towards Egypt while those of the West Bank will be orientated towards Jordan. That will release the pressure on Gaza and lift the pressure off Israel. Jordan and Egypt will resist this move since the infiltration of Palestinians into these countries will eventually impact on their internal politics. For years Israel foolishly acted as border protective shields for both countries. It is time to wake up.

2. Nothing could have helped Israel more than the rise of Hamas as the ruling authority in Gaza. It is a gift to Israel from heaven. Hamas is unwittingly helping Israel to perpetuate what Sharon courageously started. It will be ill-advised to impede the natural outflow of surplus population via Egypt to the rest of the Arab world and beyond. The stupidity of guarding the Philadelphi line is astounding and the proposal to dig up a canal is simply beyond belief. Gaza is not Southern Lebanon. It lacks the hinterland to give it depth. Any substantial smuggling of weapons will make it easier for IDF (Israel Defence Force) to target them in the future. The problem is the pressure cooker situation Israel is helping to perpetuate in Gaza. It is not in its interest to isolate Gaza from Sinai nor is it in the interest of those Arabs who want to solve the problem of the Refugees..

3. But what about the Katushas and Sderot. The Philadelphi border line, opened or closed will make little difference. You only need primitive workshops and some fertilizers and chemicals to manufacture Katushas. Israel can not afford to wait 2/3 or more years for the anti satellites star war weapons to repel Katushas. For its present purpose Israel has all the technical necessary skills now. Its know how is sufficient to locate many launching pads in order to initiate retaliatory actions which when coupled with the present limited actions of the IDF might provide an easing of the acute situation in Sderot and may put a stop to it altogether. How?

4. Let us use a two-prong action at the same time. Let Israel substitute property for life in order to keep international public opinion on its side. The first is to announce that all launching locations, not only the launching pads, are legitimate targets to be destroyed even if those include substantial multi-storey houses. It announces the new policy by broadcasting and even dropping leaflets to the effect that such and such an address was used as a launching pad and produces the satellite picture to back that. And then to give a warning that within 48 hours that location will be destroyed from the air. And it advises the inhabitants of that place and for extra caution the near-by houses to evacuate. And then carry out the limited bombing. It is only then that Hamas will stop using the people of Gaza as human shields. It is then that the innocent in Gaza will stand together with Israel against Hamas.

5. At the Same time Israel declares that it accepts that Hamas is de-facto in charge of Gaza as indeed it claims. Therefore its leaders bear the responsibility for the rain of Katushas on Sderot. Israel holds its leaders responsible. Therefore it warns that it will target the villas and habitations of its leaders and in each case it gives enough warning to evacuate before it destroys them. The message will be driven literally HOME to those leaders. Assassinating them proved to be useless as they would be replaced by worse.

6. These two measures, besides the present limited operations by the IDF, will cost Israel little, save lives on all sides and will not provoke international outcry and legal complications. It saves the lives of soldiers if Israel invades and accusation of collective punishment if it stops electricity and water. Israel won wars by using common sense and extemporized solutions not by strictly following military manuals. Implementing the above proposals may prove to be the bitter medicine it needs to administer to its enemies now instead of prescribing sweet palliatives to its public. Let panic and red alerts be transferred from Sderot to Gaza

7th September 2007
Aharon Nathan set up and headed the civil administration of Gaza Strip in 1956

Israel Arab Conflict (Debacle in Lebanon)

2006-08-20T14:54:00.000+01:00

In the Aftermath of the Lebanon 4-Week War

Background
1. For three decades we have been going from one debacle to another followed by mostly futile blame games and commissions of enquiries concluding always that it is the fault of individuals, the fault of others. This time it has to be different. We must face up to our collective responsibility as a country, as a nation, Government, Opposition, the political establishment and especially all factions that make up our Knesset whose existence is there to represent us, all of us:- WE THE PEOPLE. This time it has to be different because not since the 1948 War of Independence have we faced the thought of Israel’s extinction; the destruction of the only refuge of last resort, the only State that we can claim to be ours. The existential dangers we are facing are being articulated loud and clear by powerful and resourceful enemies: Hezbollah backed to the hilt by Iran and Syria. This danger however may prove to be more manageable and temporary than the bigger attritions and persistent dangers of the mobilized anti Israel, anti Jewish and anti-Semitic Arab forces backed by European public opinion and media. Facing that we seem to descend into a siege position, indeed a ghetto mentality saying: There is nothing we can do more than we have been doing and as the world hates us anyway and we have no partners for peace we have no choice but to continue with more of the same. We need to challenge this attitude. We have to distinguish between permanent matters of sheer existence as people and those changeable State’s needs for diplomatic alliances. We need now to adopt a long term strategy where even a 180 degree change of direction should not be left unexplored. But we can only do that if we stop our self-congratulatory posture post this war and grasp the fundamental changes that have been taking place relentlessly both in our region and also globally. The international landscape is witnessing the birth of new economic empires (China, Japan & India) who know little and care less for Jews and Judaism to whom Israel is just one more tiny state surrounded by countries with whom these empires’ interests are growing by the day. Our business leaders are acutely aware of that and are acting accordingly, but not our politicians who seem to continue to slumber in the old order.
2. In the aftermath of the debacle of the 4-week Lebanon War we have to ask ourselves fundamental questions. These questions need to be daring, deep and all encompassing. There is no doubt that for one century now our Arab neighbors have not accepted us. In turn we on our side ceased long ago to try to understand them. A mental curtain has descended between us and the Arabs, and that includes our own Arab citizens. We have become accustomed to view each other through a telescopic gun-barrel. One notable development has been contributing in recent years to the barrier separating us from our neighbors. Those amongst us who were born in Arab countries and understand their language, history and culture are disappearing. In contrast the Arabs are fast learning what make us the people we are. The command of Hebrew among some of their leaders, scholars and commentators is astonishing and their diligent pursuit of what is going on in Israel is envious. Some of our Arab MKs speak better Hebrew than many of their fellow Jewish MKs. And you only need to view the daily analysis in Al-Jazeera of our Hebrew dailies to put our kol Yisrael to shame.
3. However, our Arab neighbors are themselves facing acute internal problems of social strife political bankruptcy and overwhelming population explosion. The Palestinians are left to themselves and they are reveling in their infighting and delusions making it impossible to reach any accommodation with us. New Nassers and new Arafats are popping up everywhere without the Arabs asking themselves what good their old heroes did for them and what purpose the new ones serve. With this hopeless situation prevailing, it was right and practical for us to build the Security Wall and it was wise to act unilaterally to give both sides time to find a solution for coexistence. Late though Sharon was right. On the Arab side they can only accept coexistence once it dawns on them that Israel is there to stay not because of its army, not because of its history, not because of the Holocaust, but because the living 6 million Jews in Israel (more than half of whom anyway are descendents of ethnically cleansed Arab Jewish refugees) have nowhere else to go. They have no choice but to stand up and fight even if it is a war of mutual destruction with their enemies. Only this realization will convince the Arabs to seek mutually acceptable solutions.
4. On our side, our social fissures and political instabilities are creating hesitancy and lack of resolve and are sabotaging the implementation of our only available policy i.e securing ourselves unilaterally and quickly within defensible walls. These walls and new borders have to be defendable militarily and, even more importantly, acceptable in due course internationally through negotiation. We cannot solve these problems without introducing real changes in our political structures, without finding remedies to integrate our population including our minorities (Jewish and Arab) and without challenging what has come to be taken for granted in the assumptions underlying our political thinking.

Fundamental Questions
5. All the above can be summed up in the 3 basic areas: External Security, Internal Stability and Pro-active Public Relations. We need to keep analysing and articulating in order to accord with new circumstances developing as a result of previous preceding failures to deal with them. These 3 problems are interconnected and interwoven and must be dealt with and constantly reviewed in a strategic and coherent way. Successive Governments failed to deal with them as an integral whole. And at the heart of these failures is the tactical, piecemeal, fire engine response whenever a flare up erupts in any one of these three areas without any coordination between them. This approach is displayed starkly before our eyes now. Shoot first, justify later! Often Pangloss-like we assert that anything we have done is the best that could have been done. In fact the root of our failure is the lack of strategic thinking well ahead and co-ordinated overall plans backing them. The underlying reason for this sad state of affairs is not that we don’t have intelligent leaders in abundance (witness our science, medicine, business etc) but that members of our government coalitions cobbled together by unholy factional alliances, often respond with self-serving knee-jerk reactions rather than with cool calculated long term strategies. In times of crisis our Governments play too much to the media gallery, preying on the fears of the people, to the dismay of Israel’s citizens, friends and supporters. In all these cases neither we nor our sympathizers worldwide are helped by us with a well prepared ready proactive PR to understand the new realities to which we need responses. Unfortunately our fragile factions-based governments lack the steel in them to know better and to act differently. What is even worse is that our Knesset, the depository of our sovereignty, is itself paralysed and due to its structure unable to guide the Executive in time of crisis. For instance how can Netanyahu, with his mere 12 MKs, speak for a credible Opposition? Nothing will change until an Official Opposition look and act as an alternative government, the measure of a real democracy. This can only happen when a new electoral system is introduced to produce a stable Knesset and therefore stable full term governments.
6. So in the aftermath of this 4-Week War we need to ask many questions which on the face of it might look haphazard and disjointed when in fact they are interconnected and intertwined. And better to start in the overall national security sphere. Has our dependence on the USA forced us to act as their scouts shield and fire-fighter in the Middle East? Do we need to be their Hawaii in the Mediterranean? Do we need to go all the way in that direction or to pull back for our sake as much as for our American friends and allies? Identifying with every step they take is harming us without helping them. Did we let ourselves be caught in a power struggle between the Shi'a and the Sunni countries and peoples leaving ourselves to be the only element that is uniting them instead of taking advantage of their divisions? Did we try to forge new regional alliances while the peace with Egypt and Jordan still holds and our mutual defense interests with Turkey still intact? Did we keep the Gaza population in a pressure cooker waiting for it to explode? And therefore did we in this way only protect Egypt not ourselves from their militant radicalism? And likewise did we in effect by keeping our soldiers on the Jordan River protect the artificial integrity of Jordan? Is it time to let Gaza and the West Bank gravitate naturally in opposite directions one towards Egypt and the other to Jordan using both countries as bridges to slow infiltration of their exploding numbers into other Arab countries instead of imprisoning them inside the Occupied Territories? Are we wise in blocking this natural merging process instead of preventing it through controlling the Palestinian borders? Did we blunder in not welcoming the initiatives of Saudi Arabia instead of every time rejecting them out of hand? Did we distinguish between the motives credentials and methods of the Sunni Hamas from the Shi’a Hezbollah? Why not attempt direct contact with them using Fatah and Amal ? After all their memberships are the inhabitants of our borders and no battle or war will dislodge them from their homes? Recognizing us or not is semantics at this stage. Did we listen to the advice of our own friendly Arabs and more importantly the new brave voices coming from the Gulf? Did we analyze what the Knesset Arab MKs, friendly and hostile, are telling us? Are we missing the opportunity of using them as intermediaries and points of contact with the Arab world? Did we try to include them meaningfully in our delegations and representations in the international community as Israelis speaking for Israel? Did we examine the truth of the accusations by the outside world that we only know how to use force? Is our thinking governed by rigid entrenched assumptions of siege mentality (whether on the Right or on the Left) that are leading us to the same conclusions and therefore the same policies? In politics as in Academia but not in science and business we are led by fuzzy thinking that concentrates so much on trees that the sight of the wood is lost in distant drowsing mist. It is time to wake up and seek comprehensive answers. ( I shall attempt separately in a Q&A to analyze and answer these questions)

In the Aftermath of War
7. Our mismanagement of the 4-Week War is now forcing Lebanon to compromise with the leadership of Shi’a Iran in our North and our disjointed and late responses in Gaza is fostering a Sunni based Al Qaeda in the South. We lost the early opportunity of this war while the whole world was supporting us, to seek openly to sit face to face or through intermediaries with the Lebanese present government with its majority of Sunnis Christian and Druze. Instead we destroyed the ground from under its feet and repositioned it as hostage in the hands of Hezbollah and the Arab Street. With American influence and the tacit behind the scenes support of Sunni countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and most of the Gulf we can still find a way out of the straight jacket which within four weeks we managed to tighten around our chests. Our approach to the Iranians notwithstanding the apocalyptical pronouncements of Ahmadi-Nejad and as distinct from the Syrians was wrong from A to Z because we responded to the Iranian Government rhetoric instead of addressing ourselves to the Iranian people. We insulted the pride of the Iranian people and played into the hands of their crazy government (witness the early responses of Mofaz and Peres). We let ourselves be caught by the American approach, harming it and our American allies in the process. It is in our mutual interest to demonstrate to our neighbors and to the world that we are an independent close and loyal ally of the USA but we are not its client-state in the region. Instead of responding belligerently to Iran’s rhetoric as we did we should have lay low. We are a small country often trying to pose in super power robes. We can increase our appeal in the region to paraphrase an Old Persian dictum if we don’t stretch our legs beyond the length of our rug.
8. Iran’s leadership is merely using Israel as a proxy in its conflict with America provoking us for that purpose by Hezbollah. Instead of falling into their strategic devilish trap we should try to reach to the non Hezbollah Shi’as like Nabih Berry’s Amal Party instead of forcing it to play second fiddle to Hezbollah. Let us give credit to our enemies. They are not stupid. Iran knows that Hezbollah and not even Iran itself can defeat Israel or wipe it out. But they can use us and cause us untold damage in the process. At the moment they are interested in subjugating Lebanon to complete the Shi’a Arc stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean, and divide the Sunni North from the Sunni South. Israel is not party to their conflict with the Sunnis and what they perceive to be their Western protectors. Let the West secure its interests. Why should we sacrifice our children to pick its chestnuts from the fire? We would have been well advised to re-evaluate our position, held our nerve in the face of provocations by Ahmadi Nejad, tone down our rhetoric and refrain from direct involvement in the West’s confrontation with Iran. The present atomic Pakistani (call Bin Laden’s) Bomb constitutes more of a real danger to us if President Musharraf is suddenly assassinated than a future uncertain Iranian one. And both are far more dangerous to the West and to the Arab countries than to us. The Saudi king spelled his fear of the Iranian Bomb in no uncertain terms here in London. Why do we need to be their patsy? A limited military response for few days instead of full 4 weeks could have done the trick, spared many Israeli lives retained the mystique of our power of deterrence and invincibility. As it happened our military achievements, which are considerable but at a price, look doubtful in the eyes of the Arab and international worlds and our diplomatic failures are clearly disastrous and painfully visible.

Solutions and Policy Direction
9. Blame and lamentation will not set the clock back. So how to proceed. Olmert was right when in the midst of the war he declared that he would carry on with his plan of continued disengagement, unilaterally if a Palestinian consent was not forthcoming. He was after all elected on that very platform. By subsequently retracting it he has done a great harm to himself and to the image and future of Israel. Instead he should have defiantly repeated it and said that he wanted to accelerate it. This episode illustrates the impotence of our political system which needs urgently to reform. His retraction is more to do with internal politicking and not with the national interest. He can still salvage his reputation and emerge as a great peace leader if he would set out an even more ambitious plan now facing his opposition head on. And he should announce it and challenge Arab positions in all fronts rather than let leaks dissipate its international impact. Sharon’s decision to pull out unilaterally gained him and Israel tremendous credit. Olmert should turn a deaf ear to his internal intimidators. Frankly after the 4-Week War he has nothing to lose and everything to gain if he goes out bold and defiant. I believe the country at large would support him as indeed it unpredictably did to Sharon.
10. Israel's future survival can only be assured if we separate ourselves from the rest of the Arab World. Leaving Gaza was a first step which now should be followed immediately by a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank to within the lines agreed in the Bush/Sharon exchange of letters (of the 14th April 2004) This needs to happen quickly while Bush is still there. Abu Mazin is willing from his own perspective to cooperate. It is up to him to include Hamas and anybody else he wants to or forced into. Let us stop interfering in Palestinian politics. We have been getting nowhere assassinating this or that leader or fighting a shadowy guerrilla. Leaving them alone would eventually make them turn their attention to develop economic interests which would induce them to protect and seek to strengthen through relationship with Israelis. The most efficient way to repel katyushas is by harnessing world opinion and not taking out this or that launching pad.
11. Olmert should announce voluntarily that he will release the un-convicted Palestinian prisoners. Let us give what we save in costs to our suffering destitute in the peripheries. The narrative that these prisoners will be enemy soldiers does not wash anymore. There are millions of them all around us. Their release would add little to the hostile human sea around us. Completing the Border Wall along the above lines and in compliance with the modifications ordered by the Supreme Court will leave Israel in the best position to negotiate a final status peace treaty with the new Palestinian State. Sharon/Olmert plans are right. Negotiation and fixing final borders should come later. If left for negotiation it can take years and untold number of fatalities on both sides in the meantime. Quick action will spare internal slow and damaging strife amongst our people. This physical separation, far from antagonizing the Arabs, will pave the way for better relations with them and remove the sting and the stink of the occupation.
12. And while it is still in our control, we ought to build a separation fence in the middle of the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Mosque. This barrier will protect the Jewish worshippers of the Kothel/Western Wall in the future and avoid the constant tension often leading to violence created by Islamists during Friday prayers. Once this is done we should then proceed unilaterally to hand back the Mosque to the Palestinians together with East Jerusalem as we define it. Let Arab Al-Quds (Jerusalem in Arabic) which will anyway join with Ramallah be separated from Jewish Jerusalem. It is not as impractical as many try to characterize this separation barrier. Remember that the idea of any wall or physical separation was thought to be crazy only four years ago.
13. Sharon, by confining Arafat to Ramallah effectively moved the centre of political gravity (and its corrupting pot of gold) from Gaza to the West Bank. Resisting the building of any bridge, flyover or tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank should be the follow up to this vital move. Any Palestinians sovereign physical link crossing Israel will only stoke conflict and hostility for the future. Uniting the two parts of Palestine will result in cutting Israel in two in its most vulnerable belly from a future pincer violence simultaneously applied from Hebron and Gaza. All movements between the two parts of Palestine have to be by passports and transit or term visas. In this way the population of Gaza will be orientated and will gravitate towards Egypt while those of the West Bank will be orientated towards Jordan. That will lift the pressure off Israel. Jordan and Egypt will resist this move by us since the infiltration of Palestinians into these countries will eventually impact on their internal politics. For years we foolishly acted as border protective shields for both countries. It is time to wake up.

More Bold New Initiatives
14. That leaves the two problems of Hebron and the Golan. Here we must recognize that the Jewish enclave in Hebron will always be a vulnerable continuing festering wound. Its continued existence as it is today is an invitation for a future massacre of its Jewish population as indeed happened in the 1930s. Israel could declare, again unilaterally, that a period of its protection by the IDF, say 5 years, is to be followed by complete withdrawal. This would leave the Jewish settlers with the choice, either to relocate to Israel or if they could establish during these 5 years peaceful coexistence with the local population to remain as Israeli citizens living as residents in Palestine becoming subject, like any other foreign resident to Palestinian law. The good engendered by our unilateral declaration will help to create a new climate in Hebron. But more importantly it will challenge the Arabs’ underlying adoption of the concept of Judenrein.
15. Incidentally this would also be the best model for a solution for the Golan Heights. Here again unilaterally Israel should declare that once Syria acknowledges Israel’s claim that the international borders leave the entire shoreline of Lake Tiberias within Israel, the Golan Heights could revert to Syrian sovereignty say five years after a peace treaty and exchange of Ambassadors. Olmert should be the first to take the initiative and declare this solution. I believe the Golan Heights will soon be on the international agenda anyway so why not preempt that. It is therefore time to come up first with our own creative and bold solution which could turn the Golan into a great multi cultural tourist centre for the benefit of both countries. Such solution silly as it may sound to some diehard pessimists amongst us could catch the imagination of the international community and afford a way out of our impasse with Syria. It seeks to expose and may destroy the pernicious racist concept of Judenrein prevailing in Arab lands. We should use this powerful and evocative word, Judenrein, in this context and take pain to explain it to an ignorant world media. The mere proposal by Israel can constitute in itself a coup. The predicted negative response from Bashar El-Assad will undermine his regime and may induce the majority Sunni opposition to come forward with encouragement from outside Arab countries to support such a fair plan that restores the Golan to Syria.

Consequences of the 4-Week War
16. This is not the place to analyse our overall military planning and piecemeal execution of the 4-Week War This is the field of experts who need to knock their heads together, but not in the glare of TV studios. All the relevant questions are anyway already in the public and media domain. The one big question is yet to be thrashed out. How is it that after the failure of the “Shock and Awe” approach in Iraq and the subsequent quagmire we did not learn the lesson? Mighty America and mighty NATO never embarked on a military operation let alone a war without patient preparations. Why we could not wait for few weeks when world public opinion was with us, exerting diplomatic pressure, calling and training our reserves, revising our military plans, coordinating them with our political objectives, all before crossing the border. Hezbollah was not going to invade following the capture of the two soldiers. Frankly I cannot see how any politician, from any party, can escape the shame and blame. They need to answer the bereaved families, the orphans and the crippled amongst our heroic youth who obediently answered the call of duty often knowing full well that they were not equipped adequately to defend a policy with which they were not necessarily in total agreement on its details.
17. No less failure but with worse dire consequences of the 4-Week War is the utter collapse of our PR to project and explain our just cause to the outside world. The support for Israel has evaporated in the whole of Europe and even amongst sections of our friendly American supporters. We failed and continue to fail to put our just case may be because some of us appear to have lost faith in it. We let ourselves stand in the dock accused, instead of initiating and forcing our own agenda on our detractors. Viewing our performance on the receiving end outside Israel, examples of our utter impotence are in abundance even when the opportunity of knock-out arguments are presented to us by hostile commentators. We always reacted rather than pre-empted the defence of our operations.
18. Nasrallah stated proudly in a long interview in Al-jazeera that, way back in the 90s, he understood the need to appoint two commanders: one to fight the battle and one to care for PR always ready with photographers and crews to back him. We have witnessed his spectacular success in this field on world TV networks which has contributed to our perceived failures militarily and morally. It is not enough to declare and assert that we are a moral army. We need to explain its roots. As Secretary to the Kafr Qasim Commission appointed in the middle of the Suez War almost 50 years to the day, I know how the moral and legal basis of our soldiers’ behaviour is determined. Ben Gurion in the middle of the Suez War understood the gravity of our image abroad and the behaviour of our soldiers in the battlefield. Abba Khooshi, the famous Mayor of Haifa and a member of this Commission, told me the moment I met him that we needed to ensure that the Sword of Israel is not sullied with innocent blood. I wonder how many in Israel let alone outside Israel know this background which preceded the famous Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam and established the IDF since as an army backed by moral rectitude. Therefore the appointment of a senior Minister of Information at par with and as important as the Defence and Foreign Ministers should be made as a matter of urgency and not one day too soon.
19. With the opposition in the Knesset emasculated by the nature of our political system and with the media being so adversarial, negative and self-serving, often concentrating on trivial sensational scoops, a shroud has descended over our eyes driving us to resignation and despair. Short-term tactics are taking over and quick remedies are sought when in reality we need root and branch radical solutions; and this even while we live in days when we don't know where the next missile is going to hit us from the North or from the South. Our leaders, our academics and our TV Studio Generals are making blame and recrimination as objectives instead of concentrating on the search for solutions.
20. To have the right to speak up, accompanied by reserve Brigadier-General and MK Eliezer Cohen, I visited Galilee in the midst of the war and saw the devastation on the ground and felt the desperation of the families in shelter. I met Major Gen. Gershon, GCO Home Front Command and learnt and listened to the problems facing us from Mayor Adi Eldar who by his personal example, action and few words articulated what was happening around him in Carmiel and how we were falling short. In his mild and modest manner I sensed what Prof. Arnon Sofer has been for too long pleading with us. Our country is divided between the indulgent rich and safe centre from Gedera to Hadera and the neglected peripheries. To many inhabitants of the North, whom I had the privilege to listen to as “refugees” in Tel Aviv I felt the return of “Second Israel” we used to talk about in the 50s and 60s.
21. Two points became clear to me. First I sensed that we were back at Yom Kippur days caught napping because the early Katushas fell in the peripheries far away from Tel Aviv. The North could not understand why we had to wait for the capture of soldiers to respond. Indiscriminate firing of Katushas on civilians were enough even in International law to constitute CASUS BELLI to react. The second point they kept raising was that there was nobody in the centre of government or the Knesset to represent their different regions leaving them at the mercy of charity hand outs and family support at a time when they were hiding underground in fear. The 4-Week War has come to the regions as a wake up call. Things have to change. Fundamental structural reforms have to follow.
22. I have been watching Al Jazeera for the last 4 months and it was clear for any viewer and that must have included some viewers in Israel that Hezbollah was planning, scheming and preparing something. They were day after day analyzing our internal weaknesses, political divisions and social fissures. The weaknesses of Olmert Government at its inception and the factional nature of the Knesset were dissected ably by competent and knowledgeable commentators. That is why Nasrullah miscalculated. But he and those behind him missed one basic fact from their equation: this is that Israelis tend to forget their differences when it comes to their sheer existence simply because they have nowhere else to go. That is why it is only when we drive home to our Arab neighbors this simple truth that we might reach an accommodation and co-existence. But this can only happen when we on our side achieve a stable government, a representative Knesset and a powerful projection of our message to the world through a strong PR.
23. So now, even while licking our wounds, is the time to press ahead harder with our reform of the Knesset and Government. The President’s Commission for examining the Government and Governance of the country presided over by Prof Megidor is due to present its findings in Sept/Oct of this year. In view of our present calamitous DEBACLE, nothing could have been more timely and more relevant. Unless a clear and unified final report emerges from the Commission detailing agreed proposals for prompt implementation by the present 17th Knesset of real structural meaningful reform, the public reaction will be swift and uncompromising. The people in the regions and their supporters everywhere who suffered most and continue to suffer in the aftermath of the war for lack of direct representation will feel betrayed by an elite of academics and public figures entrusted with and given a whole year to come up with the goods. These will be perceived as caring more for their careers than their duties to the Presidency and the People. The regions and the public at large might erupt in frustration and anger in a powerful popular movement that will sweep out the present establishment of politicians that has been for too long enjoying power neglecting the trust of the real sovereign, the People of Israel.

Aharon Nathan
20th August 2006
http://www.aharonnathan.com/

Israel Arab Conflict (Oxford Union Address)

2006-06-08T15:38:00.000+01:00

Aharon Nathan’s address on behalf of the Opposition to the Debate at the Oxford Union on 8th June 2006. The following motion lost and the Opposition led by Mr Nathan won by a large majority.

“THIS HOUSE BELIEVES IRAN HAS NO LESS RIGHT TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAN ISRAEL”

Mr President,
It is a great privilege for me to speak in this world famous hall on a subject that has haunted me all my life. So forgive my lack of wit and humour. All points for and against were already made by other speakers so eloquently and comprehensively that very little is left for me to pay for my dinner. Let me therefore summarize rather than expound for both sides of the aisle.
Nuclear weapons are an abomination. However, they have at least become internationally accepted as being deterrents to avoid the breakout of war and not weapons to be used in pre-emptive strikes. The problem is how to prevent them falling into the hands of rogue regimes or terrorist organisations. No one, not even its enemies, can say that Israel belongs to these categories. Nor do I think does Iran.
The case for Israel however, is not that Iran has less right, but that for the necessity of preserving its sheer existence, Israel has more right than Iran or indeed any other country.
1. Both Iran and Israel are stirred and spurred by fear of their neighbours. Iran’s fear is certainly not from tiny remote Israel however much Iran’s present leadership vocalise their apocalyptically expressed hostility. Israel has no quarrel with Iran and Iran has no reason to fear Israel unless you accept that if you are a Muslim anywhere you should by definition be in conflict with Jews. I can not believe that the Iranian people who were well disposed to Jews and Judaism throughout their history, pre and post Islam, would accept this premise. Iran’s leadership is merely using Israel as a proxy in its conflict with America. (…Otherwise there is no other reason why Iran’s government should be more hostile to Israel than neighbouring Egypt or Jordan who made peace with Israel….)
2. The fear of the Shi’a in Iran stems from a deep-rooted historic rivalry with, and mutual mistrust of Sunni Arab Islam. Ever since Khomeni’s Islamist Revolution this fear has been heightened by American support first for Sunni Saddam Hussein and later on for Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and finally by the emergence of Sunni Pakistan as a nuclear power. These facts are behind the Iranian conflict with the West. Israel is not party to this conflict. (….and it would be well advised to re-evaluate its position, hold its nerve in the face of provocations by President Ahmadi Nejad, tone down its rhetoric and refrain from direct involvement in the West’s confrontation with Iran)
3. Iran has its sovereign right to go Ahamadi Nejad’s North Korean way or Rafsanjani’s South Korean way. It has the choice, and the right, but it does not have the need for Nuclear weapons. Israel is not in such a fortunate position. It continuously faces declarations by neighbouring nations threatening to wage a war of extermination and encouraging their streets and even their school children to that same end. It is in the context of self defence that Israel sought its nuclear capability. It held these weapons for decades but never once threatened anyone with them. Israel did not even confirm their existence in order to avoid any implied threat of employing them. Why has it suddenly now become an issue? It is particularly strange coming after Pakistan successfully exploded its Bomb. It has become increasingly crucial for Israel today facing the prospect of an unstable and porous Pakistan under the shadow of Bin Laden and with Ahmedi Nejad not mincing his words in echoing Arab leaders before him threatening and inciting and supplying arms and missiles to Israel’s neighbours to wipe Israel off the map. Israel’s need for its nuclear shield has never been greater to give her the feeling of security and military stability with so many refusing to recognise its legitimacy or even its existence.
4. Israel’s fears must be understood against its historical background. Two thousand years of persecution, execution and forced conversion culminated in Hitler’s Final Solution, a solution which wiped out almost half the world’s Jewish population on the watch of the civilised world.
5. Today it is worrying Israelis and Jews alike that what happened in Germany under the Nazis in the early 1930s is being re-enacted in a startling similar way in Europe today. Every aspect of life in Israel, its people, its institutions, its places of learning, even its acclaimed courts of justice are being demonized. Recently this demonizing has been organized and reinforced by concerted bans and boycotts here in Europe in protest they say to the occupation of Palestinian lands to which the majority of the people of Israel are opposed. All this sends shivers in the hearts of Jews everywhere reminding them of the anti-Semitic demonizing propaganda of the 1930s, which was the precursor of, and prepared the ground for the Holocaust. As Condoleezza Rice stated recently: Anti-Semitism is not just a historical fact but a current event.
6. The Arab World has played and continues to play its active part too in the Jewish tragedy. During World War 2 they made Jewish life in their midst a living hell. By the early 1950’s when the safe haven of Israel opened, some 900,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed to Israel from Arab countries leaving all Arab countries what the Nazis called Judenrein, lands without Jews. Therefore what the Nazis failed to do the Arab countries accomplished and perpetuated. And the world accepts that as normal. These 900,000 Jewish refugees are forgotten because Israel did not leave them in camps to rot and did not ask the UN to set up agencies to serve to perpetuate their misery and status as refugees. With help from Jews worldwide these Jewish refugees with their bare hands gave themselves dignity, security and a future in stark contrast to the way rich, very rich, Arabs treated the then 700,000 Palestinian refugees and disgracefully continue to treat them today. Mr President, I was a victim and a witness of this (constructive) ethnic cleansing. My personal story tells it all.
7. Fleeing Iraq, in my case via Iran, whose people I will always be indebted to for their hospitality and safe passage at my desperate time of need. I arrived at the absorption centre in Israel in 1949. I found there a mixture of people all dejected all helpless. My fellow refugees from Arab countries were desperately trying to rebuild their lives out of nothing in a land of nothing. But it was the sight of the remnants of the holocaust camps that broke my heart and my spirit. I saw frightened shadows of human beings dazed, confused and broken trying to regain their existence as humans. But the worst of all instead of hatred, rage and bitterness I found many trying to remove the concentration camp numbers on their arms feeling guilty of being alive and ashamed of not having put up a fight before allowing themselves to be led as sheep to the Gas chambers. It is the combined images of the ethnically cleansed Arab Jews who lost their countries, and the Holocaust remnants of European Jews who lost their dignity, that are engraved in my being and in the mind of every Jew who says “never again” Israelis feel the need to keep their nuclear shield not because they are on a Samson-like suicidal mission. It is because they are determined to live with pride and dignity denied to them in those dark days of the 30s and 40s. And this time, if they must die, they want to die fighting.
8. Fellow members of our great University, Your vote this evening will resound beyond the Quads of Oxford and the shores of Britain as indeed happened following the notorious debate of 1933. Israel desperately needs your support this evening at a time when it is waiting for a signal of hope from its Arab neighbours to create together two states living side by side in peace. It is these neighbours who can decide the fate of the Israeli nuclear weapons and make them redundant. Because it is they who continue to deny Israel and seek its destruction. Until their attitude changes Israel has the right above any other country be it Iran, Pakistan, France or Britain itself to continue to possess the nuclear shield, not to gain victory but through deterrence to prevent war and secure its continued existence. Mr President: Unlike Iran whose need for nuclear weapons is tenuous and optional, for Israel it is an existential imperative.

Aharon Nathan,
Oxford, 8th June 2006.

Representation in Democracy (Crisis in Israel’s Democracy)

2005-12-01T10:08:00.000Z

FIRST STEP SOLUTION: TR TOTAL REPRESENTATION

Democracies throughout the world are facing crises in the governance of their polities. They are experimenting with changes and modifications especially to their electoral systems owing to the very discontent and disconnect that we are familiar with amongst our own electorate in Israel. The malaise is not confined to Israel. Recent examples are the new electoral systems to the Scottish and European parliament in the UK (which failed to reconnect) and the changes in recent years that New Zealand introduced (which largely succeeded.) Broadly speaking both major groups of systems i.e. PR and Constituency (regional) are under pressure as a result of many similar factors that I have highlighted in my essay on “TR” Total Representation. This disconnect between the people and their representatives is widening. I believe no amount of education of citizens or preaching to politicians can drastically change that. Only institutionalised systemic reforms can produce changes in attitudes of the citizenry through engaging them where they could feel that their votes and their individual participation in the election process count. One way of doing that is by preserving the salient elements of the two major systems, tested and tried over centuries, the PR system (of Israel) and the Constituency system (of the UK). The fusion of these two systems is the essence of TR Total Representation whose added advantage is the simplicity of its implementation. On the face of it, under PR theoretically all citizens’ votes in Israel today count. However the manipulations of centralised and remote political parties rob the ordinary voters, especially in the peripheries of political participation and influence on their parties leaving them with a feeling of discontent and disconnect, hence the necessity to correct that.

Instead of concentrating on core systemic changes some political scientists are exhorting political leaders to correct their behaviour and adhere to higher standards of morality and professional ethics. Professor Dror’s “Letter to A Jewish Zionist Leader” is a notable example. It is wise and laudable. But so too were the exhortations of Plato on the qualities of the Ruler. Unfortunately we are living in a world of Machiavelli where fear not love is the engine and the tool of modern leaders. Morality and fair behaviour are cultural attributes that grow gradually gaining acceptance by societies as they develop towards uniformity and cohesion. Being a fervent Zionist Jew I find myself in absolute agreement with the sentiments of Professor Dror’s letter. But I know having left the protective warmth of Academia and stepped out into the real world of power, greed and living for the day, I found myself amongst people poor in spirit and weak in flesh. That is why I concluded that the only way to get better leaders is by instituting systems that compel them to be good for their own selfish interests.

You cannot dictate moral or ethical behaviour to people or politicians but you can legislate for it and then only if you back it by sanctions. In a democracy the voter is the only brake on corrupt rulers. This is the essence of Karl Popper’s Open Society. When published in 1945 it was hailed as the last word in defending the concept of freedom of the individual and the definition of liberal democracy because its main theme was the elasticity to change, hence “Open” i.e. open-ended. The shackles of religious rigidity and philosophical imperatives are replaced by an alternative offered by Popper of an automatic engine of continuing change to preserve the ideals and the cohesion of society. However it did not take long before John Rawls brought up his “Theory of Justice” in 1972 followed by the publication of Ronald Dworkin’s “Taking Rights Seriously” to find ourselves back where Popper started. Far from the death cry of ideology following Popper, we find ourselves grappling with a new ideology dressed in divine terms, in fact a New Religion called “Human Rights” born of the wholesale application of the UN Charter. Today it is the pragmatic Anglo Saxons (UK and USA) that are taking up the gauntlet thrown at it by writers and judges prone to theorizing in Continental Europe, in contrast to their pragmatic lawmakers at home. The scourge of fanatic religious movements using terror rather than reason and debate to propagate and coerce others to follow their lead created problems inside the legal frameworks of many countries. The human rights of individual fanatics are precariously balanced against the existential rights of society.

In Israel, while putting the instability of Government at the centre of the argument we tend to overlook what is happening to the third arm of the State, the Judiciary. The emancipation of our “Jewish Tribes” from the Diaspora brought about a breakdown in our traditional Jewish values and sharpened the divide between the religious and the secular. With the growing weakness of our Legislator and the incessant preoccupation of the Executive with pressing security issues of life and death, it was left to the Judiciary to determine and implement normative constitutional issues forgetting that they are essentially there to judge the decisions of the first arm, the sovereign arm of the state, the direct representative of the people, on these matters. Unfortunately instead of drawing on centuries of Jewish traditions where legal Justice and social justice converged into Tesedek and Tsedaka they fell into the modern mantras of Human Rights as defined and dictated not by our present situation and our past traditions as any parliament should always do, but by philosophical reasoning of a variety of judges in Continental Europe. Common Law Practice inherited from the Mandate is not alien to our Talmudic procedures. Recently a lively debate in the Anglo Saxon world is developing to search for an accommodation with the overpowering Convention on Human Rights propagated from Continental Europe. Where do we stand vis-à-vis all that? Instead of aligning ourselves with our legal base rooted in our inherited English Common Law, we find our Judges giving new interpretations of our Basic Law of the early 90’s on Human Rights that is being transformed in the hands of our Supreme Court into “The Constitution” where the amorphous concept of “Dignity” have taken precedence on the wider interpretations of truth, equity and justice rooted in Talmudic and Common Law precedents. And when the lives of our innocent people are pitched against the rights of individuals who seem hell-bent to destroy them, Human Rights is fast becoming a pernicious New Religion not to be questioned leaving our people numbed and confused. The conclusion therefore is that reform is needed here as well as in the other two arms of the State. And the only arm that has the power to reform them is the Knesset as the depository of the sovereignty of the nation. But to start doing that it has first to reform itself.

Our problems in Israel echo what is happening in the old established democracies. They are more acute in Israel because of our special precarious coexistence with our neighbours and our own Arab minority living amongst us. Our very existence is in danger owing to outside pressures and inside divisions. We cannot afford the luxury that other nations enjoy of letting events create and shape the solutions. We have to be more proactive. Our task in the President’s Commission is to devise and advice. If we don’t urgently offer practical schemes to the Knesset to reform itself our present generation of academics and intellectuals will be accused by a future Julien Benda of yet another “Great Betrayal”. Many of our citizens in the peripheries, in Kiryat Shmoneh and Sderot feel helpless to what they perceive to be an unholy alliance of academia, political establishment and social elite.

Our democracy is not new even if its practice is only 57 years old. Most of our people in Israel came either from Western countries where they experienced open direct Democracy or from the East where they practiced communal democracy centered on Synagogues and institutions which they established independent of the polities of their host countries. It is a myth that publicists and some academics that lack knowledge of these communities have invented and fostered, that Oriental Jews have no understanding of Democracy. The fact is that from 1948 onwards and until recently immigrants from the East have despaired at being unable to pierce the oligarchic walls of European/Ashkenazi led establishments. To climb those walls they needed to be Europeanized/Ashkenized, (to become mitbolilim!!! assimilated) When they couldn’t or did not want to, they sought prominence in other fields of finance, services and industry. They succeeded; and the more successful of them cast aside ambitions to assume political responsibility and left the field open to religious leaders to assume political leadership hence the increasing power of religious parties. It was only natural then for the younger tier leaders in the development regions to cultivate political bases within their small communities. And while the old establishments of the fifties reinforced by an increasing supply of ex-generals are aging, the second tier mainly oriental (and soon Russian) are coming of age to find their proper places in the national arena. We should delight and celebrate this trend as it will consolidate cement and give cohesion to a revitalized Jewish Israel. To speed it up and find a place and rationale for the Arab minority to integrate into it we need a system that propels changes and sustains them at grass root level. In fact the last thing we need in our fluid situation is a rigid Constitution at this stage. A system that can greatly help the process of change is TR/YESH Total Representation.

In seeking a medicine for the general malaise that is penetrating and frustrating our people, I am looking at our political realities from different angles. First of all, our people and our country are in dire straits. They are disunited and fragmented into many factions: ideological, theological and downright egoistic self interest, producing a multiplicity of approaches to defending our people from a three prong attack by Arabs outside, radicalised Muslims inside and a growing anti Israel (call it anti Semitic if you wish) public in the West, mainly in Europe. As a result, while our adversaries are all singing one clear all embracing tune based on the Occupation and on a falsely presented treatment of Arabs inside and outside our country, we find ourselves responding with conflicting and contradictory solutions stretching from a unified secular non-Jewish Israel down to redrawing our borders by transferring Israeli Arab villages to the other side. To put it graphically while our enemies are singing one single MIZMOR (Psalm) we tend to counter with a whole book of TEHILLIM.(Psalms) Why is this? The answer is not that we have an unstable government but because we have a fragmented Knesset where all factions claim divine right, not least amongst them are the secular.

Recent Opinion Polls have pointed to a desire by our people to have a strong leader. In the simplistic nature of opinion polling the public cannot be specific about which leaders for which policies. The reason for this confusion is that in recent years the public could not focus on a person or policy because Sharon and Shimon Peres and behind them until recently Likud and Labour have merged in the public perception as one group that is behind the prevailing malaise. The Government and the Knesset have merged and are certainly perceived by the public to be one entity. So even unity coalitions were not functioning properly because real alternatives in the shape of realistic oppositions to hold the government relentlessly accountable were missing. Shinui and Shass from their positions are so factional and one sided in the public perception that their leaders could not be seen as the alternative strong leaders of political oppositions headed by Prime Ministers in waiting. The public is confused looking in vain for an elusive alternative Strong Leader. This is the reason for the popularity of emerging Sharon and Kadima. The TR Total Representation System is designed to produce an effective stable opposition to a stable government. In this way with a leader in the Knesset marshalling a strong opposition, the public can focus through the debates in the Knesset rather than the sensational media on alternative policies, an alternative Government and an alternative Leader. Democracy is not about the power of the majority only but also about the freedom of legitimate minority opposition. This is the essence of John Stuart Mill’s warning about the dictatorship of the majority.

Therefore those who are advocating a Presidential System are looking to cure the secondary infection of the illness. It is the instability inherent in the structure of the Knesset that is causing the instability of the Government and depriving the nation of a real opposition underpinning a real democracy. We have therefore to give priority to electoral reform and then see whether we still need to follow it with a Presidential Government. Moreover changing to a Presidential System entails repeal and replacement of the Two Basic Laws of the President and the Government. It is a tall order which amounts to dismantling the State of Israel and rebuilding it anew. Why do we need this sledgehammer when we might achieve our objective of stable government by a tuning screwdriver provided by the TR Total Representation System of electoral reform? But here I must hasten to add that a strong Knesset born of TR will be needed even more so under a Presidential Executive should this be favoured and established. TR is not an alternative to a Presidential Executive. Both in academic theoretical terms and against the political realities in Israel TR is a pre-requisite for the initiation and subsequent establishment of a Presidential System of Government. The TR horse will be an essential pre-requisite to pull the cart of a possible Presidential System. Let us put this horse in front of this cart.

In conclusion I feel we have to address the crisis in our democracy with specific straightforward solutions. I believe such solutions have to be systemic structural solutions in the heart of which is TR. Any general exhortation to higher standards in public life will fall on the deaf ears of political vested interests and only increase the confusion and disillusion of ordinary citizens. Apart from the problems of security of well defined state borders and the vulnerability to radicalised Muslims inside Israel, what in fact engages our ordinary citizens are the normal necessities of their daily lives. It is unrealistic to expect these citizens to find the solutions we are looking for. If they want a strong leader it is because they need one to allow them to get on with their lives. This is the same in the established West and in the developing East. If we encourage our citizens towards mass protests or civil disobedience of any magnitude as some writers suggest (in order to put pressure on the national leadership) we will not be able to contain it and inevitably will end up in some form of civil strife and even violence. The solutions have to come from above and we academics and intellectuals in the President’s Commission could take an active part in helping the political leadership by offering them clearly defined practical and do-able solutions.

Aharon Nathan, 1st December 2005
(Aharon Nathan is a member of the President‘s Commission examining the systems of government in Israel)

Reason versus Emotion (The Bin Laden Phenomenon)

2002-07-18T11:56:00.000+01:00

18th July 2002

Conflict of Cultures or Tragic Misunderstandings

Introduction
This paper is prompted by the events surrounding the September 11 suicide bombings. It asks the question are the motives of the bombers and their organisations as often portrayed rooted in the Islamic culture which is irreconcilable with our Western culture or are they the results of deep seated misunderstandings of Islam by us and by those who are behind the bombers. Then it follows with an attempt to find a resolution of these misunderstandings. However it does not attempt to find political or international solutions rather merely to try to disentangle the religious aspects of the conflicts posed and provoked by the 9/11 events.

In order to get a grip on this problem we have to be open, rational and honest in our approach. In simple terms we have to call a spade a spade and leave diplomatic double talk behind. We have to recognise that we belong to different faiths. Keeping them private not out of irreverence or lack of respect would make it easier for us to debate the subject freely and not be shackled by taboos. This also makes it possible to bring into the debate secular thinking that would enable us to analyse religions as social phenomena. Unless we do that we would intensify the conflicts and block the doors of understanding and tolerance.

Culture Clash
First we have to dispose of the idea of a culture clash in the wider sense. Why don’t we have such conflict with the Chinese the Indians and certainly with the Japanese? We have far more in common with the Muslims and the Arabs than we have remotely with those peoples and their cultures. The sources of our culture were intertwined with and have in essence the same ingredients as theirs. Muslims embraced Greek philosophy and thought long before Christian Europe. Indeed it was through them that we managed to embrace Greek science and thought. And although Greek heritage was available to the West through Judaism and early Christianity it was the Muslims who took the initiative first in Baghdad then in Spain to delve into it. In those days Europe was the obscurantist and the Islamic world was the enlightened. Aristotle was translated into Latin only in the 13th century. The Arab tradition of translating and studying major works of non-Muslims started centuries before. And this trend intensified after Napoleon’ invasion of Egypt and continued to the present day. The Arab Society is not closed except for small power obsessed segments whose motivation is more political than cultural in the wider sense.
And what on the face of it should be even more uniting us together is religion. After all both Christianity and Islam sprung from the same Judaic ground. But it is this religious root which is the heart of the problem. Monotheism depicts one God. Therefore if He is with us He cannot be with you-in fact He must by definition be against you. Invoking the Divine by this simple logic is today and has been for centuries a lethal tool in the hands of various factions from time to time in their power struggles against their enemies internal and external by using it to mobilise the masses behind them. Paradoxically the spread of Democracy amongst ignorant and uneducated masses is bolstering these factions recently nourishing the struggle.

So what is the remedy? The answer in one word is "Enlightenment". There is nothing new in this. Judaism and Christianity have gone through the same process that is yet to be completed with relapses here and there. In Israel a small minority of ultra religious are still causing problems. The atrocities of the 2nd World War, the recent rise of anti-Semitism and the backlash against non whites (read non Christian) amongst the Right in Europe show that there is still a lot more for the Enlightenment to achieve. As for the Arab and Islamic world they are despite many tentative attempts almost centuries behind in this respect. This gap is the cause of the problems facing us. In order to bridge it or bridge over it we have to go back to the historical background.

The Theological Background
Amongst the three so-called monotheistic-religions Judaism found the accommodation first perhaps through the necessity and the nature of its existence in the Diaspora. It is traditionally accepted that the Jews came down from their self inflicted exile in Egypt to carve a territory to occupy and live in as they were not wanted and had nowhere else to go. (What a historical repeat!) They fought in the name of their God because He is the symbol of their cohesion and therefore belonged to them and to no other people. Remember He is termed God of active armies in the Hebrew Bible not of the hosts as politely translated. They were His chosen people and He would fight for them against other gods. And because presumably He was more powerful He and the Jews would prevail. Indeed they did. Monotheism as we came to understand it later was not clear to the Jews then and not since. (Although it is a logical concept- a Pyramid has to have an apex and the creation must have a single original mover.) If He belongs to them He can not belong to others. Every people lived happily side by side each with its own Deity. Moses wife was not Jewish and so was David partially. King Solomon revelled in marrying gentiles! Therefore when King Syrus helped the Babylonian exiles to go back to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem though no doubt politically motivated neither side found that to be wrong or unusual. The Persians had their god and the Jews theirs. So were other peoples and nations of old. The whole conflict started when one Jewish sect, the Christians under the Romans’ domination introduced the universality and asserted the concept of monotheism. (And then diluted it with the Trinity and it had to wait for Islam to restore it to its purity.) From then onwards God became the universal God. Islam followed and accepted that but claimed that only they exclusively belonged to Him. And of course so did the Christians. The Jews at a loss on the one hand not wanting and not able to claim Him exclusively any more and on the other by necessity had to coexist with both Christian and Muslim produced an intellectual compromise. Maimonides of Cordoba articulated this by saying it is not the oneness of God that is His essence. It is His uniqueness and that is beyond human understanding and comprehension. This is the compromise through which all three religions today are trying to find a consensus. It is also this that through Maimonides’ great intellectual disciple Spinoza that the doors of Enlightenment started to open.

In the meantime and for one thousand years while the Jews stood aside Muslims and Christians fought each other to assert the supremacy of their respective path to what both claim to be the one God and the only one assured path to Heaven. Their zeal to succeed against each other resulted only in almost eliminating their theological mentors. Today we have one thousand millions Christians lined up against one thousand millions Muslims smothering 12 million Jews out of existence. Jews became an endangered species. (I wish they were treated like the Bengali tigers or the Arabian leopards! How about a preservation order!) This essay however is not about Lamentations. It is that each of the three groups recently spawned a small nucleus to fight for their understanding what their faith is. To coexist they have to keep their faith private and ensure that their places of worship are not used for anything but worship. Any other activity political or nationalist should be outlawed. Jews kept to that throughout the ages. Muslim governments in their varieties banned political activities in mosques right through to the end of the Caliphate and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It is the western idea of freedom that is allowing this activity now to thrive in the West. In other words it is the West’s tolerance that is unwittingly encouraging intolerance. The ban on Salman Rushdie started in Bradford not in Tehran. Tolerant Europe has become the breeding ground for active terrorists.

To understand the root, the manifestation, and eventually the resolution of the 11th.September tragic phenomenon it is important to isolate, though not to ignore the Israeli-Arab conflict in order to focus on the primary causes. Since even if Israel were to disappear tomorrow the above problem will persist. It would probably become more accentuated and acute not least because Western Media would cease to be obsessed with viewing Israel as the root of all Middle East problems.

Israel has nevertheless become in the eyes of the Arab World a symbol of a Western implant and a propaganda tool exploited in many ways. Opposition to Israel helped to mould the Palestinians into a recognised nation. It was also instrumental in creating a second national identity - Jordan. Arab corrupt regimes and rulers use Israel to divert the wrath of their streets away from them. Recently bashing Israel is helping Europe to placate the Arabs and curry favour with their wealthy investors and export markets. More crucial however is that Israel or rather the Jewish people were used by the Muslim fundamentalists in their struggle against the West by invoking the imitation of the life of Muhammad who in his days perceived to have fought and overcome Jewish opposition to him and to his message.

Notwithstanding all that, the Arab ruling governments and classes in contrast to Europe and European media understand where the real fundamentalist danger lies. This is why recently they began to want to resolve the Israeli conflict out of sheer self-preservation and protection not from tiny Israel but from their own streets and masses. They hate the Israelis and the Palestinians equally-except that they fear the latter more than the former. But they cannot spell this out in public. It is a convention to support automatically any anti West voice or grievance in the Arab Street. The Arab leaders understand that and discount their own vocal support. The only side who takes it seriously is either the European Media out of ignorance or their governments out of self-serving interests. America recently has woken up to the real root of the problem.

It is against this background that we should analyse the Bin Laden phenomenon and the 11th of September.
Bin Laden – A Presumed New Caliph? Faced with their impotence in fighting foreign domination and following their failures first in the wars against Israel and then in the Gulf war the Arabs turned to those leaders who were using religion as weapon of last resort. Radicals were using it against their corrupt leaders for almost a century. No doubt some of these radicals must have thought out the grand design. However the majority support came and still coming from sincere believers. The climax presented itself when the American military were stationed in Saudi Arabia. To some devout Muslims it was analogous to replanting idolatry in the Kaaba. To appeal to the masses and the streets the golden epoch of the Prophet and his struggle against the infidels is invoked. They started to believe that they have to relive those wonderful days. This is not as outlandish as it sounds. Fundamentalists of all religions think of the universe, time and history in a circular way. Most of us in the west whose thinking is influenced by the Enlightenment our daily lives are pervaded by science and our religion is privatised. We tend to think of history as succession of events in the world in a linear way. To the fundamentalists history repeats itself. To us every day is an ever-new link in the succession of time. To them time can be recreated and relived.

Conditions and circumstances set the scene for re-enacting the times of the Prophet. Almost every detail fitted. And who better than Bin Laden to take the central role. He looks and acts the part. May be not a Prophet but certainly a Caliph is born. To understand the above we have to embark on a comparative account of both Muhammad and Bin Laden and their lives and times.

Life and Times of Mohammed
The story here is based on the Koran and history as taught in the Arab world. It exaggerates the central role of the message of Islam in its subsequent conquests and ignores the weakening of Persia and Byzantium prior to the advent of Islam. It also paints a hopeless picture of chaos ignorance and strife amongst the Arab tribes and belittles the deep penetration of the Jewish faith and culture both in north and south of Arabia. The historical truth is of course different. The Arabs swept their surrounding countries in a military conquest not unlike that of Alexander before them or the Mongols after them. To the Arabs and curiously enough even to most historians it was the Message of Islam that conquered the world. However in the context of our story what is important is what the average Muslim today believes what happened not what in actual fact happened historically.
While the Old Testament was shrouded in mythology and the New Testament was shaped and codified by a political conference convened by a Roman Emperor the story of the rise of Islam is based mostly on written historical material irrespective of its accuracy. That is why it can be accepted as more credible and appealing certainly to Muslims. It is not based on blind faith in mythology and rituals. That is why it is easier for enlightened Muslim leaders if they need to steer the fanatic masses towards rational interpretation of Islam than it is the case with fanatic Jews or Christians.

The rational basis of Islam enabled at least some of its scholars to deal freely and even to absorb Greek philosophy so easily in the early centuries of the last Millennium and so managed to accommodate it with Islam. This same accommodation helped Maimonides influenced by both Greek and Islamic philosophy to reform Judaism and paved the way to the creation of different Jewish religious movements existing side by side peacefully today. To understand this we have to refer to his Guide and to the writings of the great Muslim theologians from Al Farabi and Al Ashaari right to Ibn Rushd (Averroes) Ibn Bajja and others.
Mohammed’s life is a beautiful and attractive story. It is a great shame that it is caricatured by The Satanic Verses. It could be made into a best selling sensitive and dramatic film. His father died before he was born. His mother died when he was six. He had to fend for himself under the care of his grand father who died soon after and Muhammad found himself supported by his uncle, the father of Ali. (The subsequent 4th Caliph whose murder and that of his son Hussein split Islam into Shi’a and Sunna) He was lonely and lost and had to work for a wealthy Meccan widow to look after her trade with Damascus. She trusted and eventually married him. He was 25 she was 40. Thus he suddenly became wealthy with a status in his community and plenty of time and wealth on his hand. But his personal upbringing made him contemplative and introvert. He came in contact with the Christians on his travels to Syria. More importantly he was intimately in touch with the huge Jewish tribes in Mecca, Medina, Khyber and other towns in Arabia. He absorbed a lot of their teachings and culture. He admired them and felt affinity with them belonging, as he was to a movement the Hanafi, which believed in One God.

It was during one of Mohammed's contemplative retreats in a cave outside Mecca that he felt the Divine was inspiring him in the same way that Ezekiel did before him and almost in a carbon copy manner. Bewildered at first but later convinced that he was destined to be yet another Jewish Prophet. Initially the Jews themselves thought that he must be the awaited Messiah. Later on, when their Rabbis discovered his little understanding of their complicated theology and Talmud they disowned him thus repeating the same mistake that separated them five centuries back from Christianity. Muhammad fought them and defeated them. Did he connive or condone the massacres that followed is a matter for historians to continue to debate. Suffice us to say that it would have been out of character to do so. He was upright genuine and sincere and never even presumed direct personal contact with God. He never presumed to be divine or immortal and as a prophet in the best Judaic tradition he did not appoint a successor. He did not claim to be the last messenger in the sense of sealing the Prophecy. That would have contradicted his belief that God decides whatever He wants. It was not he but his second successor Caliph Omar who eventually drove God’s beloved Jews out of that part of Arabia. During Uthman Ibn Affan’s Caliphate the Koran was codified and all sorts of new traditions were initiated. However it was Omar who was the first political leader of Islam to shape the Caliphate that emerged later. This is the background for the Koran as it was handed down to future generations.

Muhammad was illiterate which was nothing unusual in those days. People learnt by heart poetry and recitations of events. The Koran came to him by way of remembering and commenting on what he knew of the Old Testament. He would go in a trance and recite these commentaries. Mystics and hypnotised individuals can behave similarly even today. After his trances professional storytellers would listen to the Prophet repeating them and they in turn would recount and recite them. The main thrust of the Koran is taking issue with the Jews who rejected him. The message is not different from those of Hebrew prophets Isaiah Jeremiah and especially Ezekiel.

Muhammad was shunned by his fellow Meccans and found refuge first with the Jews and later on with other supporters in Medina. When the Jews disowned and turned away from him and then others who embraced him first joined the Jews and the Meccans against him these two groups became the targets of his admonition. The Koran opens with a short stanza modelled on the opening lines of the Psalms. Then it goes on to castigate those who incurred the wrath of God (i.e. Jews and Christians lumped together) and those who have gone astray (i.e. the non Jews in Medina and Mecca who initially accepted Mohammed’s message and then reneged.)
The rest of the Koran is primarily one long polemic with the Jews, or the people of the Scriptures and a variety of Rules and Regulations. The second chapter named "The Cow", is referred to by scholars as mini Koran and contains the gist of the whole work. It states that God loved the Jews. He chose them as His own people and they turned away from him and although he forgave them time and time again they continued to rebel against his teachings and his message. They are argumentative and not prepared to accept without questioning God’s faith and straightforward messages. They made so much fuss about the Red Cow (hence the name of the chapter) instead of just obeying His wishes to sacrifice it without questioning. And as a last straw they were not listening to his latest messenger Mohammed. The rest of the Koran is a compilation of rules and regulations adapted with allusions to the words of God as revealed in the Old Testament. And just to complete the story the Koran accepts the Christians as believers while rejecting absolutely the concept of Trinity but curiously leave the door open for the Immaculate Conception. God after all created the world out of nothing why can’t He order the creation of a baby without the normal human contact.

It is interesting that the Koran by criticising the Jews pays them indirectly the greatest compliment. Jewish tradition is argumentative and reflective. Maimonides repeats and confirms this tradition which boldly asserts that they carry out the tenets of Judaism but they reserve afterwards the right gifted them by God to try to understand why. Briefly and succinctly: “we do first and we listen after.” It is this tradition that made the Greeks dub them the philosophising people. It may very well have contributed to their survival.

The power of the Koran is less in its contents. These are disjointed and their allusions and quotations of the Old Testament are often contradictory. Its power lies more in its poetic prose and musical quality that is most effective when read allowed. When properly recited it is mesmerising. Translation can never do it justice in fact it destroys it. Once compiled after Mohammed’s death it kept its present arrangement and form even though Muslims admit that it is haphazard in its chronology and coherence.

As important as the Koran is the life of the Prophet. It is told and repeated to every child in school and at home. Muslims are expected to follow and imitate his conduct (Sunna) and recall his deliberations (Hadith) and relate them to the appropriate passages from the Koran to provide them with authority and context. In this respect there is more similarity with the Christian attitude to the life of Christ. Jews never have such personality cults. When a child is blessed you would say " may he follow in the ways of Abraham Isaac and Jacob"-curiously not that of Moses or David or any Prophet.

Life and Times of Bin Laden (compared with Muhammad)
It is easy to discern a parallel of the two lives if you are intent on finding it. Like Mohammed, Bin Laden travelled the world and came in touch with those who lost their faith in God and questioned His existence. (Cf.Byzantium and Damascus) He made money and he could have lived a life of luxury. (Mohammed's. marriage to Khadija). He decided to fight the infidels, the Russians. (Cf. the Meccan Idolaters) helped by the Americans (Medina Jews and supporters) who then turned against the Muslims in the Gulf (the Meccans’s hostility and Medina’s renegades) then the American army is stationed in Saudi Arabia.(the enemy in Mecca) So he goes to Afghanistan (Medina) where he could lead them to repossess Arabian lands (back to Mecca). Like Mohammed bin Laden likes to think and contemplates in isolated caves. He will destroy the heathen images and symbols and idols like the Buddas and the arts and the museums. (The heathen idols in the Kaaba) He will declare one Islamic State and one Islamic society (the Ummah) by abolishing the name of Afghanistan changing even its radio to become Sharia Radio. He is helped by leading followers like Sheikh Omar, Al-Zuwahiri etc to establish the rule of Islam in Afghanistan. (Cf. Abu Baker, Ali, Omar Alkhattab etc setting a new state in Medina) He will have fighters from other Arab and Islamic countries (Al Ansar in Medina) and so on and so forth. How can any Muslim deny this messenger of God and his ambition to drive the infidels, those who "incurred God’s wrath" and those "who have gone astray" in the lands of Islam. (Dar-El-Islam.) To Bin Laden the West became the house of War to be destroyed. (Dar-El-Harb).

Once you see this comparison and follow it in details you understand what is happening today amongst large segments of Muslim communities and how easy it is to recruit naïve and innocent Muslims to this new cause. These recruits will find comfort in this cause from their anguish and frustration whether in their alienated lives in the West or living under the oppression of their corrupt leaders at home or under occupation in Israel. Bin Laden fits the image and embodies the renewed divine message. Driving Bin Ladin from and changing the regime in Afghanistan does not even begin the solution. To those who follow Bin Laden it is only a setback in their eyes the same way that Mohammed had his setbacks. The danger to the world today comes from the enormous body of converts to the new cause. They may be naïve and simple but nevertheless are sincere innocent believers. We have to find the way to their minds and hearts and not confine our efforts to eradicate the evil few who are inflicting terror on them and on the entire world.

Conclusions
So where do we look for a solution to this complex problem? The West has been experimenting by juggling stick and carrot with the Muslim countries but without success. The trouble of course is that the rulers and the peoples of most of these countries are caught in vicious circles. With the lack of real democracy they have become hostages of each other. The corrupt rulers are becoming hostages of their streets and the streets are hostages of these rulers. A twin track path towards democracy and complete separation of state and religion could ideally solve the problem. But these countries are marching in the opposite direction. And anyway can we say that we have really achieved such an ideal state in the West?

Some commentators on the other hand find the root in the jealousy and envy of the wealthy West. This may very well be the case. But it is an unrealistic pipe dream to think that a semblance of redress of inequality can be achieved in a foreseeable future. These and other factors are no doubt the breeding ground for the terror recruits. They may be the dynamites but the switch is in the hand of those the like of Bin Laden who is using Islam to ignite them.

How to counter this misuse of Islam as an evil tool? The simple answer is what both Judaism and Christianity have in their own ways discovered. And that is Enlightenment. But in order to be convincing and effective only Muslims can lead Muslims on the road to Enlightenment.

The question is where to find these leaders who can initiate and start to steer the Muslim world towards this goal. The answer is mainly in the West and may in some Islamic countries where Muslims enjoy free speech. And yes funny as it may sound amongst the Israeli Arabs. There would also be those Muslim academics, religious scholars and publicists of independent means. Only Muslims can influence Muslims. They should be encouraged and made aware of their responsibility to do that. Our mistake has been that we sought tolerance from those who by definition are intolerant. It is counterproductive to appeal to Muslim Mullahs and clerics. And to expect leaders of other religions to help is illogical and would only encourage hypocrisy. However to ask them all to join together to highlight their common moral values and show how similar these values are can be very positive and helpful.

Danger comes from the simplistic and adversarial methods of the Media and misinformed policies of the majority of Western Democracies. The main thrust of their argument is that all religions are either militant or intolerant and none more so than Islam. On the other side of the spectrum you have naïve religious leaders who seek to gloss over the exclusivity of religions. It is no use saying that the Testaments, Old and New, or the Koran preach messages of peace. They don’t. And where you cherry pick those phrases or interpretations to prove such good intentions you end up losing credibility. But while the majority of Christians and Jews have learnt during the last two centuries to privatise their faiths only a tiny minority of Muslims have. They can coexist with the rest of the world only if they do. Jews and Christians seem to coexist even if in some countries just. And so do the peoples and religions of the Far East. There is no reason why the Muslims should exclude themselves from this process.
Political preaching should be literally outlawed in places of worship. For centuries Islamic states did just that. Western tolerance is breeding Muslim intolerance. Loudspeakers on top of the mosques in the West must be banned. Those who find it important to remind themselves of the times of daily prayers can use “Pagers” or watch-alarms. Loudspeakers emphasise foreignness and alienate Muslims from other communities. State-sponsored or aided faith schools must be banned not encouraged. Sharia laws (or Jewish laws or Church laws) can be applied voluntarily to regulate relationships between members of certain communities if so desired by those individuals but only if always to be overridden by the democratic laws of the countries in which they exist. Unless such measures are taken and explained and accepted the future of our children, irrespective of their persuasion is bleak.

Aharon Nathan, July 2002
www.AharonNathan.com

Israel Arab Conflict (President Bush Speech)

2002-06-28T15:32:00.000+01:00

Q&A in the Wake of President Bush's Speech

Question
Should the President’s speech on 24th June 2002 alter our views and our proposals on the problems outlined above?
Answer
No. The President gave us support and time to implement what we should be doing ourselves. The speech just extended the time limit for us to put our house and our affairs in order. It is like the President throwing to us a plank to enable us to swim to a safe shore. However, the time afforded to us is limited and I guess that it is not the eighteen months that is envisaged in his speech but rather the five month period leading up to the US elections in November. By that time the atmosphere in Washington may change and the President may be pushed to modify his staunch support for Israel. The speech is clearly thought out carefully. We must believe the President when he said later on that he was concerned about the survival of Israel. Of course he has other considerations. But not since Harry Truman did we hear a Western Leader speak about us with so much moral conviction and passion. We exasperated Truman then by over-pressurising him. Read his daughter’s account. Bush today has even more outside pressures. We must use the time he gave us and follow his road map in all details. We must help him to help us.
The media by picking up on the problem of Arafat in the speech blurred its other more positive aspects. The media in Europe, which is hell bent on its anti-American stance in every respect and on every possible occasion, caught the opportunity to try to criticise the President on this part of it rather than concentrate on its positive aspects.
It is interesting to note that no pro-western Arab leader has rejected the Bush vision. We have to remember that it was released after intensive consultation with the leaders of Egypt Saudi Arabia Jordan and even with Nabil Shath, the Palestinian Authority minister (PA) in charge of foreign affairs who stayed two weeks in Washington for that purpose. That is why even Yasser Arafat himself did not reject it. Only European media did so with alacrity.
Viewed from the Arab viewpoint Bush vision is a program for the establishment of their coveted State with American declared blessing and pledge for future help. We should not kid ourselves that it is tailored for a Sharon plan. The Arabs so adept lately in their PR portrayed it as such to score on PR hoping to squeeze more concessions in due course. From our viewpoint it asserts American support for our demand for security thus giving notice to the Arabs that violent tactics and homicide bombing will get them nowhere. It also put a stop to UN and Europe justifications for such tactics.
So in the midst of our general euphoria we seem to forget that now we cannot procrastinate any longer. The President set a time limit for us. This not a Sharon Plan. Bush advisors believe that they need a strong right winger to back their plan. That is an important ingredient in their support for Sharon. They declare that there will be a Palestine and we have to co-operate with this new State. We have now no alternative but to accept the World diktat on the borders in accordance with 242 and 338 albeit with some modifications. So we have to act very quickly to establish within this framework fait accompli markers on the ground for our future security. Hunting homicide bombers in the territories like finding needles in haystacks and demolishing buildings in countless incursions are only sapping our strength killing our boys, dividing our own people weakening our economy and alienating what is left of sympathy for our cause. Instead we should walk out of what we envisage to be future Palestine fortify and close our new conceived borders for the time being and let the Palestinians fight it out amongst themselves to choose how they want to live in a future coexistence with Israel. Believing that we can build for them a sophisticated security infrastructure friendly towards us is tragic naivety. Did we succeed in Iran, in Lebanon, in some African countries?
A very interesting sentence in the President’s speech seems to escape attention. When he spoke about a final settlement between the two countries, Israel and Palestine, he said something along the lines that such settlement should be helped or connected with Egypt and Jordan. Can we cash in on this when talking about economic links of Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan? May be we should exploit this line of thinking.

Question
How to proceed now?
Answer
We have to solve the three problems outlined many times before i.e.
1. To establish on the ground secure and defendable borders which clearly separate Israel from Palestine to include only defendable settlements. We proceed urgently with building the border walls including Jerusalem and including a wall rising on the Temple Mount separating the Mosque and the Kothel wall. Once we establish these borders the struggle to have them accepted by the other side will follow through negotiation. Then we have to attend simultaneously to solving the other two problems. We have no time to waste. Bush has defined the time- table. Palestine is coming into being irrespective of whom in Israel is for or against. Bush Plan is not Sharon Plan. Bush has given time for Sharon to pave the way for Israel to accommodate the creation of Palestine. We must engage ourselves in defending the inside of Israel and not waste our strength on targeting few individual terrorists and blow up buildings. The people of Israel are numb with their tragedies and mourning. They are understandingly reacting with their emotions often in different directions. It is the responsibility of the leaders to think with cool and rational heads for long term solutions.
2. The internal political division in Israel caused so much harms to our cause during the last 2 years that we should feel ourselves as much responsible for the spilt Jewish blood as the homicide bombers. What chance have we got when Sharon and Peres undermine each other? They are old. They belong to yesterday’s world. They have to unite and speak with one voice for the sake of our future survival. Bush and his advisors are exasperated. While America was blocking a UN enquiry into the Jennin operation Peres rushed to scupper that by declaring that he had no objection because we had nothing to hide. Indeed we have none. But before he spoke he had to understand the legal and political implications not only for Israel but also for American stand on the international surrounding the principles involved. And now while bush is trying so hard to convince the G8 leaders that Arafat cannot be a partner for peace Peres comes on BBC Newsnight stating that if and if and if then he can negotiate with Arafat. Why volunteer such opinion at this juncture even if it is sound? What a nightmare! Frankly Israel is desperate for political statesmen who can unite to address the world with one voice. Unfortunately Israel can only speak with one voice if its political structure is modified to produce a strong representative government, which speaks for a truly democratic and representative majority of the country. Now that the direct elections for the office of the Prime Minister is abolished the only other method is to adopt the proposed electoral reform which combines constituency and proportional representation. Such system has to be put in place before the next general elections in two years time. This question is as urgent and as vital as dealing with homicide bombers. Only such electoral reform can produce a strong government that can speak for the whole of Israel with one voice. (See the paper on Electoral Reform in Israel.)
3. The third problem facing Israel and indeed world Jewry is the need to retell and keep explaining the historical background which necessitated the creation of Israel. An organised and aggressive assault on World public opinion is needed (outlined in a previous synopsis) to remind the world of the Holocaust and the cleansing of the Jews from Arab countries to Israel. Otherwise we will not be able to negotiate a proper settlement with the Palestinians with regard to the future of Gaza, the security of our borders and specifically the question of the Palestinian Refugees. It is not the Arabs I fear. They are predictable. It is world public opinion led by anti-Semitic European media recently bolstered by misguided Jewish do-gooders and may be some even self-haters.

Question
What is the link between Gaza and the Holocaust?
Answer
It is to do with the future security nay survival of Israel. Our comparative military strength today will not last forever. When we negotiate the future status of Gaza we must explain and emphasise our future fears to gain support for our plan. The evil axis of Gaza/Hebron will always threaten Israel dividing it in a pincer link or exposing its belly to bombers or missiles from both sides. There was a time even recently when we could have negotiated a settlement which could have in time diluted Gaza of its refugees leaving it a demilitarised municipality linked to Israel economically retaining Palestinian sovereignty. Our obsession with Judea and Samaria blinded us from hard realities. It is too late now. So what is the solution?
a) Under no circumstances should we agree to any bridge or tunnel or even a jointly policed corridor linking Gaza to the West Bank. Any link has to be a visa/passport-based arrangement for going in and out of the two territories. Israel should not be made to enter into any special long-term final status treaty in this respect. You never know when the conflict restarts irrespective of treaties and guarantees. Let us cast our mind to the pre not post Six-Day War situation of Israel.
b) Gaza and the West Bank can be two states or two countries or two entities linked together in a federation or confederation or any type of agreed union. They can of course also be two constituent parts of a single State. It is not up to Israel to decide or even be party to such decision. UN 242 and 338 ordered a reversion to the status quo anti which prevailed before the 1967 War. Gaza then belonged to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan. Both have to be parties to the negotiations to restore the status quo anti. Israel will join in to negotiate adjustments to its borders for its security and the settlement of the Jerusalem question. Is that why Bush linked the names of Egypt and Jordan to the final negotiations for a Palestinian State? I wonder. If not, we should bring this up. Our objective should be to see evolving at least economic links of Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan making the two parts of Palestine gravitating towards these two countries away from Israel. Any future demographic pressure will thus not fall on Israel provoking renewal of conflict. This idea may sound far-fetched to some but it is of such obvious importance to our future security and survival that we must not dismiss it out of hand. Some people in Israel may resist this line of action because of the need for Arab labour. The answer is to negotiate labour employment with the future State of Palestine on ad hoc basis and not as part of the structure of the final status agreement under the Bush plan or vision. There is a real big danger facing us right now. The US expects us to open our borders to the territories to ameliorate the economic conditions in preparation for the proposed elections for the PA in six months’ time. We have to resist vehemently otherwise we will prejudice and jeopardise our future negotiations. We should help in any other way but not in opening doors that we definitely will not be able to close in future emergencies.
c) We have to insist on the demilitarising of Gaza.
d) We must negotiate Israel’s some rights to the sea adjoining the shoreline of Gaza to enable Israel’s navy to monitor shipping activities.

Question
Is not this like giving the Palestinians two states for the price of one?
Answer
They already have two states Jordan and Palestine. They may as well end with three. Our consolation is that these will be three weak entities that in time will develop diverse identities and vested interests. We have provided this stage for them because we did not foresee beyond our arrogance for years after the Six-Day War. Then we compounded our mistakes by signing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan releasing them of their troubles with the Palestinians to their ever relief and delight. And all this happened because we were fighting between ourselves. We are still doing this today and it is time to wake up and rectify some past mistakes. In the present atmosphere of terror we can be seen justified in using our economic card. We just say in view of the constant infiltration of homicide bombers we have to close our borders until the peace process is completed and the borders clearly defined and agreed.

In Conclusion
We are facing momentous decisions. The world and now the USA have decided to impose on us a Palestine based on almost all the territories. It is up to us to make the best of this bad job. Time is not working for us. Unless we respond quickly to establish facts on the ground we end up losing our future security and any hope of creating a situation of co-existence with our future neighbours. Both are essential for the survival of Israel.

Aharon Nathan, 28th June 2002
www.aharonnathan.com

Israel Arab Conflict (Consequences of Defensive Shield)

2002-05-20T15:27:00.000+01:00

In the Aftermath of Defensive Shield - Q & A

Question
Soon after my talk on 5th May 2002 analysing the three problems in Israel and following Operation Defensive Shield by Israel Army in the West Bank, many friends asked me for my reaction and specifically in what way this Operation has changed the dynamics of the conflict and affected the three problems facing Israel outlined by my talk on how to right the wrong in Israel.
Answer
Defensive Shield accentuated all the three problems(Borders Security, Government instability and Negative Image) brought them into focus and made their solutions even more urgent. Otherwise Defensive Shield did not change anything. What it did was to give Israel time-very limited time - to solve all the above three problems. Defensive Shield coupled with external circumstances created a window of opportunity that we have to use while still open. It may not be wide open for long.

Question
What are these external factors or circumstances?
Answer
Initial reaction to Sept.11th was negative for Israel. The Arabs and specially the Palestinian radicals were emboldened. Many voices in the west and mainly in Europe sought to placate the Muslim world on the expense of Israel. Europe continues to do that. However the President’s decisive condemnation of terror and countries harbouring it, the American response and success in Afghanistan and the lack of clear support by the Arabs for that response restored American almost consensual support for Israel by the American Presidency, State Department, Congress and Media. This consensus may not last beyond the November elections for Congress. World media through Arab money and influence and under pressure from Europe is slowly changing tune and under State Department pressure may gain ascendancy.

Question
How to proceed?
Answer
On the 1st problem that of our future security we have to define clear demarcation of the ultimate borders of Israel (not what is desired but what is possible) and to effect complete separation of the two states of Israel and future Palestine along these borders. Israel has to act unilaterally by walking out of Gaza and the West Bank leaving within the borders of Israel only those settlements, which are linked uninterruptedly to Israel and therefore easily defendable. Proposals by Ben-Eliezer and Haim Ramon although come from different directions in actual fact seem to point the same way as far as creating the basis for separate and clearly defined borders with future Palestine. What is imperative is to implement them without waiting or negotiating. In this way we can consolidate the American support and may regain some of the support we have completely lost in Europe. The words “occupation” and “humiliation” in the new jargon of TV spin proved to be the most lethal weapons in the hands of our enemies in the Middle East and in Europe. It is no use talking about right or wrong. We have lost the propaganda war and we need to assert and reassume our moral high ground. We can only achieve this by boldly and openly declaring our acceptance of a State of Palestine. Protracted interim arrangements will work against us by depriving us of any sympathy or support of most of the countries in the world.
Let us also not commit the same mistake again of organising and arming the new state. It is none of our business. We cannot prevent any future state from arming itself having failed to prevent such arming to take place under the Palestine Authority when under agreement with them at least we had the power to do that. Treaties in the hands of terrorists and dictators are merely pieces of paper. We need to establish hard defendable borders on the ground. The utmost we can ask for now is to demilitarise Gaza retaining sovereignty over the sea bordering it. Once we have proper borders with a proper sovereign neighbouring State of Palestine we can regulate the flow of economic workers from there to suit us. This is a real and tangible and effective weapon. That entails visas, work permits, pre-entry research etc. I believe a new situation of good secure fences will bring about support from progressive elements within the new state to seek the assistance of Israel. In fact the new situation will have far reaching consequences both on our relations in the region and our internal relationship with our own Arab Citizens.
Suicidal bombers have introduced a new dimension to the conflict. Post Sept. 11th gives a new definition to what security entails. The balance of casualties, the number game, has swung in the Palestinians favour hugely impacting on their confidence and psychology. They now believe rightly or wrongly that time is on their side. The hurried manner of our withdrawal from Lebanon has encouraged them. We have to remember that the Arab radicals believed and to a degree rightly so that their terror created the internal pressure in Israel which compelled us to withdraw from Lebanon. They are trying to repeat the same tactics and will intensify its use by sending their homicide bombers from all surrounding countries. It is now embedded in their mythology that they have kicked us out of Lebanon and it is only a question of time to kick us first out of the territories followed eventually and over a time by the whole of Israel a la Crusades fashion. Internal pressure in Israel is building up and few concerted suicide bombings co-ordinated simultaneously will cause it to implode and fulfil Arab expectations. We have to act before this happens since if it does it will confirm the efficacy of their strategy and make it impossible to build a peaceful co-existence in the future.
The consequences of Defensive Shield have generated hatred and mistrust on both sides that will take generations to heal. The do-gooders amongst us who rely on goodwill, morality and equity to reach the basis of a settlement with few like-minded individuals on the other side are misreading the mood and the psyche of the streets on both sides. Reading the London Guardian and meeting each other’s counterpart in comfortable English or Norwegian countryside may draw few individuals together but that is a long, long way from solving the problems, pain and hurt of ordinary people. Only clear separate borders can in time rekindle trust between these two peoples of two proud countries through trade, tourism, cultural exchanges and the like. Forget about similarities with other situations. We are not in Northern Ireland and anyway who are the Catholics and who are the Protestants in our conflict. Comparisons are dangerous and misleading. They may be good only for patching up tools in the hands of self-serving mediators. Please beware!

Question
How can we just walk out? What about our economic interests? What about Arab workers whom we need in Israel and the Palestinians need of employment for their livelihood?
Answer
We have to decide our priorities. Closing our borders is a double-edged sword. But economic hardship on both sides is preferable to mutual slaughter. Moreover as it hits all the population it can concentrate the mind on solutions. First things first. We define our ultimate borders then we set out to strengthen and fortify them. And having declared and publicly explained our position and intention to recognise the new state we proceed to close the borders and hand over the territories except for Hebron to the present Palestine Authority reformed or corrupt. It is only then that we engage with them in bilateral negotiations for a series of treaties.
At the start of the negotiation whenever it happens the first and most urgent will be agreeing the borders which Israel would have established unilaterally on the ground. Our starting stage will be the status of Gaza. We insist that any agreement to reopen the borders here will be contingent on declaring Gaza a demilitarised entity with pre verifiable conditions. That will be our starting stage in the bilateral negotiation. Our weapon will be the pressure of closed borders.

Question
This sounds crazy almost giving up what even some Arabs are not contemplating. Is this a solution for Israel or for the Palestinians?
Answer
Any solution has to be good for both sides in the long run. However my proposal is only concerned with the security present and future of Israel. I believe that we are standing at a crossroad with regard not only of the safety of Israel but also with the future survival of our Jewish heritage that is dependent and intertwined with the future of Israel. The recent manifestations of the hostile attitudes of Europe, governments and peoples (U.K. and Denmark excepted) is far more disturbing than that of the Arabs who of course should be predicted. Once we reach a settlement with the Palestinians we would be amazed to find them far more reliable friends than the Europeans especially if we treat them and the Arabs of Israel with dignity as genuine and equal friends. I believe that the Palestinians have over the last twenty years learnt far more about us and about their so-called Arab brothers in the Arab countries than we realise and understand. They have particularly seen how much Jordan had gained in contrast to Syria by being supportive of America and neutral towards Israel. Once peace is established the progressive Palestinians will find more in common with democratic modern western orientated Israel than they have with the dictators and the corrupt regimes of almost every Arab country.

Question
Where do the Arabs of Israel fit into this picture?
Answer
In the same way that we should not lump the Palestinians with other Arabs living elsewhere we should not lump the Arabs of Israel with others. They are content where they are and would like to identify with Israel if given the chance. We must be careful not to see them as the simple villagers of the pre-1948 era. They have progressed since as we have done. We should treat them sensibly honourably and as equal citizens the way Jews and other ethnic groups are treated in, for example, tolerant “Christian” Britain. We should enlist them in the IDF but avoid taking them into sensitive units and the Air Force on account of the understandable justification of avoiding them having to fight their own relatives across the border. Modern Armies depend increasingly on specialised units that can be restricted to Jews. As for their social and political integration the proposed electoral system will help in that direction. Even today given the chance they would have been of immense value if a number of them were to be assigned to our key embassies in the West. They would have been proud to parade themselves as Israelis. I believe they could in time constitute our bridge to the neighbouring Palestinians and to the wider Arab world.

Question
What about the rest of the Arab world?
Answer
Once Israel withdraws from the territories the sting will go out of the propaganda venom of the Arabs and their supporters in Europe. They will try to sabotage any bilateral agreement with the Palestinians. They are not going to like losing the Palestinian card and the Israel bogey to divert the attention of their peoples and their streets away from their corrupt regimes and hopeless governments. We have to counter this by exposing their weaknesses. And of course each country has its own problems so there is no “fix fits all” in our treatment of our future relations with them. For the sake of continuing to receive financial aid from the West at least Egypt and Jordan will heat up their cold peace with Israel. Others will follow which may leave isolated Syria to seek settlement.

Question
What about Jerusalem and Hebron ?
Answer
We separate Jerusalem from East Jerusalem and start to call it Al-Quds. Then again just hand over to the Palestinian Authority those parts which we are prepared to give up as last resort even before any negotiations. These must include the Mosque. Meantime we must literally while it is in our hand erect a wall, a battlement wall in the middle of the courtyard of the Mosque to protect the Kothel-Wall and the Jewish worshippers below. We must assert and declare our sovereignty of this battlement structure and the area on our side of it. This is possible today but will not be so later on. This time let us use the cards we hold. The world would understand us and accept our action in today’s atmosphere of terror and homicide bombers. They will not tolerate this action tomorrow in quieter times.
As for Hebron we declare now that once an arrangement can be made with the new State of Palestine to ensure the safety of the settlers as Israeli citizens living in Palestine as Foreign Residents Israel IDF will withdraw after an agreed period of say one or two years. Only a clear declaration now can diffuse the perilous situation of the settlers, avoid more slaughter, and gain the sympathy of the outside world.

Question
But the Palestinians or Yasser Arafat would not agree to play ball?
Answer
The principle of this scenario is to act unilaterally. Establish facts on the ground as our ultimate concessions and negotiate the details of a treaty with Palestine afterwards. An urgent action is needed while we have the support of the President and Congress. You never know what may happen tomorrow. Let us deploy our army to seal our borders and secure the lives of our people inside those borders instead of using it to demolish few buildings which will be better designed and rebuilt by Western money. And let us do that while discredited Yasser Arafat is there. We will be under far more pressure if say an articulate Saeb Erekat or a moderate replaces him. Let us concentrate on rebuilding our shattered economy. We must abandon the idea of reorganising the Palestine Authority. The dream that Palestinian police or security organ will defend our borders from suicide or rocket bombing is naïve to the point of tragic misunderstanding of the present mood in the “occupied” territories. We will never have security that way. The aftermath of Oslo and later on of Clinton should have taught us some lessons. Let the factions in the territories fight it out between themselves. Eventually they will settle down and they may very well settle down in a confederation with Jordan. While we are interfering we are preventing the progressive elements amongst them from gaining power. Let us keep out of it. In the new scenario they will need Israel. And those in the West who want to help them will need Israel’s goodwill as a neighbour for economic not political reasons. I believe that ultimately our best friends after the Americans will be the Palestinians themselves and certainly not Europe. It will dawn on the Palestinians that their best friend is their western neighbour. We shall both see Europe for what it is and what it is showing itself to be nowadays i.e. anti-Semitic and racist. In this respect at least we have something in common with the Arabs. Jews in Europe should make this common ground to be felt both by Europe and by the many Arabs living there. Let us get to the hearts of the Arabs through co-operation in this area and not through arming or organising the security arms of the new State. We must remember that the enemies of the people in all Arab countries are their own secret services and their armies. We do not want to be associated with them in the eyes of their people in the way for example we did in Iran and lost so much as a consequence. Let us not be the tool of Western interests. We are not even helping anybody that way certainly not our American friends.

Question
What about the refugees and their right of return?
Answer
This is the one question that we should be clear and adamant about. We have taken more Jewish refugees from Arab countries than Palestinian refugees left what today is Israel. We must make this clear and keep saying it. Whatever are the circumstances of refugee movements on both sides we have to deal with the outcome and not talk of reversing it. For the sake of the ultimate success of any future negotiation and the future survival of Israel we must declare that this is the one question which is out of the question. Anybody in Israel who is prepared to negotiate this subject must have his head examined.
There are some comfortable Jews outside Israel and more importantly there are Israeli Jews who believe Israel should become a secular country of its inhabitants. Let us not volunteer to be the first. Let us follow others may be in 25th century! when may be the Arab and Islamic countries and even Europe not excluding the U.K become secular or at least not identified with any religion. We have to remain the Jewish State that is the refuge of last resort of persecuted Jews. We must not allow Israel to be diluted further. Tolerant Israel yes, un-Jewish Israel no. We must stop being ashamed of our heritage and our identity. Therefore we must resist any further Jewish dilution.

Question
What about the problem of electoral reform and the stability of Israeli Governments i.e. no. 2 problem outlined in the referred discussion?
Answer
This is becoming even more urgent and our divided front vis-à-vis the outside world during Defensive Shield made a change absolutely imperative. The present coalition with its backbone of Shraron/Peres/Ben-Eliezer have 18 months to introduce the new system. It will be a case of historical criminal negligence committed against the Jewish people by Likud/Labour if they do nothing about it. This is a case of putting the country nay the Jewish future survival before party politics. Enough is enough. Our incessant division and political in fighting are exasperating our friends and making us the laughing stock of our enemies. We ask Yasser Arafat to reform his political structure. What about him asking us to do the same to make any peace enduring!? What shall we say to him if he simply ask us the startling question: what is the difference between SheikhYassin in Gaza and Chief Rabbi Ovadiah in Jerusalem!! The case for electoral reform may not sound that urgent or important when viewed against pressing daily dangers facing Israel. In fact it has as much relevance as any outside danger facing us. It is rotting our socio-political structure and driving our best talent away from the Kenesset and government. The new proposals will force future politicians to seek their support in the regions and amongst the people away from the chatty cafes of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

Question
What about the third problem highlighted in the synopsis i.e. that of our appalling public relations.
Answer
This is probably the saddest part. Here we are the people who produced the fathers of propaganda and P.R. namely Durkheim Freud and Bernays have failed abysmally in defending Israel’s case before and especially during Defensive Shield. Even now we have not recovered from all the faux pas we have stumbled in or failed to avoid. The only two persons who made any impact were Peres for substance and Nethanyahu for form. Unfortunately Peres was out of place in New York and Nethanyahu was out of place in Trafalgar Square! We could not even get the juxtaposition right! We really should spend time and resources in this area. May be we should find out who the Palestinians are employing and try to hire them! We need urgently to address this problem and highlight the points outlined in the discussion. Let us use the weapons of the Holocaust and the Arab cleansing of their Jews from their countries. We have paid so dearly for these two weapons and they are rusting away.

Question
Some may say that there seem to be so many contradictions and inconsistency in the above arguments i.e. We are enemies and friends of the Arabs. We are strong and we are weak. We want to keep what we can of the territories and we should give up most of it. Are we with Sharon/Ben-Eliezer or with Sarid/Beilin or worse are we the new defeatists?
Answer
We are none of the above. There is no inconsistency. There may be poor presentation of the argument. I concede that but we must be careful not to mix form and content. My point of departure is the future survival of Israel that I believe is synonymous with that of the Jewish People and Jewish heritage. Israel today is facing unprecedented danger. To overcome it we have to think with our heads not our hearts. We have to see the realities of our situation not the wishful thinking of our ambitions. The Palestinians have changed the rules of engagement and the world is unconcerned. They don’t need a huge army any more. They need few daring and punch drunk fanatics not necessarily to carry bombs that we may or may not intercept in time. Biological and chemical weapons can be easily carried in small tubes by beautiful and innocent looking teenagers. The world has not yet experienced this horror yet. Unfortunately innovations seem always to be tried on Israel first – aeroplane hijacking, suicidal bombing and tomorrow biological or chemical warfare. Our urgent response now must be two pronged: close the borders properly and seek an acceptable peace that can prepare the ground for neighbourly friendship. There is no alternative. And remember we have become an endangered species of 12 million squeezed between one thousand million Muslims and similar number of Christians. We cannot afford to play the number game with the Arabs when one suicide bomber kills tens and maims hundreds. This is a game too far.
This is a program based on hard and harsh realities not on ideals and aspirations.

Aharon Nathan, May 2002
http://www.aharonnathan.com/

Israel Arab Conflict (Three Problems in Israel)

2002-03-05T13:00:00.000Z

Solutions to Border Security, Political Stability and Negative Image

The daily news from Israel is getting more and more alarming. It is only natural that we Jews would react emotionally and angrily and try to search for a quick fix. However such quick fixes in the past proved to be short lived and made future permanent solutions more difficult. Successive Israeli Governments worked on the assumption that time was on their side. Recent development, from Oslo onwards, the opposite became true. The Arabs feel today that they have discovered the recipe for success i.e. guerrilla warfare coupled with propaganda onslaught on Western TV’s.

Since the 6-day war Israel has achieved wonders in building a strong economy, an up-to-date technology, an invincible army and above all a real haven in time of need for the Jewish People. Tragically these achievements are being eroded now day by day owing mainly to three dangers which are corroding the future survival and viability of a Jewish State. These are:

Problem No. 1: Security of Borders
In the heart of this problem of the security of Israel’s borders is the cancer of Gaza which sits on the geographical belly of Israel and together with Hebron forms an axis of evil which divides the country in two halves. The fate of the isolated settlements on the West Bank looks precarious and untenable. The heart of Israel becomes vulnerable to attacks by suicide bombers or long distant rockets. A rational solution to resolve these problems has to be perceived and seen by both sides to be logical and in their mutual interest. And above all it has to look to the outside world to be fair in the circumstances.

The solution lies in moving the Capital and therefore the centre of gravity of the new State of Palestine to the West Bank (Ramallah or East-Jerusalem) and endeavour to resettle the refugees living now in the Gaza Refugee Camps outside leaving a demilitarised Gaza with its original inhabitants. All this is to be part of the overall settlement with the Palestinians. And together with realistic arrangements for the Hebron enclave becoming a community of Palestinian Jews or Israeli Residents within and subject to the sovereignty of Palestine and with similar status for some of the existing Settlements will end up with reasonably defendable borders.

Problem No. 2: Reform of the Electoral System
The present electoral system of Israel based on pure proportional representation has over the years pulverised the Jewish population and prevented it from integrating its big Arab minority into the body politic causing the latter to be the fifth column that it is virtually today. More importantly it rendered a stable Government of the country almost impossible. Israeli Jews are nowadays divided culturally and politically. They are diametrically opposed to each other even in their attitudes to security and foreign policy matters. No wonder the Government itself is speaking in so many voices giving mixed messages to friend and foe. The Arabs are taking advantage of this situation and Europe exploits it for their regional interests while venting their pent-up anti-Semitic impulses in the bargain.

The Solution is a new electoral system based on a combined Proportional Representation and Constituency system, which is easy to operate and can be acceptable to the two big Parties:Likud and Labour. With Labour Peres and Likud Sharon co-operating in the present government it will be possible to advocate it. In fact it is an opportunity which may be lost unless introduced in this Kennesset ready for the next general election.

The proposed system is based on dividing the country into 120 constituencies that elect 120 members of the Kenesset. And in addition another 30 members are elected by adding the votes cast for the unsuccessful candidates and allocating them on a proportional basis amongst the political parties out of their pre-announced lists of their candidates in the constituencies. Details of this proposal can show that it is simple to operate and practical. This is a completely new and innovative system, which Israel can pioneer and it can be, adapted in other democratic countries e.g. the U.K. where a change of electoral system in the opposite direction is called for. This system can over time cause to integrate the Arabs of Israel into its political life.

Problem No. 3: Israel’s World Image
This is the poor almost pathetic way which Israel’s information organs are presenting and advancing Israel’s case throwing away the two main underlying raisons d’être for the very existence of Israel: i.e. the persecution of the Jews in Europe culminating in the Holocaust and the treatment of the Jews in the Arab countries and the ethnic cleansing by them to Israel. Not only the world has forgotten this because they don’t want to remember but also because we ourselves don’t remind them. So we are left with Israel the aggressor the dispossessing and inhumane. And not only Arabs say this today but almost the whole of Europe and worst of all many Jewish "intellectuals" both inside Israel and outside. Any TV viewer can contrast the articulate and vocal Palestinian spokesmen with the Israeli halting apologetic defensive and almost lost for words in their responses.

The Solution is an offensive on a large scale to take on Arab propaganda European hypocrisy and above all the emerging Jewish intellectualism trying to curry favour in the West disdaining their heritage following their counter-parts in Germany in the twenties and thirties who thought that Goethe and Beethoven could take care of Anti Semitism and Nazism. We should not be abashed or ashamed in reminding the world of what happened to necessitate the existence of Israel. In modern days of spin and emotional appeals we cannot afford in our responses to be the gentle the clinically pure the refined. All Nations know and certainly the Arabs have realised the potency of the propaganda war. Unfortunately for the Jewish People we don’t even need propaganda. We just need to tell historical truths without inhibition or fear. We are at war.
To the Arabs we say: You ethnically-cleansed your old Jewish communities who preceded you in your countries. Why can Arabs live in Israel but not one single Jew can even visit any part of Arabia Iraq Syria let alone contemplate living as a foreign resident even in Jordan or Egypt. The Arabs have succeeded in making their appalling ethnic and religious prejudices acceptable even to the most enlightened and tolerant segments of society in the West. It is shocking how these views are taken for granted. The world forgot or did not know that the number of Jewish refugees taken by Israel far exceeds the Palestinian refugees.

To Europe we say: Please don’t lecture us on morality and human behaviour. You have caused the emergence of Israel. And the best way to help is to try to be friends to both sides, not to sit in judgement on Israel. You cannot choose to be neutral. You were party to the problem. The world and not least the Jews living in security and comfort for the time being in Europe have to know that the Israelis cannot afford to let Israel to be a big Ghetto or a concentration camp waiting for a Final Solution. These are harsh words but they have to be said loud and clear otherwise we may have only ourselves to blame in 10/20 years time.

Aharon Nathan, June 2001
http://www.aharonnathan.com/

Representation in Democracy (Total Representation ‘TR’)

2001-10-01T11:44:00.000+01:00

A New Electoral System for Modern Times.
Total Representation (‘TR’) is based on the premise that every single vote cast in elections has to end up with some representation in parliament, whether directly or indirectly.

It avoids the most serious defect of the First-Past-the-Post System, under which votes cast for the successful candidate are represented in parliament, while all the rest of the votes i.e. those cast for the unsuccessful candidates (which may be more than 50 per cent of the total in some constituencies) are left unrepresented.
The Proportional Representation System “PR” on the other hand does allow representation to all votes cast and gives them equal weight, but it encourages small political parties and splinter groups, resulting in weak coalition governments, where factional rather than national interests take over.

‘TR’ offers a solution, by combining the positive elements of both systems, PR and first-past-the-post.

In order to implement ‘TR’, parliaments would have two classes of MPs who would be equal in every way save for the manner by which they were elected. One class would be the Constituency MPs (CMPs) who would be elected on a constituency, first-past-the-post basis, exactly as they are today in the UK. They would continue to fulfil their duties and obligations towards all their constituents, dealing with individual problems and grievances at meetings and surgeries. The other class, Party MPs (PMPs) would be elected by pooling all the votes cast for the unsuccessful candidates in the constituencies and dividing them proportionally among the parties, who would announce before the election the lists of all their constituency candidates in order of priority.

For ‘TR’ to succeed in its objective, the ratio between the number of Constituency MPs (CMPs) and the Party MPs (PMPs) is crucial. I believe this ratio should be around 80:20 (or 75:25) in favour of the CMPs. This numerical ratio ensures the strength of the CMPs in parliament and consequently a degree of government stability, backed by the majority party in parliament. And, just as important, it keeps the direct bond between individual MPs and their constituencies. The 20 per cent of PMPs on the other hand ensure the existence of a built-in opposition in parliament backed by representation, so that the voices of minority interests are heard speaking with authority on the floor of parliament.
This would be the case even if one party were to win all the constituencies: the majority party would secure 80 per cent of the seats, but that would still leave 20 per cent of the seats for the opposition parties. This built-in opposition, which lies at the heart of any democratic, open society, based on real representative democracy, should help to counter to some extent the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that John Stuart Mill warned against. Once this built-in opposition is safeguarded, the more the ratio is moved towards, say, 60:40 the more the system tilts towards PR with all its disadvantages.

It is important when talking about rights, freedoms and justice in an open society to bear in mind that all these concepts revolve around the idea of vibrant social dissent or opposition of one kind or another, whose existence is essential and whose legitimacy has to be recognized and respected by all sections of the community.

The concept of opposition in general, and political opposition in particular, is the kernel at the core of an ‘Open Society’. It is the door through which changes find their way to transform society. Its absence renders a society ‘closed’ and backward looking. Political structures therefore should contain such a kernel, institutionalized as an integral part of their structure. This kernel must have the freedom to grow or wither away within its wider social context. This is what the ‘Open Society’ is about. And yet this does not mean automatically that ‘opposition’ is there merely as a permanent obstacle to the way the majority of a community wants to govern itself. Permanent representation for the opposition must be, and traditionally has been in the UK, at the heart of representative democracy in order to fulfil its function. Hence the concept of ‘Her Majesty’s Opposition’ in the Westminster parliament, which to outsiders looks like a quaint, contradictory expression of British eccentricity, is in fact an essential ingredient of the UK’s tolerant constitutional arrangement. We should therefore not visualize the concepts of majority and minority as two inherently static, adversarial sections of the political structure. Rather we should see them as parts of the same community, stimulating each other in a permanent ebb and flow of movement and change.

How ‘TR’ Works?

To implement ‘TR’, the country would be divided into electoral constituencies, as is the case in the UK today. Candidates would be fielded within the constituencies either as party nominees or as independents. The votes cast for the successful first-past-the-post candidates would gain their representation through the newly elected CMPs. The votes cast for all the unsuccessful candidates in all the constituencies would be pooled together and distributed proportionally among the unsuccessful candidates to elect the PMPs of the various Parties (Lists) that have fielded or sponsored them as candidates in the constituencies in the first place. Therefore all MPs (CMPs and PMPs) would have started as candidates in the constituencies whether sponsored by national parties or by independent groups.
This is a crucial element of ‘TR’. Unlike pure PR (Proportional Representation), in ‘TR’ the bond between the constituency voters and their chosen candidates are preserved and would probably survive even when a candidate failed to secure a CMP seat. Such unsuccessful constituency candidates would be heartened by the knowledge that they might end up as PMPs, if not in that very general election then in a future one. So ‘TR’ would encourage high calibre candidates to offer themselves in what today are considered un-winnable constituencies.

The merits of ‘TR’ are clear: the system is simple to operate and easy to understand. Voters continue to vote for a single candidate in their local constituency. But, most importantly, ‘TR’ modifies the first-past-the-post element of the constituency system with its failed candidates and wasted votes that have contributed to the apathy among UK voters.

‘TR’ as outlined above can be adapted and modified for any democracy but especially for emerging democracies or old democracies with changed circumstances. In fact, when examined closely it is a system which can be applied in any country and to any democracy. It is a ‘fits all’ system.

I have written separately brief proposals on the practical applications of ‘TR’ to the prevailing political circumstances in the UK (especially with regard to the House of Lords) and Israel (with regard to its parliament, the Knesset). These are the two countries I know well and whose political developments I have been watching closely for half a century. It is especially interesting to examine these two applications, as they would be approaching ‘TR’ from opposite directions – the UK moving from constituency-based, First-Past-the-Post System to ‘TR’ and Israel from Proportional Representation “PR” to ‘TR’.

Aharon Nathan, October 2001
http://www.aharonnathan.com/

Israel Arab Conflict (Peace Objectives)

2001-06-01T11:40:00.000+01:00

Peace - Objectives and the means to achieve them.

1. Time to think the unthinkable and come up with a bold approach based on fundamentals and not on preconceived prejudices and entrenched positions.

2. Unlike Christian or Muslim countries Israel can not be treated in isolation from the Jewish people worldwide. After what happened in Europe, Jews believe that defeat of Israel means annihilation. Israel is all the Jewish People’s refuge of last resort.

3. Lasting Peace is not a matter of goodwill. It lasts only if it is based on absence of potential future conflicts on the ground.

4. Only maximum defensible real SEPARATION of Israel and Palestine on the ground will work. Last 8 months killings and the recent outrages make separation mandatory.

5. GAZA is the core of the problem. Its population has to be reduced to its original inhabitants to be a viable entity. Its refugees have to be resettled in the West Bank, in Arab Countries including sparsely populated labour hungry Gulf and in Continental Europe. Otherwise it will always be a pressure cooker waiting to explode.

6. Jerusalem has to be divided into Jerusalem Capital of Israel and Al - Quds Capital of New Palestine - Twin Cities with clear SEPARATION between the two. Without this no peace will survive.

7. Arab inhabitants in Jerusalem (those who were annexed after 6 Day War) should revert to Palestine citizenship but can live as residents in Jerusalem if their residence falls within Israeli Jerusalem.

8. Likewise Jews who choose to stay in Al - Quds can retain their Israeli citizenship but continue to live as residents in Palestine subject to its laws after a period of protection by Israel.

9. Similar status should apply (after a period of protection by Israel army) to all Israelis who choose to stay in New Palestine. This includes the Jewish enclave in Hebron. The same arrangement should be accorded to any Jewish settlement which falls within the borders of Palestine.

10. Media/TV wars are nowadays taking precedence to Diplomacy and conventional wars. Israel is failing to use its many cards and moral weapons in this field to the dismay and utter frustration of its friends in the World.

11. Above suggested solutions lead to stability on the ground and are to the mutual benefit and future advantage of Israel, Palestine the Middle East and beyond. They have to be portrayed and CAN BE portrayed with sincerity and conviction as such.

12. Yasser Arafat is not in control. Hamas has to be brought directly into any negotiation for an enduring settlement. If either or both do not accept this scheme Israel should unilaterally implement it.

Aharon Nathan, June 2001
http://www.aharonnathan.com/

About Aharon Nathan

2001-05-31T21:07:00.002+01:00

Aharon Nathan was born in Iraq in 1931 and moved to Israel in 1949. In 1953 he was appointed Senior Assistant Advisor both under Prime Ministers, Ben Gurion and Moshe Sharett. In that capacity he was secretary to the standing committee of the security services in the Arab sector under the chairmanship of the Chief Advisor Shmuel Divon.

In 1955 he was appointed by Ben Gurion to the Yohanan Rattner’s Commission on Military Government which laid the basis of future administrations of Arab areas in Israel, and post 1967, in the occupied territories. In 1956 he was Secretary to Judge Azulai’s fact finding Commission on Kafr Qasim which drew the distinction between lawful and unlawful orders for future engagement rules of the Israel Defence Forces.

In the Suez War (1956) he was Deputy Military Governor (to Brig. Mati Peled). He set up and headed the first civil administration in the Gaza Strip. In the 60's he was in charge of integrating the Arab workers as full members of the Histadrut Trade Union. In the 6-Day War (1967) he served in the Golan Heights. In 1970 he left the civil service to pursue a career in business and travelled extensively in the Far East and East Europe. In 2005 he was appointed by the President of Israel to the Commission to examine the government and governance of the country. At the same time he joined the board of governors of CECI (the Centre of the Empowerment of the Citizens in Israel) He holds degrees from the Hebrew University and Oxford.