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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - February 20, 2006

Q. ...recommendations to shorten mandatory IDF military service...? Q. ...recommendations to reduce migration to Israel by Palestinians intermarrying with Israeli Arabs?

Q. The IDF appears to be contemplating new high level recommendations to shorten military service. How does this correspond with the growing sense of military threat from Iran and the possible military challenges posed by Hamas' rise to power in Palestine?

A. The recommendations, which have been endorsed by both Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, would shorten compulsory service for men from three to two years by 2010, and move budgetary resources toward offering the incentive of graduated salaries to those who stay beyond two years and join the standing army. Women's service would be expanded to move more women into operational tasks currently restricted to men. This "small and smart" army would be adapted to the growing trend of reducing the amount of occupied territory under Israeli control, and presupposes additional withdrawals from the West Bank in coming years.

The recommendations stop well short of the demand voiced over the years by some military manpower planners to abandon compulsory service altogether in favor of a professional army, as in the US and the UK. They recognize and respect the IDF's ongoing roll as a "melting pot" for most of Israel's youth, immigrants as well as native-born Israelis. Indeed, the high level committee under former Finance Ministry Director General Avi Ben Bassat that formulated the recommendations, suggests the IDF become even more egalitarian than previously by phasing out programs that provide special, and shorter, service paths on a selective basis to yeshiva students, Nahal settlers and the like. Nor will the army continue to "loan" excess manpower to various government offices.

This reform in military service must be adopted by the next Knesset, after elections. Indeed, it appears that the timing of its publication by Mofaz has more to do with election politics (he is on the Kadima list, and wants to continue as defense minister in the next coalition) than IDF manpower considerations. Further, a worsening of the security situation due to events in Iran or to the ramifications of Hamas rule in Palestine could put the new plan on hold, as might a political reversal for Kadima that freezes additional disengagement initiatives.

One area of national security that is affected by manpower considerations but is ignored by the recommendations is the Israel Police, which badly requires reinforcements if it is to deal effectively with settler violence and rampant violent crime and corruption. The ratio of police to population in Israel is the lowest among western democracies. Currently the police enjoy the services of several thousand soldiers on loan from the IDF, but this is hardly a healthy exploitation of compulsory servicemen and women. Even if the IDF does not intend to withdraw such manpower loans, the police require additional serving personnel, meaning a larger budgetary allotment.


Q. Another new set of high level recommendations to the government of Israel dealing with manpower issues addresses legal and illegal immigration, and contemplates sharp reductions in migration to Israel by Palestinians intermarrying with Israeli Arabs. What is the rationale for such severe restrictions on human rights?

A. No less a champion of human rights than Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, former head of the Shinui Party and dean of the School of Law at the Interdisciplinary University, headed the committee that made these recommendations last week. In explaining them, Rubinstein focused on Israel's right to prevent immigration from political entities in a state of war with it, implicitly including the Gaza Strip (considered a separate political entity since Israel's withdrawal) and perhaps soon parts of the West Bank. His committee also suggested that immigrants from the PA or Arab countries (in almost all cases spouses of Israeli Arab citizens) be required to prove their loyalty to Israel both upon entry and thereafter, and that the government of Israel be authorized to establish immigration quotas for non-Jews from these and other countries (Jews will continue to immigrate under the Law of Return).

The recommendations, made at the initiative of outgoing Minister of Interior Ophir Pines (Labor), are intended to provide a framework for dealing with two migration phenomena that Israel has encountered in recent years, both of which are perceived as endangering the country's status as a Jewish and democratic state. One is intermarriage, usually by arranged unions between related families, between Israeli Arab citizens and Palestinians. In virtually all cases the couple requests to live in Israel, not Palestine. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Oslo process and the advent of the intifada in 2000, Israelis increasingly came to understand this phenomenon, particularly prevalent among the Negev Bedouin, as a semi-clandestine form of "return" of 1948 refugees, intended to undermine Israel's Jewish status from within.

The second phenomenon corresponds more with the "north-south" migration problems familiar to southern Europe and the American southwest. It involves not only Palestinians but Egyptians and Jordanians as well as "guest workers" from Turkey, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and even Central America, some of whom arrive with work visas but then remain illegally. All told, at its peak, before Israel created an "Immigration Police" force a few years ago, there were over 200,000 non-Palestinian illegal workers in Israel, and another 100,000 or so illegal Palestinians, most of whom entered Israel to find work but whose residence in the country took on a political significance.

Rubinstein's committee advocates abolishing the Immigration Police, which rounds up illegals, holds them under harsh conditions and eventually, after a court procedure, expels them. It also suggests a lenient attitude toward naturalizing children of illegal immigrants who are born in Israel, and proposes more humane conditions for legal and illegal guest workers. But it seeks to prevent wholesale naturalization of guest workers, which has the effect of encouraging more to come or to remain illegally. Basically, these recommendations are no different from those debated in other relatively prosperous countries with a large and problematic guest worker population.

The proposals regarding migration of Arabs to Israel (essentially Palestinians; the only non-Palestinian Arabs trying to enter tend to be Egyptians and Jordanians looking for work) are the most controversial. They are also the only recommendations to encounter serious opposition within Israel--from the Israeli Arab community and from some human rights advocates. They follow upon a temporary Interior Ministry regulation severely limiting immigration of Palestinian spouses that is currently under High Court review, and are paralleled by proposed legislation that is already before the Knesset that deals harshly with illegal residents even if they are married to Israeli citizens.

(Incidentally, a new study by an Israeli Arab sociologist, Prof. Aziz Khaider, published by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, argues that Israeli authorities deliberately exaggerate the size of the Israeli Arab community. With the exception of the Negev Bedouin, the study demonstrates, the Israeli Arab community's growth rate has dropped nearly to that of Israeli Jews. "Western" societal phenomena like a large percentage of unmarried career women up to age 35 now characterize Israeli Arab Muslims and Christians just as they do Jewish society. The study in effect seeks to counter the argument that Israel's Arab population, bolstered by Palestinians from the territories, threatens to expand to the point of neutralizing the Jewish nature of the country.)

Assuming the next Knesset enacts most or all of these recommendations and legislative initiatives, Israel's immigration laws for non-Jews will be more or less in line with those of most European countries as the latter, too, tighten their regulations. But Israel will almost certainly be judged differently on this issue, for two reasons. First, while it has always distinguished between Jews and non-Jews in its immigration laws, it will be abandoning some of its leniency with regard to the latter. Critics of Israel, some but not all motivated by anti-Semitism or simply a conviction that Judaism is a religion and not a people, will see an opportunity to attack. And secondly, while laws regarding naturalization of non-Israeli spouses will have to be applied across the board to non-Jewish Swedish, American and Thai spouses as well as Palestinians, the political ramifications of the legislation for Palestinian "return" (whether deliberate or due to a simple love match between an Israeli Arab and, say, a Gazan) and, accordingly, for the conflict as a whole, will not be lost on those who oppose the Israeli position.

At the end of the day, Israel's decision (by virtue of a basic law enacted some 15 years ago) to define itself as "Jewish and democratic" remains problematic. Most non-Jewish Israeli citizens reject it, as do many critics of Israel. But in the course of a few short years it has become the guiding "value" for the Israeli mainstream regarding two issues related to Arabs: Israel's rejection of the Palestinian demand that it recognize the right of return; and efforts to rationalize the status of Israeli Arabs at a time when the country remains caught up in a seemingly endless conflict with their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.