Israel’s Joint Arab List Won’t Send a Delegation to the Arab League, and That’s Good News

Mahmoud Abbas recently invited Knesset members from the Joint Arab List (JAL) to address a meeting of the Arab League. Evelyn Gordon explains the reason for, and the significance of, the JAL’s unprecedented decision not to attend:

[P]olls have shown for years that Israeli Arabs would like their MKs to focus on domestic problems like unemployment and crime rather than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But, until now, Arab MKs have blithely ignored their constituents’ preference, preferring to devote most of their time to condemning Israel’s handling of the conflict. . . .

[I]n contrast to the Palestinian conflict, bread-and-butter issues are ones on which Israel can and should provide reasonable answers to Israeli-Arab demands. Israel can’t withdraw from the West Bank and allow it to become a rocket-launching pad like Gaza, nor can it refuse to fight back when Palestinians attack it, even if war inevitably entails Palestinian civilian casualties. But it can approve master plans for Arab towns so that new housing can be legally built, set up industrial parks to provide employment opportunities in Arab communities, crack down on the rampant illegal weapons that contribute to high crime rates in these communities, and so forth. Indeed, all recent governments have invested heavily in trying to improve Arab educational and employment opportunities, and these efforts have already produced significant gains.

Clearly, much more remains to be done. But because these are issues on which the government can actually make progress toward satisfying its Arab citizens’ demands, they have the potential to draw Jews and Arabs together rather than driving them apart, as the Palestinian conflict does.

Read more at Evelyn Gordon

More about: Arab League, Israel & Zionism, Israeli Arabs, Israeli politics, Mahmoud Abbas

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF