Is Israel a good counter-terrorism role model for the US? This question has been on my mind ever since the morning of September 12, 2001, when professors in two consecutive lecture classes told us first-year law students that we needn’t worry, that they had been talking to friends in Israel, friends who knew just what we were going through because they deal with terrorism all the time, and that we’d get through it just like they did, whether with tighter airport security or with other measures. We’d get through this just like the Israelis do every day. This was intended as a soothing reassurance, and taken as such by many students.
I found it disturbing. Do we really need to start living like Israelis? In constant tension with neighboring countries, in a state of permanent national emergency, under constant threat of terrorist attack? Do we really want to be the defiant practitioner of many policies—assassination and preventive detention for instance—that most of our peer nations profess to abhor? (We americanos used to officially abhor them too in that sepia-toned decade before 9-11.) Beefed-up airport security has indeed come to pass, a farce and a headache. Overall, not my idea of the good life.
Last week I went back to NYU for a short conference, “Democracies and National Security: The American and Israeli Experiences,” sponsored by NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies and an Israeli outfit called the Israel Democracy Institute.
The panel led off promisingly with Gabriella Blum, a former IDF lawyer now at Harvard Law, who told us that the similarity between the US and Israel is in fact a little too intuitive, and laid out the many differences. Brava.
Have we then turned to Israel for guidance a little too reflexively, a little thoughtlessly? If the similarity of our circumstances really is overdrawn, is Israel then the best source of counter-terrorist guidance for the US? I asked the panelists if we necessarily had more to learn from the Israeli experience than from the United Kingdom, Colombia or Italy, all liberal democracies which have also dealt with sustained threats from terrorists and/or armed militants over the past decades. None of these other countries is an exact parallel to our own situation, and none has met total success in balancing national security with civil liberties and other concerns. And the same, of course, could be said of Israel.
The response to my question was pretty much what I expected. Gabby Blum herself quickly answered that no, the European examples are not applicable to the US because their terrorism is “home-grown.” (Really, the IRA, home-grown? More than Hamas, which Israel used to bankroll? Not a very satisfying answer.) Yuval Shany, Hersh Lauterpacht Professor of International Law at the Hebrew University, assured me that Israel and the US were, alas, locked into their own little support group of two. This he said sighingly, as if the US and Israel were two star-crossed lovers in a cold and misunderstanding world.
The outlook of so many American national security intellectuals was typified by panelist Rick Pildes, a justly-esteemed professor at NYU Law. Pildes is a real asset to NYU Law: a frequently brilliant scholar on election law and constitutional law, always a cogent talking head, a popular lecturer and a co-director of the school’s Center for Law and Security.
Pildes seemed almost to salivate at the prospect of adopting a counter-terror legal system like Israel’s, “more sophisticated, less binary,” than the American approach. He spoke enviously of Israel’s “third way” that is neither a war paradigm, nor a criminal justice paradigm, and wondered aloud if the US might adopt judicially-ordered preventive detention, just like Israel has. No doubt about it, Israel does have a more complex, developed set of laws in its counter-terrorism toolkit—but is this really a virtue? Shany said that the Israeli legal system had “benefited” from a gradual and constant deterioration of the nation’s security, and so has developed more nuanced legal tools to prevent terror attacks. Ah wonderful, a silver lining for lawyers.
Of course we lawyers do have a built-in bias in favor of law itself: a solution to any problem that involves more law we tend to like, and the more complex and nuanced the law--the more we like it! (This goes triple for law professors.) Solutions that are non-legal—for instance political, diplomatic, social, military-- tend not to cross our minds. Not our brief, can’t help you. So the counter-terrorist solutions boosted by Pildes and speaker Amos Guiora (another former IDF lawyer now teaching law at University of Utah) have all revolved around fancy new legal structures, like hybrid special courts and subtle continuums from criminal to terrorist, all giving more power to the judges and courts. Yes, more law!
Not surprisingly, the simple option of withdrawing our military from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq or cutting off our lavish military and diplomatic support to Israel was not even mentioned as a way to undercut anti-American terrorists, despite this course of action’s essential morality, prudence and Gordian efficiency. Equally unsurprising, neither was the possibility of Israel withdrawing behind its ‘67 borders, uprooting its illegal colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and/or giving full citizenship rights to all Palestinians. Too crude, too unsubtle? Too “unrealistic”?
George Fletcher of Colombia Law, to his credit, did at least bring a glimmer of peripheral vision as he pondered the immense costs of Bagram and Guantánamo, both in treasure and soft power. But his contention that the boring old US Constitution is perfectly up to the task of regulating our many counter-terrorist policies was speedily pooh-poohed by Pildes. “To say that the Constitution is enough for this situation is to blank out reality!”
I’m not so sure. Since 9-11, of course, the US has performed many extra-Constitutional and extra-legal maneuvers in the name of emergency, from torture to indefinite detention at Gitmo and Bagram to the conquest of Iraq itself. To claim that any of these measures has contributed one iota to national security rather than undermined it is, it seems to me, to blank out reality. It is 2010, not 2003; this is no longer a minority opinion.
Throughout the conference, the overall strategic failure of Israel’s quest for national security went all but unmentioned, as did the overall failure of America’s spastic and self-defeating responses to 9-11. (Perhaps a support group is not the place to probe such wounds.) Shany did alight on the disturbing “spillover” of counter-terrorist practices into the policing of ordinary Israelis, where gag orders and incommunicado detention are mushrooming. Is this something we want to emulate in the United States? Have we already taken this path?
Nine years and one conference later, I remain unconvinced that Israel is a good counter-terrorist role model for the United States. What Israel does offer us seems to lie much more in the way of object lessons than sane, effective security policies. No matter. Since 9-11, our own permanent emergency has corroded civil liberties, spawned pullulating Islamophobia and produced illiberal detention policies and Presidentially ordered assassinations, of US citizens even. This is not unlike the Israeli way—and is it really working out for them? By now our heads should have cooled off enough to allow us to look around the world and see what works and what doesn’t in counter-terrorism, never ignoring the big strategic picture as this conference resolutely did. Then again I’m not sure whether the function of the conference was to stimulate real thinking about counter-terrorism or to cement even closer ties between the US and Israel. The two may well be mutually exclusive.
Madar is a lawyer in NY who writes for Le Monde diplo, the London Review of Books, and The American Conservative. Six months back we posted Madar's report on the American Society for International Law's annual conference and their panel on the Goldstone Report, here.
Retaliatory terrorism is an inevitable consequence US/Israel ongoing military aggression and human rights abuses (Gaza, Iraq, AfPak, etc). Since the US/Israeli elites do not intend to discontinue their militaristic ways, they need to defend themselves from retaliation. Additionally, these harsh “security” measures are a dual use means of imposing overt social control and squelching protest over the inevitable consequences of a neoliberal class war. The Third World model of great wealth and great poverty, with massive repression is now being implemented in the First World. It is not difficult to see which side of the divide these NYU/Israeli lawyers see themselves on.
This is the way in which Israel is a US “ally” – leading the dance down the road to facsism, serving as a model of corruption.
Israel at least has the excuse of never having been a free country. Soon Americans won’t even remember what that used to mean.
The power of nightmares. This is how oligarchies manipulate the public. Israel has been doing since its inception – no wonder they were so pleased about 9/11, the perfect chance to persuade the American public that we are at ‘war’ with the Muslim world, thus justifying every warmongering, fascist attack on defenceless populations. Looking at Israel as an example is perfect if you want to engender a siege mentality, a mass hysteria which justifies a militaristic attitude to every problem, a paranoic insecure mindset whose instinct is to attack and smear people who disagree. It is profoundly anti-democratic, isolationist and ignorant of the riches the world and its peoples have to offer, if we share it with them.
RE: “…professors in two consecutive lecture classes told us first-year law students that we needn’t worry, that they had been talking to friends in Israel…and that we’d get through it just like they did…” – Chase Madar
SEE: Murdoch blames left wing for ‘most virulent strains’ of anti-Semitism ~ By Daniel Tencer, Raw Story, 10/15/10
• Donations to GOP, US Chamber of Commerce ‘in the interest of the country,’ Murdoch asserts (excerpts) Accepting an award from the Anti-Defamation League, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch criticized left wing groups and activists for what he said was a growing trend towards anti-Semitism.
“Today it seems that the most virulent strains [of anti-Semitism] come from the left,” Murdoch told an audience in New York Wednesday.
Murdoch said US college campuses and the “highest and lowest reaches” of European society are becoming infused with anti-Semitism, and “often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel.”
Murdoch said that much of the criticism directed at Israel’s actions is “part of an ongoing war against the Jews.”
He said this war has passed through three phases, with all-out war against Israel by Arab states being replaced by terrorism, and terrorism now being replaced by a campaign to “de-legitimize” the state of Israel…
…Under attack from some News Corp. shareholders over the Fox News parent company’s donations to the Republican Governors’ Association and the US Chamber of Commerce of $1 million each, Murdoch told shareholders at a meeting Thursday that the donations were “in the interest of our shareholders and the country.”… ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to rawstory.com
RE: “…professors in two consecutive lecture classes told us first-year law students that we needn’t worry, that they had been talking to friends in Israel…and that we’d get through it just like they did…” – Chase Madar
SEE: Murdoch blames left wing for ‘most virulent strains’ of anti-Semitism ~ By Daniel Tencer, Raw Story, 10/15/10
• Donations to GOP, US Chamber of Commerce ‘in the interest of the country,’ Murdoch asserts
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to rawstory.com
Anti-Zionist Jewish-Americans should get together online for the purpose of delivering an ultimatum to Jewish-Israelis – that if they go ahead with this racist loyalty oath, we’ll write them off as Jews, not in some holy book, but where it counts, in our hearts and minds. .
oops, meant as a comment to David Samel’s “The New Threat To Israel’s Palestinian Students”
I attended this presentation by Michael Chertoff last year.
link to create.usc.edu
He spouted a lot of boiler plate about how meticulously DHS walks the fine line between national security and Constitutional rights. I asked about the numerous instances of people erroneously placed on the DHS no-fly list and how could he pretend to be confident of DHS’s ability to avoid trampling on the civil rights of US citizens in light of this reality.
He flippantly brushed off the question by saying it’s not as many names as people think, and that in these perilous times, it is far more prudent to err on the side of caution, even if some people are “inconvenienced.”
I found him a reprehensible and prevaricating individual. I was particularly incensed by this fatuous meme in the lecture announcement -
His greatest successes have earned few headlines – because the important news is what didn’t happen.
Nonsense such as this could be used to excuse away virtually any government action. I got a taste of the US he was trying to bring about by the insane level of security that surrounded him and the fear memes that was meant to project.
The attitude of most people present I spoke with was “Please don’t create a police state on my account.” He was treated with far too much courtesy and deference than I felt he deserved.
Chertoff and Mukasey are prime examples of high level operatives with hidden agendas.
This is the guy claiming his tin hat repels dragons, because “No dragons have attacked me since I’ve been wearing it.”
Israel has an ally in American neo-conservatism, not American values.
Zionist instigation in the war on Iraq, the continued effort to ignite American strikes in its war against Iran, and their efforts to stir up Islamophobia and oppose Muslim rights in America, all attest to that.
when i first read this post yesterday it depressed me. i googled the taub center. it depressed me. i wondered how many people attend these things. it’s gruesome, just gruesome. why are we offering these people a platform to spread their filth in this country.