fugitive peace

A small but important lesson about opinion polls.

Three weeks ago Ha’aretz’s pollster, Camil Fuchs, published a poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour holding talks with Hamas in order to get a ceasefire and release Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier. Today the Tami Steinmetz Centre has issued the latest monthly Peace Index. It says that only 25% of Israelis and just 17% of Israeli Jews favour negotiating with Hamas.

Puzzled? So was I. I reported on the Ha’aretz poll a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Israeli opinion is shifting towards talks with Hamas. So I called Ephraim Yaar of the Steinmetz Centre for an explanation, and it turns out to be simple.

The Ha’aretz poll asked people if they supported talks with Hamas: yes or no. The Steinmetz poll asked them the best way for Israel to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza: (1) talks with Hamas; (2) a relatively restrained military response (though Israel’s idea of “restrained”, I should point out, still means several Palestinians killed every week); (3) a bigger but still limited response (ie, like the ground incursion that killed 110 people or so earlier this month); (4) a massive ground operation to reoccupy Gaza; (5) another option of your choice; (6) don’t know.

When you put the question like this, more Israeli Jews support reoccupying Gaza than talking to Hamas (see the table below).

So which poll is “right”? What does the Israeli public actually think about talks with Hamas?

I asked Fuchs. “When you include other options, you’re cognitively giving legitimacy to them,” he says. “What you’re doing is hinting to the person that there are other people who prefer these options.” When there’s only one option on the table, on the other hand, you’re asking them to choose between doing that and doing nothing.

In short, what the two polls taken together say is that if the people could run the government, and had a range of options for dealing with Gaza, more of them would go with a military option. However, if the government says it’s going to talk to Hamas, 64% of the public would support it (though Fuchs thinks the number now would be a little lower than three weeks ago).

Question 1: Should Israel conduct talks with Hamas towards a ceasefire and the release of Gilad Shalit?

Source: Ha’aretz/Dialog

Question 2: What is the best way for Israel to prevent rocket fire on the south?

Source: Tami Steinmetz Centre

I feel sorry for the poor Winograd commission that investigated the second Lebanon war. They’re nice, serious, committed people who tried to give Israel the definitive, all-encompassing recipe for how to make sure it doesn’t screw up a war ever again. It took them:

• 16 months
• Over 270 witnesses and interviewees
  
• 629 pages, including appendices
• 21 pages for the table of contents alone
• 223 instances of the word “fail”, “failure”, “failed” etc
• 286 instances of the word “flaw” or “flawed”
• 14 key recommendations for reform of the army and executive branch

But the press and public are calling the report a sell-out. Why? Because the only thing they want to know is: whose fault was it that so many soldiers died in Lebanon for nothing? Or more specifically, will the person whose fault everyone believes it was, Ehud Olmert, now at last quit? And since he has no intention of doing so, it’s Winograd’s fault for not giving him the push.

There is a Russian saying: kto vinovat i shto dyelat’? — “Who is to blame and what is to be done?” Israelis, being impatient people, only want to know who’s to blame; to hell with what’s to be done, because in a few months time the government will change again and nobody will do it anyway. Which is why, as I wrote in this week’s piece on it, the Winograd report will probably sink into obscurity like all its worthy predecessors.

The mystery about Israel’s air strike against Syria on September 6th, which I wrote about in the current issue, continues to deepen. The story taking hold is that Israel hit material or equipment for nuclear weapons supplied by North Korea. But something still smells fishy.

For a start, the way this story has emerged in public is odd in the extreme. Well-connected Israeli journalists hinted from very early on that they knew what was going on but couldn’t say, a sign that censorship was in effect. (That is censored too, but it has become so obvious that they are now saying it openly.) All last week it was the American media - CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times - which dripped out the story, mainly with off-the-record comments from American officials.

But today it’s Britain’s Sunday Times which carries it forward, with a lot of enticing details from unnamed Israeli sources about how an Israeli commando unit on the ground guided the bombers; how the Mossad found “evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea”; how Israel diverted a spy satellite from Iran to Syria; and, interestingly, how the mysterious rise in Israel-Syria sabre-rattling a few weeks ago - which I wrote about in my very first post - was actually the result of Israel’s sending more troops to the Golan “in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.”

So, first question: why the Sunday Times? Letting details of the attack leak via Washington last week may have been a way to prevent a flare-up between Israel and Syria or other Arab states. But if Israeli officials have decided that it’s now safe to break silence, why not in the Israeli press?

Second question: is it true? Uzi Mahnaimi, the Sunday Times’s man in Tel Aviv, is a former Mossad man (correction: served in military intelligence) known for having excellent security sources. But as I’ve discussed before, journalists in that position are also susceptible to being fed misinformation and printing it, knowingly or otherwise.

The operational details he reveals are probably accurate. The nukes claim, which seems to have been fed both to Uzi and to his Washington colleague, is more questionable. Newsweek today reports that, yes, Israel showed satellite photographs of northern Syria to officials in Washington, suggesting that they revealed a nuclear project; but that other anonymous US officials “say they’ve seen no credible evidence yet of nuclear ties between North Korea and Syria”.

So the alternative view going around is that this news cycle is all part of a big conspiracy by Washington hardliners - with ex-UN ambassador John Bolton at the fore - and Israel to push the Iran-Syria-North Korea connection, with the media gullibly playing along.

Thus, the Sunday Times cites Bolton saying that “I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” but Newsweek gets him to admit that he “never saw proof North Korea was sharing nuclear technology with Syria.” Joshua Landis, who has also clipped several other useful pieces on this issue, lists reasons to think that Bolton is “shooting from the hip”, and Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy’s blog argues that quotes Joseph Cirincione saying that

If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

I’m suspending judgement. Launching an air strike at Syria, especially if there were indeed ground commandos, was risky. It’s hard to imagine Israel would have done it just to lend credibility to a neocon claim about nukes or prevent US-Syria dialogue (if anything, Washington is even more sceptical of Syria’s intentions than Jerusalem is). An alternative hypothesis is that Israel really believed that Syria might have the hot stuff, but only because the neocons led Israel by the nose. But I still can’t figure out why keep the Israeli media muzzled, unless it’s just that they’re less likely than the US press to buy into the spin. At any rate, stay sceptical. Not everything is clear yet.

Human Rights Watch is making no friends these days. Last week it had to scrap the Beirut launch of its report accusing Hizbullah leaders of possible war crimes over last summer’s Lebanon war, after Hizbullah goons threatened to break up the event. Today HRW published the sister report about why Israel killed so many Lebanese civilians. It makes chilling reading. Besides listing each one of the 1109 confirmed victims (mostly civilian) by name, it investigates 97 incidents in painstaking detail, analysing who died, how, and whether they were collateral casualties of a legitimate action under the laws of war, or - more often - victims of an attack that should never have been carried out.

The report’s bottom line: Israel’s claim that most civilians died because Hizbullah fighters were hiding and fighting in their midst is true only to a limited extent. Instead, says HRW, Israel bombed too widely and indiscriminately (including its infamous use of cluster bombs); assumed that all civilians had left their villages after it warned them to; and - most troubling for Israel itself - had to rely on inadequate and old intelligence. After the first few days of aerial bombing it ran out of known targets, and had to identify new ones to keep the campaign going. This led to mistakes such as bombing the civil defence offices in Tyre (killing 14 innocents) in the belief that they were the local Hizbullah headquarters.

There is, however, a moment of light relief in the HRW researchers’ investigation of Israel’s most famous and surreal mistake, when its troops raided a neighbourhood in Baalbek:

The object of the raid remains unclear. However, it appears that the Israeli commandos were looking for someone named Hassan Nasrallah, the same name as the secretary-general of Hezbollah. But the Hassan Nasrallah they found was a 54-year-old local shopkeeper who was not related to the leader of Hezbollah. As soon as they entered the home, they asked the shopkeeper in broken Arabic, “Are you Hassan Nasrallah?”

They took him, his son and three other men back to Israel, where

…Israeli officials repeatedly interrogated the men and accused them of being Hezbollah members. They repeatedly accused Hassan Deeb Nasrallah’s son, Bilal Nasrallah, of being the son of the Hezbollah Secretary-General, even though his father was with him. [my emphasis]

After three weeks Israel, with no official apology or explanation, returned the men to Lebanon. There, a HRW researcher tells me, they promptly came under suspicion of having been turned into Israeli spies, and had to endure a grilling from Lebanese military intelligence. Hizbullah’s reaction is not recorded.

This week’s story is about the likelihood of an Israeli war with Syria, and in part about the role of the media in hyping it up. Israel has some terrific journalists, whose reporting is cynical, spin-conscious and explicit about political agendas in a way that is rare in many other countries. Yet when it comes to what they hear from intelligence sources, quite a few are happy to sprinkle it liberally into their stories without making it clear where it comes from, let alone analysing their sources’ motives.

Intelligence sources are always dubious: spies know that journalists find anything with a whiff of secrecy very tempting, and what they tell you is, by its nature (and on purpose), very hard to check. There’s been a lot in the Israeli media over the past months about what they’re really thinking in Damascus and Teheran–stories like this and this, where it is hard to see how the information can have come from anywhere but the Israeli security establishment. I don’t think the establishment’s agenda is to provoke a war, but rather to cover its backside against accusations that it didn’t foresee one. But as the rash of pronouncements about “we don’t want a war and nor do they” this week showed, it realised that the media spin had started to take on a life of its own.