A Tale of Three Israeli Reports
SALPETER, ELIAHU
SHAPING THE FUTURE A Tale of Three Israeli Reports BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv Most of the dispatches from Israel appearing around the world are related to some aspect of the perennial Middle...
...An angry Wald then quit the Army (he is now a colonel in the reserves) and turned to the press...
...Nevertheless, the newspaper and television accounts of the controversy compelled Defense Minister Yitzchak Rabin (himself the Chief of Staff during the brilliant 1967 Six Day War) to instruct the Army to take a new look at the Wald Report and include whatever practical suggestions it contains in the General Staffs long-range planning...
...Slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) the price of the shares rose, until it went far beyond their real value and the banks could no longer afford to continue the operation...
...At that time the shares of the four biggest banks—Bank Leumi, Israel Discount Bank, Bank Hapoalim, and Bank Mizrachi—were considered the country's bluest chips and most pension funds had heavy investments in them...
...The second document that made a lot of headlines was the Wald Report...
...Itwas, thus, not simply conventional military thinking that obliged Israel to rely more and more on sheer fire power, and less on imaginative strikes involving speed...
...Indeed, the few specific reactions to his demographic projections have been quite predictable...
...Bacchi found that by the turn of the century the Arabs will represent 43 per cent of the total inhabitants...
...Some 20,000 abortions are performed among Jewish women each year, Burg claimed...
...The Attorney General (who functions independently of the Cabinet) meanwhile urged the government to set up a commission of inquiry into the mess...
...It also declared that banks should be forbidden to manage mutual funds or to engage in brokerage activities on the stock exchange...
...Add intermarriage to all this, Bacchi said, and you have the Jewish population in the diaspora sliding from 9.5 million today to 8 million by the end of the century, and to 6 million within 40 years...
...Leaving aside how long it will take bef ore they are a maj or-ity, such a huge minority has enormous political implications...
...Those to the Left say Israel must get rid of the occupied territories, and fast...
...The general response to this dilemma depends on the political persuasion of the respondent...
...It defeated quantitatively preponderant Arab forces by utilizing its qualitative superiority to execute fast, in-depth penetrations that threw the enemy off balance and brought quick victory...
...This warned about the consequences of low and declining birth rates among the Jewish population both in Israel and in the diaspora...
...others have been criticized as unenforceable under present conditions.The tug of war over what can and cannot be done will continue for some time...
...Colonel Emmanuel Wald, a systems analyst, was assigned by the Chief of Staff to review the performance of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the fighting in Lebanon...
...There is, however, no easy answer to what some commentators agree is the basic problem of Israel's military strategy...
...To protect those funds from huge losses , as well as to prevent the total collapse of the banks, the government undertook to guarantee the pre-crash value of their shares if holders converted them to long-term bonds...
...Despite a drop in the number of children Arab women are having, their fertility exceeds that of Jewish women and Jewish immigration only slightly exceeds Jewish emigration, so that the Arabs are destined to be an ever larger minority...
...Several of the recommendations were implemented...
...Bacchi predicted that given the present birth rate of 2.8 per thousand for the Jews of Israel (including East Jerusalem), by the end of the century Arabs will constitute 22 per cent of the population, compared to 17 per cent in 1986...
...Aware of what might be found, the government procrastinated...
...Rabbi Yitzchak Peretz, Minister of Interior and head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, denounced missionary activities and expressed opposition to organized meetings between Arab and Jewish students (sponsored by the Ministry of Education) because in his opinion, they promote mixed marriages...
...Over the first 20 years of the Jewish State's existence, including the 1967 War, the Israeli Army was the "quick fox...
...It may be indicative of an almost fatalistic approach to the entire problem that while there is a continuing lively debate in the press and among politicians over the Beiski Report and the Wald Report, there is practically no discussion—let alone heated debate—about the implications of Bacchi's study...
...Moreover, he put the responsibility squarely on the senior officers corps, accusing it of insufficient professionalism...
...Still, the public debate aroused by the Wald Report has pinpointed an issue that will have crucial influence on Israeli military (and possibly political) thinking in the future...
...Three recent headline-grabbers illustrate the point...
...He went way beyond what was expected of him, producing a 700-page study that charged the IDF with having failed to assimilate the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur War or the 1982 Lebanon War...
...Then the crash occurred...
...Israel will very soon face (some politicians say it is already facing) a choice between losing its democratic character by denying equal rights to half of the population under its control, or becoming a binational state and shortly afterward an Arab State with a large Jewish minority...
...After months of hearings, it issued a 650-page report confirming what every banker, journalist and broker has known for years: The banks had been illegally boosting the price of their own stock by buying it up on the open market whenever there was a big volume of sales by the public...
...Prime Minister Shimon Peres, carefully avoiding the potential political powder keg, urged every Jewish family to have at least four children...
...But the acquisition of enormous amounts of sophisticated armaments and electronic gear by the Arabs has made such tactics increasingly difficult to execute, especially since the battlefields have become saturated by enemy warning systems and fire power...
...In addition, severe financial restraints have limited Israel's ability to acquire necessary quantities of counterbalancing armaments...
...Finally, the Knesset's Oversight Committee stepped in and appointed a commission headed by Supreme Court Judge Moshe Beiski...
...The third provocative report that hit the front pages recently actually was a study by Israel's most respected veteran statistician, Roberto Bacchi...
...Communications Minister and Shi-nui Party Leader Amnon Rubinstein stressed the importance of negotiating a compromise settlement with the Arabs to relieve Israel of the burden of governing hundreds of thousands of Arabs...
...This, of course, was not greeted with great enthusiasm by the Chief of Staff and other top brass, who quietly put the report on ice...
...a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...
...Demographic prospects are even bleaker for diaspora Jews, whose birth rate is only 1.5 per family, which is below replacement...
...Here the subject shares the top of front pages with domestic stories that receive scant attention abroad...
...One was the Beiski Report on the stock market crash of more than two years ago...
...In describing the whole process the Beiski Commission pointed out two important facts: first, that the heads of the banks were personally responsible for the operation, and second, that the government, at least through the Bank of Israel (the equivalent here of the Federal Reserve), was fully cognizant of what was going on...
...The vast majority seized the opportunity and the State was suddenly saddled with an extra $7 billion of domestic public debt...
...Perhaps not surprisingly, the Jewish birth rate is lowest in the Soviet Union...
...Eli ahu Salpeter...
...No one doubts, though, that in the long run the Beiski Commission's findings will have a profound and far reaching effect on the financial life of the country...
...Most military writers agree that his findings are greatly exaggerated...
...But occasionally these touch upon events that will affect the shape of life in this country for years to come...
...Consequently, among other things, it called for the presidents of the four banks and the president of the Bank of Israel to resign within 30 days, and further said they should be barred from managerial banking posts in the future...
...Of more immediate significance are the figures for the entire population under Israel's control—that is, counting the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...
...SHAPING THE FUTURE A Tale of Three Israeli Reports BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv Most of the dispatches from Israel appearing around the world are related to some aspect of the perennial Middle East crisis...
...Religious Affairs Minister Yosef Burg, head of the moderate National Religious Party, spoke out against what he claimed was the ease of obtaining abortions...
...Those to the Right say there is really no choice: The occupied territories cannot be returned because no Arab country besides Egypt is willing to make peace under terms that would guarantee Israel's security...
Vol. 69 • June 1986 • No. 9
