August 4, 2010

In the weeks since Israel’s lethally bungled raid on a boatload of protesters trying to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the Jewish state has come under tremendous pressure to lift its punishing blockade of the Palestinian enclave. Though it has recently announced a partial easing of restrictions on imports, Israel argues it must continue to isolate Gaza to keep Hamas from smuggling in weapons and ultimately drive them out of power. In other words, Palestinian civilians must suffer economic hardship so that Israeli civilians are no longer menaced by rockets.

That’s a hard-hearted, but plausible-sounding, argument. The trouble is, research shows that historically, using economic sanctions to force a rogue regime to change its ways rarely works.

Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, recently released the third edition of their highly regarded book-length study on economic sanctions, examining more than 170 cases over the last century. Their main conclusion: Sanctions have accomplished their proclaimed objective in only about a third of all cases — and most of those involved goals far more modest than regime change. “I’d say Israel’s chances of success are very low,” says Gary Hufbauer, one of the study’s authors.

The authors of a 2000 study on sanctions imposed in the 1990s found a similar one-in-three success rate. What’s more, this kind of collective punishment often strengthens the targeted regime, rather than weakening it.

“Politically, [the] goal is to reduce the support for sanctioned leaders of their own peoples. This may indeed happen in exceptional cases. But in fact the more general reaction is one of ‘rallying around the flag,’ whereby resisting outside pressure is seen as a patriotic duty,” writes Ramesh Thakur, vice rector of Tokyo’s United Nations University.

Many economic sanctions stop short of a full-scale trade embargo. But Israel’s ability — with Egypt’s support — to cut off virtually all foreign trade with Gaza makes its blockade most comparable to thoroughgoing international efforts to isolate Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Neither case offers an encouraging precedent.

The sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, aimed at getting Belgrade to stop supporting the war effort of their Serbian confreres in neighboring Bosnia, drove the Yugoslav economy into freefall. Industrial output was halved, wages plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed. Basic foods and even medical supplies became scarce and expensive. But according to an American University study, “Milosevic used the economic sanctions both as a glue for defiant nationalist sentiment and to strengthen his hold on power.” Writing in George Mason University’s International Journal of Peace Studies, researcher Milica Delevic noted: “Firmly in control of the media, the Yugoslav officials managed to blame the sanctions on the world’s hatred for the Serbs. … [T]he sanctions provided a convenient excuse for whatever was wrong in the country.”

Eventually, Milosevic did bring some pressure to bear on his Bosnian allies, but not enough to make them stop fighting. “Sanctions, helped to a great extentby pre-existing economic difficultiesand macroeconomic mismanagement … [helped] make Serbian President Milosevicmore cooperative, but were of no decisive importance for stopping the war in Bosnia,” Delevic concluded. That required NATO bombers.

The story of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1991 invasion of Kuwait is similar. The embargo dealt a heavy blow to ordinary Iraqis, crippling the economy and spawning shortages of food and medicines. The sanctions were a major contributing factor to the doubling of Iraq’s infant mortality rate, according to UNICEF. But Saddam made sure his supporters, and especially the military, got everything they needed. As a result, another American University study found, “Sanctions have strengthened his resolve, while weakening his opposition. Under the sanctions, Saddam has rebuilt his army from the shattered wreck left in 1991.” Once again, it took a full-scale military invasion to drive him from power.

There are success stories. The Peterson Institute researchers credit sanctions with helping coax Libya into handing over suspects in the Lockerbie airplane bombing. Perhaps most famously, economic pressure on South Africa helped end apartheid. But Cuba’s Communist Party is still in charge after weathering nearly 50 years of an American economic embargo. North Korea’s leadership seems similarly unfazed by years of international economic sanctions.

In Gaza, the blockade hasn’t forced Hamas to hand over kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, one of Israel’s demands. Nor does it seem to be weakening Hamas’ grip on power. In the past year, Hamas militants have jailed and killed its critics on the left and right. “A thriving political culture has been culled to a one-faction state,” The Economist reported recently.

One of the main reasons sanctions fail is that they are almost impossible to make airtight. From Africa to Eastern Europe, neighboring countries always have an incentive to keep doing business with the targeted country. In Gaza, despite Egypt and Israel’s efforts, Palestinians have dug an extensive network of smuggling tunnels through which huge amounts of goods are brought in. Hamas profitably taxes that traffic.

As Thakur points out, as a result of sanctions, “Leaders are often enriched and strengthened on the backs of their impoverished and oppressed peoples.”

Those tunnels also serve as a conduit for weapons. Hamas had no shortage of rockets to fire at Israel in their 2009 war, and there’s no reason to think they have any fewer on hand now.

Recently, Israel has eased the blockade somewhat, allowing more goods in overland while still banning incoming ships. Perhaps Israel is beginning to realize that while history shows there’s a chance a full-scale economic embargo will help it tame Hamas, the odds are badly against it.

Nicole Pasulka contributed to this story.

It’s not just politics. It’s not just religious gerrymandering or denominational tactics. Why is so much Jewish energy being spent on the Rotem conversion bill in the Knesset? Why does so much of the Jewish agenda — in Israel and in the Diaspora — center around the convert? 

In the past few decades, we’ve seen proposals and heard arguments dealing with patrilineal descent; Jews-by-choice; legitimizing proactive proselytizing agencies; the assessment of proactive outreach programs; the status of intermarried and mix-married couples in the synagogue and in the leadership of Jewish organizations; and the amendment to the Law of Return, which has been presented 43 times before the Israeli Knesset and which, again, focuses on the status of the convert. 

Why the convert, the ger, and why now? The Jewish community is concentrated on the ger, the stranger in our midst, because the ger, particularly in an open society, has become a litmus test for the character and course of global Judaism. How Judaism treats the stranger standing on the threshold of our homes will shape the Jewish relationship to the non-Jewish world outside us and to the Jewish community within.

Two competing strains within the Jewish religious tradition influence Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews and, by extension, the Jews they may marry. These two temperaments sharpen the self-understanding of Jews and of Judaism (e.g., does Orthodoxy subsume Judaism, or does Judaism embrace non-Orthodox beliefs and behavior?).

The two strains within one tradition I identify as “Ezra and Ruth” schools of thought and predilection. Both biblical attitudes are evident in the contemporary Jewish debate over the legal and moral posture of Judaism toward the ger. 

For the Ezra strain, conversion is, in the last analysis, no solution for what it considers to be a tragic entanglement of Jews and non-Jews. The Ezra position presumes a primordial foreignness in the stranger, an innate alienation that cannot be assimilated to authentic Jewish life. 

The foreignness of the non-Jew, according to the Ezra outlook, is more than a matter of culture or faith. When pressed, it can be seen as a matter of inherited traits. Chapter 6 in the Tanya, the Chasidic classic, separates the pure from the impure souls of creation, the pure Jewish souls from “the souls of all the nations of the world which are unclean.” 

Echoes of this biological metaphysics are evident in the writings of the 12th century philosopher Judah Halevi and in the contemporary philosopher Michael Wyschogrod, who, in his book “The Body of Faith,” asserts the “carnal election of Jews” who remain elect even “when it sins.” The intensity with which the Charedi, the ultra-Orthodox world in Israel, builds walls to discourage conversion to Judaism and even ban burials on Jewish soil of Russian immigrants who fought and died in combat as members of the Israel Defense Forces, manifests the severity of the Ezra temperament in our times. 

The Ruth strain celebrates the choice of the Moabite Ruth. It deems highly laudable the choice of non-Jews to join the faith and fate of the Jewish people. Ruth is revered as the great-grandmother of King David. And it’s the Book of Ruth, not the Book of Ezra, which is chosen by the ancient rabbis in the Talmud to be read on the festival of Shavuot. In contrast with the distancing stance of Ezra, the outlook of the Ruth strain embraces the non-Jewish seekers and reaches out to those who seek Jewish adoption. Those who adopt the Ruth paradigm challenge the genetic bias of the Ezra orientation that favors biological origins over chosen faith. 

The world Jewish people is undergoing a Kulturkampf, an internal battle of values. It articulates the shift in the pendulum that swings between fate and choice. The swing of the Jewish pendulum is not over, and its direction hovers over the storms of controversy.

In the stranger, Judaism discovered the idea of the human being. So the Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen averred. In the stranger, Judaism is challenged to determine the nature and character of its own identity. Beyond the controversies swirling around descent and conversion is a persistent ancient and modern question: Is Judaism essentially a biological, genetic affair determined by the status assigned the ovum? Or is Judaism a spiritual and cultural matter of faith freely chosen? While formally, either birth or choice qualifies as events of Jewish identity, it is birth to a Jewish mother that issues the seal of Jewish authority according to the fundamentalist Ezra mindset. Neither religious law nor political partisanship move the conversion battle as much as the nature of Jewish sensibilities and the direction of the policies reflecting the ideals of the modern Jewish state in a widening global universe. 

The ger is our mirror. How Judaism sees the stranger outside reflects its own image within. Before us is a crucial choice in the Jewish self-understanding. World Jewry stands between a faith and fate that is insular, parochial and closed, and one that is an expanding, accessible and open tradition. Jews are a choosing and chosen people. Before us is a fundamental choice of character that will affect our closeness to Israel, our relationship to each other in the Diaspora and to the non-Jewish world.

Harold M. Schulweis is rabbi at Congregation Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and the author of “Judaism: Embracing the Seeker” (KTAV, 2010).