By Avi Davis
December 15, 2003
Originally published by Jewsweek.
Sedition is a word that has no accurate translation in Hebrew. Among the contenders begida, hasatah and mered all fall short of describing the act of undermining a government through false diplomacy. Even in English, the word, over time, has lost some of its quotidian nuance, having acquired associations in the popular imagination with pirates and revolutionary turncoats, rather than with the acts of real political figures in the modern age.
Yet there are very few other words available to characterize the diplomatic efforts of a group of Israeli citizens who last week appended their signatures to an agreement with Palestinian representatives in Geneva.
For not only does such negotiation dismiss the past ten years of Palestinian terrorism as irrelevant; it repudiates the capacity of a democratically (and overwhelmingly) elected government to determine the best security interests of its own people. While publicity seems to have been the real objective of the so-called "Geneva Initiative," it is, in fact, a dagger in the heart of diplomacy -- establishing the precedent that leaders of democratic countries who are considered by sectarian elites to be ideologically blind to realities, should and must be circumvented.
Americans learned the meaning of sedition early in their nation's history. The Logan Act was named after James Logan, an American political figure and diplomat and supporter of Thomas Jefferson, who went on his own authority to France to secure an accord with the United States. His mission, in part successful, was resented by the Federalists, who secured the passage of legislation prohibiting civilian participation in diplomatic negotiations except by official authority. The Logan Act was intended to prohibit United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments. And while there appear to have been no prosecutions under the Act in its almost 200 year history, it remains law as potential sanction to be used against anyone who without authority interferes in the foreign relations of the United States.
Not that there has been an absence of cause to prosecute. American history is replete with instances of civilians attempting to negotiate on behalf of the State without proper sanction. During the 1984 presidential race, Ronald Reagan suggested that a trip Jesse Jackson had taken to Cuba could be legally actionable, citing the Logan Act as the "law of the land." The act has also been brandished against Henry Ford, Joseph McCarthy, Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark . Many have claimed that President-at-large Jimmy Carter's freelance efforts to open diplomatic channels with dictators with whom the United States has no relations should be subject to the same strictures.
The question could then, of course, be legitimately asked: If a democracy such as the United States is incapable of imposing judicial restraint against such acts of sedition, why should Israelis feel any different? The answer is simple. Israel is a country at war.
Its antagonist is the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt and unrepentant sponsor of terrorism that has launched a three-year campaign of attacks against the country, slaughtering hundreds of innocent men, women and children. All of this in contravention of its own internationally sanctioned agreement to eradicate terrorism, quell incitement and establish law and order. Now the very same Palestinian representatives who negotiated those agreements return to the table with a new outline for peace, predicated on the same kind of compliance they proved incapable of demonstrating any time before. What's wrong with this picture?
On the other side of the table sit many of the same Israeli faces who were responsible for negotiating the failed Oslo Accords. Their leader -- Yossi Beilin -- is a political outcast, repudiated by his own party and no longer a member of Israel's parliament. His outcast status is precisely a result of his own diplomatic bungling and the failures of vision that resulted in the most dangerous security crisis in Israel's history.
Is it any wonder that a recent poll found only 18% of the Israeli public favorable to the agreement? Or that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a man who knows a thing or two about Palestinian non-compliance, would characterize the initiative as a disaster, damaging to national security and leading to even more loss of life in the future?
It is natural for cynicism to breed when attempts to resolve differences fail repeatedly for the same reasons. Yet resistance to the Geneva Initiative transcends cynicism. Its effect is to project the current Israeli government's carefully calibrated diplomatic initiative as unreasonable, when reason itself dictates that further negotiation with any Palestinian leader is purposeless without demonstrable fulfillment of prior agreements.
The battle for Israel's survival is being fought, as Beilin and his cohorts well know, not only on the ground but also in newspaper columns, on radio talk shows, and on television news hours throughout the world. With this much at stake, the perpetrators of this brazen and seditious publicity stunt have, perhaps, finally merited the creation a new word for treason in the Hebrew language.
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