The media in Israel is abuzz with the news that Tzipi Livni will bring her Ha’Tnuah party into a joint ticket with the much larger Labor party. Now there is a tandem that can outpoll Likud, they are saying. The Israeli center just might be able to assert itself in this election.
Permit me to throw some cold water on this excitement. Livni, who has been the lone voice in the current government who has actively supported talks with the Palestinians, is doing this because if she doesn’t, there is a very strong possibility that her party will not get enough votes to remain in the Knesset. Labor leader Isaac Herzog, who has very little international experience, ran for the party leadership based on his commitment to resolving the long-standing conflict with the Palestinians. As the prospective Number Two, Livni gives Herzog some credibility in this regard.
But not only is there a long way to go before the March 17 election; there is also no guarantee that the party that wins the most seats will lead the next Israeli government. Of all people, Livni knows this only too well. In the 2009 election, she led the Kadima party which won the most seats in the Knesset. Then-President Shimon Peres tasked her with forming a governing coalition, but she couldn’t get enough parties to agree to join her to accumulate the requisite 61 seats. So Peres turned to Netanyahu who has occupied the Prime Minister’s office ever since.
Something very similar could happen in 2015. Although the current Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, is not at all fond of Netanyahu, he is also from the Likud party and, while his domestic policies are relatively liberal, he is no friend of the two-state solution. He might not necessarily want to give Netanyahu the first crack at forming a government, but, if he believes Bibi has the better chance of forming a governing coalition, he will bow to precedent.
And Rivlin may well be forced to that conclusion, whether he likes it or not. Even if Labor wins a seat or two more than Likud, it would likely win no more than 24 seats. Assuming Herzog and Livni could convince all of their potential allies to join a coalition (that would mean Yesh Atid, the new Kulanu party, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Meretz), they would get 40 more seats at most, but that, frankly, is a pretty optimistic projection. They very likely would need at least one other party to join them, but there is only one other realistic possibility: Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party. Lieberman would surely demand a plum cabinet position (probably Defense), who could then bring down the government any time he strongly disapproved of its policies.
Such a government would be exceedingly difficult to cobble together in any case. Lieberman’s party has always been sharply critical of the religious parties who would necessarily have to make up part of the Herzog-Livni coalition. The orthodox parties are themselves unpredictable and share mutual hostility not only with Yisrael Beiteinu but also with other secular parties like Yesh Atid. Meretz, the only left-wing Zionist party remaining these days, would also take some convincing, given the rightward tilt of the remaining members of the coalition.
Despite Livni and Herzog’s own positions, the government outlined above would also be somewhat less than passionate about a two-state solution. Kulanu, led by former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, is open to some evacuation of land but is unlikely to support a resolution based on the 1967 borders; Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas both theoretically support some kind of two-state solution but both also have a generally hawkish outlook. Together, they constitute nearly half the purported government. Less than a mandate for peace, especially considering that Likud and HaBayit HaYehudi in opposition would fiercely oppose any concessions — perhaps even discussions — with a Palestinian leadership they have repeatedly labelled “terrorist.”
So, an extremely unstable coalition government whose interest in reviving a peace process, let alone striking a deal, would be lukewarm at most is the best-case scenario, even with the news that Labor-plus-Livni might win a plurality in the Knesset.
That analysis presumes that the current polls reflect what will happen in March. Of course, they don’t. The campaign hasn’t even begun yet, and a Herzog-Livni ticket isn’t the most marketable for Israeli television. Israeli supporters of a two-state solution cling to Livni as a last, albeit highly flawed hope. They understand that, as a former prominent Likud member and from a family that was part of the aristocracy of Likud and its predecessors, she is not a peacemaker at heart. Herzog might be one but he is bland and thoroughly Ashkenazi (the most influential and wealthy of the Jewish ethnicities in Israel but no longer the majority). That image will work against him in the popular vote.
Israeli political campaigns are often a contest between preachers of hope and preachers of fear. In unsettled times like these, when Israelis are concerned about a growing number of unpredictable, even random, Palestinian attacks, as well as their growing sense of isolation from Europe, fear tends to do well. Historically, fear has served the Likud and other right-wing parties, especially HaBayit Hayehudi, very well.
There is a chance, albeit a very small one, that the preachers of hope can win. They’re not preaching a very high hope, merely one that is more hopeful than the demagoguery of Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett. And they have found an unexpected ally in Moshe Kahlon.
Kahlon, head of the new Kulanu (“All of Us”) party, appears to be drawing votes away from Likud, as well as from Yesh Atid. Like Livni, he is another of the former Likud pragmatists who do not identify with the extreme nationalist camp in Likud that has come to dominate that party after living for years on its far-right fringes.
It was Ariel Sharon who provoked the Likud split in order to thwart the party’s opposition to his plan to remove settlements from Gaza and a few from the West Bank as part of a larger strategic plan to pre-empt growing international pressure for a comprehensive solution. Others, like Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, went with him. Now Kahlon is following a similar path. While he says he could support some sort of land-for-peace arrangement, Kahlon, who is more focused on economic issues in any event, has never endorsed a two-state solution. Indeed, in the past he has rejected it as impractical.
The fact that Kahlon is now deemed a suitable partner for the dreamed-of Herzog-Livni government tells you a good deal of what you need to know about how such a government might behave. Nonetheless, Kulanu will appeal strongly to the Likud old guard. For those who supported former Likud ministers like Benny Begin and Dan Meridor — indeed, those who saw Benny’s father Menachem as the exemplar of Likud leadership and reject the fanatic ideologues who dominate the party today — Kahlon offers an alternative, as well as to other centrist voters who are disappointed in parties like Yesh Atid and Kadima before it.
With Kulanu taking some votes from Likud’s centrist flank and HaBayit HaYehudi continuing to gain right-wing votes at Likud’s expense, it is unsurprising that polls give Labor-with-Livni a chance to win the most seats. But does this mean Israel’s steady rightward drift has stopped?
Not necessarily. The overall view that the conflict with the Palestinians is unresolvable remains strong. At the same time, the growing split among Israeli Jews in reaction to the rise in ethnic and religious violence since last spring may prove an important factor in the election. While more Israeli Jews appear to embrace anti-Arab racism of the kind that benefits the far right represented by Bennett, more and more Jews are expressing alarm over that trend, although they, too, are loath to really examine the roots of that tension: the institutional racism and marginalization of Arabs in Israeli society.
Still, a considerable portion of Israeli society, including some religious and conservative sectors, want to see a reduction in tensions between Jews and Arabs. They are also concerned about the relationships between Israel and the U.S. and between Israel and Europe. While Bennett and his ilk think Israel should act even more defiantly toward the rest of the world, these actors are genuinely worried about the consequences of such an attitude. Many are also concerned about the country’s growing economic stratification.
Those forces of relative reason are confronting a growing wave of nationalist extremism in Israel. As a result, the most hopeful result of the election, at least at this point, is the creation of a center-right government. Of course, if the Herzog-Livni ticket would be willing to bring the non-Zionist, communist party, Hadash, and the Arab Ra’am Ta’al party into the government, along with Meretz, that would indeed change the political trajectory. But that is even less likely than a sudden and egalitarian Israeli decision to actually end the occupation. So, outside observers must for now cling to faint hope that things will go from incredibly bad to slightly less incredibly bad. Such is the state of Israeli politics.
]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
In the past, people have speculated about what Israel and the Occupied Territories would look like if the United States stopped trying to broker the mythical kind of solution that the Oslo process envisioned. Well, now we have an example.
The most radically right-wing government in Israel’s brief history was simply [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
In the past, people have speculated about what Israel and the Occupied Territories would look like if the United States stopped trying to broker the mythical kind of solution that the Oslo process envisioned. Well, now we have an example.
The most radically right-wing government in Israel’s brief history was simply waiting for an opportunity to deliver the most intense and widespread blow to the West Bank. The kidnapping of three young Israelis provided that opportunity and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seized it with a vengeance. Under the cover of searching for the kidnapped youths, Netanyahu launched a massive operation to cripple Hamas in the West Bank, further humiliate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and punish the entire Palestinian population for calling for a halt to the charade of the “peace process” and, worse, moving toward a unified leadership.
On the Palestinian side, the fundamental lack of strategy has become ever more apparent. Ditching the US-brokered process has been, for a very long time, the right move, but sloughing it off in a half-hearted way and without a substitute was unconscionably foolish. That’s especially true when you consider how much time there was to devise an alternative strategy to the US-brokered process over so many years. The result is that the Palestinian unity agreement was imperiled before it was signed by the essential incompatibility of the strategies and ideologies of Fatah and Hamas.
This is being played out on a daily basis now: Abbas appears not only weak, but like a traitor as he cooperates with Netanyahu in this massive operation that has yielded nothing with regard to the three kidnapped Israelis but has resulted in hundreds of arrested Palestinians without cause, disruption of work, school and health services throughout the West Bank, hundreds of injuries and, to date, five deaths. Hamas is fanning the flames of anger while denouncing Abbas for his quisling behavior, but it also offers no alternative, unless one foolhardily believes that yet another intifada is going to soften Israeli stances. The last intifada may have shaken up Israelis, and certainly resulted in numerous deaths and injuries in Israel, but it did no harm to Israel’s stability while killing and harming a great many Palestinians. In fact, it only hardened Israel’s positions and worsened conditions for the Palestinians. This suggests that violence, on top of being deplorable, is a foolish course for the Palestinians.
For his part, Netanyahu is playing this to the hilt. It is far from certain that Hamas, as an organization, is responsible for the kidnapping. Right now, it seems much more likely that this was a small group whose members might also have been members of Hamas, but were not acting in concert with the organization. Netanyahu, however, insists he has “unequivocal” proof that Hamas was responsible. The credibility of that claim erodes with each passing day that Bibi refuses to offer evidence for his claim.
Netanyahu’s brand of politics, like most right-wingers, functions best when the country he runs is either angry, scared, or better yet, both. The current situation creates such an atmosphere. The problem will come when and if the tension in the West Bank boils over. And that problem is going to be one that neither the United States nor much of the rest of the world will be able to ignore. They will have to choose a side.
In looking at where we’re headed right now, we must start by understanding that the US is not removed from these events. While the Obama administration has decided to take a “pause” from this conflict and certainly has other matters like Iraq and the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to occupy its time, it is still Israel’s benefactor, providing arms and, quite likely, the omnipresent protective veto in the UN Security Council. So, the US is still there, whether it wants to be or not.
It will also be drawn further in if the Palestinian Authority collapses and violence in the West Bank is renewed. This seems very much to be the direction Israel is pressing matters towards. If that is the case, then it also stands to reason that the Israeli government intends to annex some part of the West Bank, using the violence as a pretext. Israel, especially given its budgetary constraints these days, is certainly not prepared to supplant the Palestinian Authority in administering the West Bank. The remainder of the West Bank would be surrounded by “Israel” and would be easily contained. From there, local councils or some such arrangements are probably what is envisioned for the lands Israel decides to leave to the Palestinians.
Netanyahu and his cohorts like Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman and Moshe Ya’alon are gambling that the violence of a third intifada will be enough to convince key governments — particularly, the US, UK and Germany — to tolerate the annexation. By “tolerate” I mean that they would object and “refuse to recognize” the action, much as they have with East Jerusalem, but would take no other action.
That is a huge gamble. It is far from certain that even the United States would acquiesce to such actions, and less so that Britain and Germany would. Even if they did, there would surely be a great uproar from other countries, in Europe and throughout the Muslim world, as well as from Russia, France and China. Even governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are largely indifferent to the Palestinians’ plight would be unable to stay silent.
But the gambit has a few things working in Bibi’s favor as well. First, as much as the Israeli de facto annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980 outraged many, the reality of the whole city functioning as an “undivided” capital, however restlessly, has survived for over three decades since then. And that’s Jerusalem, the hottest of hotspots in this conflict. Netanyahu surely reasons that if Jerusalem didn’t start a war, there’s a good chance that annexing the Jordan Valley in a similar manner won’t either.
Moreover, the timing is very good for the annexationists. Not only are all eyes on Iraq with a few still lingering over Ukraine, but the specter of ISIS has renewed the sense of fright that the West feels toward Arabs. These will combine, Bibi surely hopes, to encourage a similar clucking of tongues while doing nothing that has greeted the excesses, both pre- and post-election, of the al-Sisi government in Egypt. Netanyahu’s assessment that he can take an outrageous step and get away with it is thus not without recent precedent. The annexation vision, if that is what Bibi is pursuing, would require years of violence to set the stage for it, or at least many months of intense fighting and bloodshed on both sides (though, as always, the Palestinians will bleed a lot more than Israel).
Abbas, however unwittingly, is helping that process along by working with Israel. Netanyahu is not allowing the Palestinian forces to do much of anything in the current operation, but Abbas is also doing nothing to support his own people. Hamas’ strategy isn’t entirely clear yet, but its obviously trying to capitalize on the Palestinian rage that fuels its support. In Hamas’ view, escalating violence plays into its basic strategy of confrontation rather than collaboration. But the question of whether or not Hamas actually has some endgame vision of how it can make any headway against the might of Israel’s forces, let alone triumph, remains yet to be answered.
So, this is what Israel-Palestine looks like without a sham peace process. Does that mean the sham is preferable? Is it better to have a normalized occupation, with all the banality of its entrenched administration and gradual assimilation of more and more Palestinian land into Israel; or is a possibly long period of bloodshed preferable? Only Israelis and Palestinians can answer that question. That said, the shameful behavior of the US, the international community, the Quartet, the Israeli government, and the Palestinian leadership has left few other options.
Israelis can alter this situation, of course, any time they want by electing a government that wants to make a peace deal. Palestinians can also affect change by developing, organizing and executing a strategy that wins them both attention and increased support in the international arena. At this point, however, both sides seem unwilling and unable to take these paths, which increases the odds of Israel-Palestine spiraling back into extreme violence.
This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission. Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Photo: Gaza, June 16 — Women rally for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons on the 54th day of a mass hunger strike by the detainees and supporters. Credit: Joe Catron
]]>via IPS News
Amidst a new U.S. effort to revive the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, healthy pluralities of both peoples want U.S. President Barack Obama to play a stronger role in resolving their conflict, according to a major new poll released here Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
[...]]]>via IPS News
Amidst a new U.S. effort to revive the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, healthy pluralities of both peoples want U.S. President Barack Obama to play a stronger role in resolving their conflict, according to a major new poll released here Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The survey, which also covered attitudes towards Israel and Palestine in 11 other countries, found that Israeli confidence in Obama has increased since his visit to the Jewish state in March, while Palestinians retain little confidence in the U.S. president despite their desire for his greater involvement in peace-making efforts.
And while half of Israelis believe a two-state solution can still be achieved peacefully through negotiations, Palestinians by a large margin believe that is a delusion.
Indeed, a plurality (45 percent) of Palestinian respondents said the best way to achieve statehood was through armed struggle, while only 15 percent said negotiations were the best course. Another 15 percent cited non-violent resistance, while 22 percent more said some combination of these tactics offered the greatest chance for success.
The new Pew survey, which interviewed nearly 15,000 people in 12 countries, as well as the Palestinian Territories (PT), also found strongly unfavourable opinions of Israel, particularly among its predominantly Muslim neighbours.
The United States was the only country where a majority (57 percent) expressed positive views of the Jewish state, although a plurality in Russia also registered more favourable (46 percent) opinions than unfavourable (38 percent).
Nearly two-thirds of respondents in France, Germany, and China, however, said they held unfavourable views of Israel, while in the predominantly Muslim countries covered by the poll – Egypt, Tunisia, PT, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon – negative views were overwhelming, ranging from 86 percent in Tunisia to 99 percent in Lebanon.
“This is consistent with other polling,” noted Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program of International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), who has designed multinational surveys for BBC and his own worldpublicopinion.org in which Israel has repeatedly placed among the world’s least popular nations, along with North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan.
The new survey as released as Secretary of State John Kerry visited the region, including Israel, this week in hopes of injecting renewed momentum into his efforts to reconvene peace talks between Israel and Palestinians.
In what was widely considered an important step in those efforts, Kerry persuaded Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani and Arab League officials to amend the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), which offers full recognition of Israel by all League member states in exchange for its withdrawal to the 1967 Green Line, to include the possibility of “comparable and mutually agreed minor swaps of land” that would presumably permit Israel to absorb major Jewish settlement blocs on the West Bank in any final peace agreement.
While the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeted the statement as an “important concession” – and has quietly frozen, at Washington’s request, the issuance of new building permits for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem through next month, most analysts believe the chances for serious progress on the peace front – or even the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks – remain quite low.
They point in particular to the persistent split on the Palestinian side between Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, which controls Gaza and has reportedly rejected, along with several other Palestinian factions, the Arab League’s amendment to the API.
As for Israel, the same analysts note that Israel’s leadership is unlikely to agree to the kind of far-reaching concessions necessary for a breakthrough, particularly given the continuing political turmoil in its neighbours – including the civil war in Syria, growing political tensions in Jordan, and the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government in Egypt.
And the fact that major figures in the settlement movement now head key ministries in Netanyahu’s new government also dims prospects for significant progress on the peace front, according to this view.
Nonetheless, Kerry, who said Thursday he plans to return to the region in less than two weeks reportedly in hopes of nailing down a June summit with Abbas and Netanyahu in Jordan, appears determined to overcome the reigning scepticism.
The new poll suggests that Israelis may be somewhat more open to his efforts than Palestinians, particularly following Obama’s visit, during which he spent far more time wooing Israeli public opinion, to the region in March.
Sixty-one percent of Israeli respondents said they had either “a lot” of “some” confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world affairs; that was up from just 49 percent two years ago. On the other hand, 82 percent of Palestinian respondents in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem said they either had “not too much” or “no confidence at all” in Obama.
Similarly, 47 percent of Israelis said U.S. policies in the Middle East were “fair”, while another 35 percent said they favoured Israel “too much”. Palestinian respondents, on the other hand, were virtually unanimous in asserting that Washington favoured Israel too much.
Nonetheless, pluralities of 49 percent of Israeli respondents (including 54 percent of Arab Israelis) and 41 percent of Palestinians said they favoured a “larger” role for Obama in resolving the conflict, according to the survey, which noted that there was considerably more support for a larger U.S. role among Palestinians in the West Bank (47 percent) than in Gaza (30 percent).
Fifty percent of Israeli respondents said they thought a two-state solution could be achieved, while only 14 percent of Palestinians agreed (although an additional 22 percent said “it depends).”
The more positive Israeli results contrasted with a survey taken last year by Shibley Telhami, an expert on Arab public opinion at the Brookings Institution and author of a forthcoming book, “The World Through Arab Eyes.”
In that poll a majority of Israelis said they believed a two-state solution could not be achieved. “This suggests that Israelis are somewhat more optimistic,” he told IPS. On the other hand, he added, the Palestinian results suggested increased pessimism on their part.
The poll found that respondents in France Germany and Britain were significantly more optimistic about a two-state solution than respondents in other countries and that publics in those countries, especially Britain, had become more sympathetic toward the Palestinians in recent years.
That could prompt European leaders to take a more active role in efforts to bring the two parties together, as recently recommended by the European Eminent Persons Group (EEPG).
In a recent letter to the foreign affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, the group — consisting of seven former foreign ministers, four former prime ministers, and one former president, among others – called the current U.S. position “unproductive” even if Washington’s role in a peace process remained “indispensable.” Among other steps, it called for exerting more pressure on Israel, especially with regard to settlements and recognising the 1967 border as the basis for any solution.
In a report released Thursday, the European Council on Foreign Relations amplified that message, calling for the EU to pursue “a more independent policy in the region that would include encouraging reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, acquiescing in – rather than opposing – the PA’s recourse to the International Criminal Court, and ensuring that goods produced by Jewish settlements in the PT are denied trade preferences.
“A harder-nosed and more indpendent policy from Europe will strengthen Washington’s hand in Israel and improve the chances for a decisive U.S. peace initiative before Obama leaves office and before the occupation enters its fiftieth year,” according to the report.
Photo: The Shuafat refugee camp can be seen across the separation wall from the Israeli settlement Pisgat Ze’ev. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
President Barack Obama spent three days in the Near East, a whirlwind visit like a genie from the Arabian Nights, kicking up dust and making his presence felt. But what did he achieve?
Two substantive matters stand out: $200 million promised to the King of Jordan to [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
President Barack Obama spent three days in the Near East, a whirlwind visit like a genie from the Arabian Nights, kicking up dust and making his presence felt. But what did he achieve?
Two substantive matters stand out: $200 million promised to the King of Jordan to deal with that country’s horrendous refugee program stemming from the Syrian Civil War and the “trailer talk” between Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the US president as a facilitator. Related to the Israeli attack on a Turkish vessel carrying supplies to Gaza in 2010, this was one of those classic diplomatic imbroglios in which neither side is prepared to be the first to back down. Obama’s role was thus instrumental, a true honest broker.
What else? Atmospherics, mostly, and mostly on the Israeli side, where Obama has been accused of being insensitive to Israeli feelings, in part because of his poor relations with Netanyahu, and not visiting the Holy Land during his first term as president. This is not just the stuff of a relationship on the rocks; it also impacts Obama’s ability to advance US interests in the Middle East in two ways. First, in US domestic politics, where, like it or not, the supporters of Israel (more particularly, supporters of its government) are a major force to be reckoned with, not just on Arab-Israeli issues, but also on the full range of Middle East issues and the president’s domestic agenda. Second, what the US does with Israel and what it’s able to get Israel to agree to do is the starting point for any progress in its relations with the Palestinians. Israel occupies most of the disputed land, after all. Even more importantly for the United States, Israeli cooperation also provides flexibility for the US President, including in his domestic politics, to deal with other matters in the region — matters far more critical at the moment than the Israel-Palestine issue — especially in regard to Syria and Iran.
Hence, the president was quite right in doing what he should have done a long time ago: demonstrating, to the extent that it can be done through words and the symbolism of his Israeli visit destinations, that his heart is in the right place. Hard-boiled Israeli leaders — and they are paid to be so, especially with Israel’s objective circumstances — clearly believe that Israel’s capacity to rely on US security guarantees depends on Israel being seen by US leaders as strategically important. In the Cold War, where the US and the Soviet Union mostly chose sides, Israel’s strategic connection to the US was obvious. That has been far less clear since the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979, which vastly reduced the risk of an Arab war on Israel (and hence the risk of a US-Soviet nuclear confrontation), and then the collapse of the Soviet Union. Israel has sought since then to identify areas in which its strategic interests are at least compatible with those of the United States. This helps to explain why Israel emphasizes the threat from Iran far beyond what objective US analysts see in terms of a potential direct threat to the US, just as Israel and its supporters in the US were instrumental in pressing the United States to invade Iraq a decade ago.
But at heart, the US commitment to Israel’s security and future is not about strategy — after all, the US was committed to Vietnam and then walked away and is doing the same now with Afghanistan. The US commitment is “of the heart”, and has to extend far beyond the US Jewish community, which is a small fraction of the US population. In fact, support for Israel as a democracy, as a haven for survivors of the Holocaust and as a productive Western society with Western values, is both broad and deep in US culture and society. This is the most solid basis for Israeli confidence in America’s commitment. And reinforcing that sense of identification does not come out of a strategy text book but out of demonstrations of the unprovable: repeated reassurances of American love for Israel and what it represents, in hearts and not heads.
Of course, this is deeply frustrating for most Arabs, including virtually all Palestinians. This was underscored on Obama’s trip, when he limited himself largely to “words” and not “music.” He made little effort to connect with this people, who have labored under Israeli occupation for nearly 46 years, in terms that they could relate to emotionally.
Nevertheless, Obama did say many of the right things — Israeli settlements on the West Bank are “counterproductive” (but not “they should be stopped and maybe even rolled back in places”) and a two-state solution is important for everyone including Israel. In making the latter case eloquently to Israeli young people during his Jerusalem speech, Obama also added another point: the founding generation of Israeli leaders is passing from the scene, and a new generation needs to chart Israel’s future. It was not an accidental comment. In fact, this may be Obama’s “long game” — not that he’s expecting to be the one decisive player in resolving the standoff, but that perhaps over time, young Israelis and Palestinians will be able to do it themselves. In fact, as confirmed by public opinion polling in the two communities, the people want to go in that direction; it’s the leaders who haven’t found their way.
But none of this actually moves anything forward in the Middle East. The Secretary of State, John Kerry, will assume the burden of being lead US negotiator, a poor use of his time overall, given that the chances of moving the “peace process” forward are so poor. They come up against the fact that, when push comes to shove, psychologically, Israel is not willing — understandably so — to take risks for peace in view of grave uncertainties about Egypt, Syria, and Iran. And the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammed Abbas, can take no risks for peace as long as Israel keeps Gaza isolated and its people, lacking economic hope, dependent on Hamas.
At least with his trip, Obama has taken limited steps that had to be taken in regard to the Middle East as a whole — with the reconciliation between Turkey and Israel, and the reassurances of where his heart lies to Israel. But the administration still lacks an overarching perspective on the region. It has no real strategy (does anyone?) regarding a way forward on the Syrian civil war. There is no visible planning about the aftermath. The administration does not seem to be taking seriously the rising, if slow-rolling, civil war throughout the region between Shi’a and Sunni states and communities, and Washington is unwilling to tell Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to stop their nationals from funding Islamist fundamentalism in Syria and elsewhere and where the US suffers directly — including in terms of combat casualties – in Afghanistan and Pakistan, from what these three countries tolerate among their rich supporters of religious extremism. The United States also continues to lead a policy of continued isolation of Iran while refusing to engage in negotiations that meet the first test: the consideration of legitimate Iranian security interests, as well as those of the United States and Israel — a sine qua non for success. He argues that “all options are on the table,” but a serious approach to negotiations is not one of them. Obama has thus, like his two predecessors, given a critical hostage to fortune: that keeping the US out of a war with Iran — which the American people do not want, and which would be even more destructive to US interests than the misbegotten invasion of Iraq — depends not on independent US decision-making, but on the good sense of two other countries, Israel and Iran. No great power should ever get itself into such a predicament.
The key issue now is whether the US president will take a step back, engage the best that there is in the US professional community on the Middle East; bring the right people into the government; consult with others outside; and for the first time in his presidency, develop a coherent, viable strategy for the region as a whole that is consonant with the deepest and most critical US interests in the region.
At the very least, in looking at the Middle East and his administration’s approach to it, President Obama needs to fashion a team of hard-nosed thinkers and doers, akin to what Franklin Roosevelt did in World War II and various administrations did during the Cold War. As the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest King, said in 1942: “When the going gets tough, that is when they send for us sons of bitches.” Obama needs to view the Middle East and US interests through a similar optic and bring in the first team.
Photo: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama holding a joint press conference at the Prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. March 20, 2013. Credit: Kobi Gideon
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
The stakes in President Barak Obama’s impending visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan have risen steadily in recent days. It is taking take place, after all, almost immediately following Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip around the region — but not to the same stops [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
The stakes in President Barak Obama’s impending visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan have risen steadily in recent days. It is taking take place, after all, almost immediately following Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip around the region — but not to the same stops on the President’s tour — which, coming so soon after Kerry assumed office, almost inevitably can do little to advance America’s regional agenda. This agenda includes fostering regime change in Syria and ending its civil war; promoting political stability in Egypt and reinforcing its relationship with Israel; gaining Iran’s compliance on the nuclear issue; and setting the stage for a more salubrious course for the so-called Arab spring than has been seen so far, at least in the Near East. On top of that, Kerry had to deal with a complicating comment by the Turkish prime minister: “It is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism, or anti-Semitism, or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.” That slur did nothing to increase Israel’s confidence regarding its neighborhood.
Also inevitably, an unavoidable linkage between President Obama’s trip and the issue of the Iranian nuclear program was reinforced by the administration’s obligatory recitation of its policies before the annual meeting in Washington of AIPAC, “America’s pro-Israel lobby.” Vice President Biden was most dramatic: “President Barack Obama is not bluffing. He is not bluffing. We are not looking for war. We are looking to and ready to negotiate peacefully, but all options, including military force, are on the table.” That is nothing more than Obama has already said, in one way or another. But it comes immediately after the resumption of talks in Kazakhstan between Iran and the so-called “P5+1” countries — the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the European Union. These talks, containing at most a sliver of hope of future progress, were probably just a “time buyer” in any event — especially to get both sides past the Iranian presidential elections in June. But, now, “confidence-building,” assuming that it’s possible, will have to wait for another day.
President Obama’s trip thus does not begin on an upbeat note for America’s overall ambitions in the region. But on one level, that is almost beside the point. This is, after all, the first time he has been to Israel, more than four years into his presidency. The very fact of his going is thus important. A neat parallel was President Anwar Sadat’s almost-hectoring speech to the Israeli Knesset in 1978. At the time, I asked a leading Israeli whether Sadat’s words undercut his message of peace. “The fact that he was standing there in the Knesset,” my interlocutor said, “spoke so loudly I couldn’t hear what he was saying.”
So Obama will be there, underscoring by his presence not just that the US “has Israel’s back,” but also, made necessary by the fact of his trip, that Israel-Palestine negotiations are on his agenda. But what else?
Certainly, given the administration’s declared objective of restarting the moribund Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” — where Kerry has characterized failure as a “catastrophe” — Obama has to address the subject, and do so in more than pro forma terms. Most important is providing a sense of his own personal commitment, assuming that that is his intent, to seeing the process move forward, a highly-elastic term. One observer with about as much experience as anyone, Ambassador Dennis Ross, laid out his own 14 steps for confidence-building in last Sunday’s New York Times. While quite possibly realistic in terms of confidence-building, they are far from confidence-inspiring and are devoid of significant concrete goals, much less an end point, the so-called “final status.” Notably, Ross did not mention the so-called “Clinton Parameters,” of December 2000, which can be viewed here, and which are widely understood to be the only realistic basis for peace and the “two-state solution.”
While nothing is easy in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, the Clinton Parameters compete for the prize: land-swaps would incorporate most West Bank Jewish settlements into Israel; Jerusalem would be the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state; Palestine would be essentially demilitarized, with Israel retaining some residual rights of defense; outside peacekeepers (probably NATO) would be introduced; and arrangements would be made for Palestinian refugees, certainly better than their current circumstances. But 12 years after these sensible ideas were put forward — and 33 years since negotiations began — success is not now even remotely in sight.
Obama’s peace mission — if that is how he sees his Near East trip — will be complicated by Israel’s deep security concerns, most immediately the civil war in Syria. Jerusalem and Damascus have had a tacit agreement since the mid-1970s to prevent a breakdown in their uneasy truce, but that is now in jeopardy. And although Egypt’s continuing commitment to its treaty with Israel, the latter’s geopolitical linchpin, will probably hold, this is not something on which Israel can bet the farm.
And then there is Iran and the nuclear conundrum. Of necessity, Obama will have to repeat, and perhaps even reinforce, what Vice President Biden said to AIPAC. He can express hopes for a peaceful outcome, but he will have to underline, and underline again, the military consequences if Iran does not respond in terms that the US, with Israel at its elbow, has set. This will not be the time or place for the US president to lay out a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Iran, including one essential element that has so far been missing: that the security needs not just of the US and Israel, but also of Iran, must all be on the table. Instead, Obama’s trip will be a time primarily to provide, and provide again, reassurances to Israel, the sine qua non for everything else.
This, of course, will do little to move forward efforts to defuse the time-bomb with Iran. But with those efforts necessarily being on hold until after its June elections, nothing should be expected from the US president, other than some reference to giving diplomacy a chance. But what of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?
An old rule of thumb, based on both the facts and appearance of power, is that US presidents don’t do “fact-finding” or go on “listening tours.” They have mid-level officials to do that. What American presidents are expected to do by both friend (with hope) and foe (with fear), is to lead. Words will not suffice: Obama has already done that in Cairo, Ankara, and Accra with three essays in eloquence that advanced the proposition that hope buttressed by hard work can triumph over experience. Now the world waits to see his Act Two.
There is one thing to do: be bold. Not baby-steps, like those suggested by Dennis Ross — as well as by others over the years — and which have yielded so little for so long. The place to start consists of two steps that go directly to “final status.” First, to endorse in clear-cut terms the Clinton Parameters as the United States’ bottom-line, a formal commitment to a two-state solution — full stop; and second, to promise the diplomatic and other efforts needed to see them through to completion, whatever it takes. I have already argued for the appointment of Bill Clinton as Special Negotiator. Or perhaps the Secretary of State would want to do it, though that would necessarily take him away from the rest of his global duties. But the principle is clear: if the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is ever to succeed — a huge “if” — the US president has to enunciate a concrete, simple, and unambiguous plan, set his seal to it, and be a bull terrier in carrying it through.
Be bold, Mr. President, or it would be better that you stay home.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
As President Barack Obama’s first trip to Israel approaches, one senses desperation from the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. Obama’s scheduled stop in the West Bank has all the trappings of an empty gesture masking the real goal of creating coordination between the President and Israeli [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
As President Barack Obama’s first trip to Israel approaches, one senses desperation from the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. Obama’s scheduled stop in the West Bank has all the trappings of an empty gesture masking the real goal of creating coordination between the President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issues of Iran and Syria. Meanwhile, protests in the West Bank are spreading as Palestinian hunger strikers inspire defiance against Israel’s ongoing occupation.
In that context, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is seriously trying to convince Obama to focus attention back on the question of Palestine and the occupation. Abbas’ advisor Muhammad Ashtiya told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz on Monday that the PA is trying to get Obama to jumpstart the peace process by putting forth a formula for talks that “…will guarantee the end of the occupation in the territories of ’67.” Such a formula would make it unrealistic to talk “…while the Israeli government continues to build settlements and establish facts on the ground that will thwart a future agreement.”
In other words, the Palestinians would drop their (entirely reasonable) “preconditions” in favor of the US setting them. It’s hard to see Obama doing this to say the least. But Ashtiya is right in saying this is the only way for talks to resume. That’s why they won’t.
The very next day, US Secretary of State John Kerry revealed the itinerary for his first trip overseas in his new job. The Middle East leg will include Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, but not Israel. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland explained that Kerry did not want to disrupt Netanyahu’s coalition-building process. While that may be true, an Obama Administration that would even consider the sort of steps the PA is currently suggesting would want to push Netanyahu toward a coalition that would accept a US framework. Any notion that Obama was considering a step like that at this time is contradicted by Kerry’s demurral.
Perhaps at some point later in his second term Obama will try to fix the mess we call the Israel-Palestine conflict. But right now the task involves too many pitfalls and too few promises. Obama knows Netanyahu will buck any serious effort at US mediation, just as he knows that former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni taking the reins of talks with the Palestinians is nothing more than window dressing. Netanyahu has some incentive to appear more reasonable than he has for the past four years, but very little to actually try to forge a deal with the Palestinians. The Israeli public is nervous about the status quo, but that has more to do with their view that their government is isolating them from the rest of the world through brash statements and provocative actions than any sense of urgency to end the occupation.
Obama knows that Congress will revolt at the behest of AIPAC at any perceived pressure on Israel. With major battles over taxes and budget cuts looming, nuclear issues with Iran and now North Korea coming back to the fore and a Republican contingent determined to undermine his every move, Obama is not going to risk aggravating the Democrats in Congress that he absolutely must keep in line.
So Abbas is shouting into the wind here. The same sense of calm that keeps Israelis comfortable enough to refrain from pushing their government toward a resolution of the conflict also makes contemporary crises like Syria and the disposition of Hezbollah in Lebanon seem far more urgent. Yet this too, like Iran, is a bone of contention with congressional Republicans. Obama has no wish to increase his foreign policy difficulties.
Abbas’ options are becoming very limited. Israel has quietly and slowly been easing the siege on Gaza and while the situation there remains grim, there can be little doubt that even incremental improvements (which have largely consisted of some small imports of building materials and considerably larger imports of Israeli products) strengthen Hamas’ hand. As Palestinian reconciliation remains far off, Abbas is feeling domestic pressure from his political rivals. Add to that increasing protests, hunger strikers and the continuing, gradual growth of the global Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement (BDS), and Abbas is getting boxed in. Without some opening which only Obama can create, the credibility of Abbas’ program of negotiating with and reassuring Israel is dwindling to zero.
The Palestinians need the United States to bring forth a plan — Abbas and Ashtiya are not wrong about that. But Obama is not going to do that and risk alienating many in his own party unless it turns into something Israel wants. Netanyahu obviously doesn’t want it, and it’s not immediately apparent what Israeli leader would. But if the Palestinians — through non-violent but firm means such as the International Criminal Court, the BDS movement and continued appeals to Europe and Arab and Muslim countries that have relations with Israel — can increase pressure and make Israel’s populace less comfortable with the status quo, perhaps Israel will put forth a new leader with a peace mandate along the lines of that which they gave to Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak.
In that context, a president like Obama might have more options. But as it stands now, the Palestinian strategy should be based on the US being an obstacle, not a help.
Photo: President Barack Obama watches as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (right) shake hands at a trilateral meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, N.Y, Sept. 22, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and being thus recognized as a truly valid recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize conferred on him 3 years ago. Or, he may deeply regret venturing into such troubled waters and ending up, like so many of his predecessors, with not much to show for his pains in trying to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
In any event, he has now embarked on a course that he must see through to the end or risk making matters worse, possibly for the regional parties and certainly for the reputation of the United States. Yet if he is prepared to do so — with demands that will match anything else in foreign policy that he has done in his presidency — the payoff will be immense, not just in the Levant but throughout the Middle East.
The lack of success in creating a viable Palestinian state, at peace with Israel and with both peoples living in mutual security, is not from a lack of effort from many senior, talented and dedicated people in the 34 years since President Jimmy Carter’s summit at Camp David with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin launched what were then called Autonomy Talks for the Palestinian territories.
Nor is the lack of success in producing what is known as the “two-state solution” a failure of ideas. These have been fussed over for decades, but have come down pretty much to a consensus on a few cardinal points, looking toward “Final Status.” These were best put in a brief statement by President Bill Clinton in December 2000, following the abortive Second Camp David Summit and a scant four weeks before he left office. They can be found here.
In brief, they propose a swap of land between Israel and the West Bank, so that about 80 percent of Jewish settlers on the West Bank would be incorporated into Israel; the state of Palestine would have contiguity (which implies some link to Gaza); Israel could keep troops in the Jordan Valley for a 3-year transitional period, plus long-term warning stations; arrangements would be made for Jerusalem that boil down to there being two capitals in one city with respect for everyone’s religious sites; there could be any one of five Clinton-suggested approaches to dealing with Palestinian refugees, with at least some being admitted into Israel proper; and Palestine would be a “non-militarized state” with an “international force for border security and deterrent purposes.” With a colleague, I later proposed that this “international force” be NATO, and that idea has gained currency.
Compared with the reams of negotiating documents and the years of talk, this is a simple formulation. It is also recognized by almost everyone who has actually been engaged in these negotiations — as I have — as probably the best that can be achieved and a balanced approach from which all can gain and that could, finally, bring the conflict to an end.
These Clinton Parameters, the obvious solution, were advanced 12 years ago, yet the conflict continues. The reason is manifold: part has been a general lack of political will to move forward, especially with the complex — if not tortured — politics in both Israeli and Palestinian societies; part is the natural human difficulty of taking a leap in the dark after decades of stasis; and part is what else has been happening. And it is this “what else has been happening” that Obama cannot avoid addressing during his visit and that will still be there when he departs, no doubt after applying his well-honed skills of inspiration, intelligence, and honest application to tough problems. This will be so even though opinion polling has long shown that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want the conflict to be over and done with.
Obama will no doubt reassure all parties of US commitment to be engaged until the job is done — and if he is not prepared to “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk”, he should stay home — ; to provide reassurances to Israel about its security and to Palestinians about the importance of what they call justice; and to call on peoples and political leaders to seize this particular moment. This should include a major address to the Knesset and some form of symbolic (as well as substantive) encounter with the Palestinians.
Then to the “what else is happening.” On the Palestinian side, Hamas’ control of Gaza and the on-again, off-again nature of its relations with the Palestinian Authority led by Mohammed Abbas on the West Bank are far from propitious, if not now impossible to resolve. Abbas will also insist, once again, that the US president get the Israelis to stop settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to ease significantly the isolation of Gaza.
On the Israeli side, current preoccupation is not with Palestine peacemaking, but with a trifecta of Iran, Syria and Egypt, all of which involve real or potential Security with a capital “S.” In Israel, Obama will no doubt be pressed, and pressed again, to confirm that “containment” of an Iranian nuclear capability is unacceptable to the United States and that all options — including the use of military force — are “on the table.” That will certainly not make negotiations any easier with the Iranians, in whatever form and whatever timing they take, and it will be even more difficult for Obama to change the US negotiating position to something that might have a chance of working — e.g., by recognizing that US, Israeli, and Iranian security concerns must all be accounted for. Prime Minister Netanyahu will also underscore Israel’s continuing concerns with attacks coming from Gaza and Iranian support for Hezbollah. And he will want the US strategic commitment to Israel to be further bolstered in concrete military terms.
Israel is also deeply concerned by the civil war in Syria, which, depending on what happens when President Assad departs (assuming that that will happen,) could turn that country into what Lebanon has so often been — a haven for attacks by Hezbollah and maybe others on Israel. President Obama can offer reassuring words, but the US may have little to offer, including in forestalling a larger, slow-burning civil war between the region’s Sunnis and Shi’ites, a byproduct of the misguided US invasion of Iraq a decade ago. And Israel is meanwhile very carefully watching what is happening in Egypt, where the 1979 peace treaty has been the bedrock of Israel’s strategic confidence ever since.
Nothing that President Obama says or does on his trip to the region will change fundamentally any of these factors. And, as usually happens when any positive possibility seems to be emerging in Arab-Israeli relations, a terrorist incident during the president’s trip is highly likely, further stimulating the fears of all those who would like to move forward, and undercutting moderate politics.
All this is the bad news. The good news — or at least potentially hopeful news — is that for the US to become again engaged in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is an essential ingredient: despite talk over the years that “we Americans can’t want peace more than the parties,” it has been proved repeatedly that only the US can press the parties forward. (That statement includes whatever other members of the so-called Quartet that the US fostered in 2002 — the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia — will try to do but where they have no capacity to be of much consequence.) It is also true that, when the US commits its prestige and that of its president, “things happen.” This effort is also coming at the start of Obama’s second term, whereas Bill Clinton got engaged seriously only when he was about to leave office — and thus was in no position to put US political muscle behind any forward progress.
Experience also confirms that serious negotiations on Final Status can only truly begin when the US plunks down for consideration the draft text of a complete treaty, perhaps for presentation purposes doing it jointly with the other three Quartet members. At the very least, President Obama needs to outline parameters for a settlement during this trip — whether he just calls them “Clinton” or a more proprietary “Obama” Parameters. He will need to paint himself into a corner in terms of his own personal commitment to success, however long and hard the slog may be.
There is some other news regarding Obama’s spring trip, the impact of which has yet to be proved; it raises questions about why he is acting so soon, other than to splash a big rock in the pool and thereby get everyone’s attention that “the US is back.” Happily, he has appointed a Secretary of State, John Kerry, who is deeply committed to success on this issue, calling failure a “catastrophe.” Yet, by the time Obama goes to the region, Kerry will not have had time to even put his State Department Middle East team together and get his key officials confirmed by the Senate. The NSC staff in the White House will have had to be beefed up with top-notch people in this area; and the nominated Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, who will need to offer strong backing — especially to reassure Israel of US strategic and military engagement — is not yet even in office. There is also precious little time before the president leaves for the Near East, for the White House to do the essential prior consultations with the Congress and key US constituencies, especially leadership of the Jewish community, if his trip to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan is to be – as it must now be – about substance and not just symbols.
For Obama to offer more than his own commitment and symbolism of “being there,” he must be ready to take one further step, if Kerry is to be spared having to spend a massive amount of his time and energy on the Middle East account, which regularly eclipses other priorities. That is to appoint a senior-level negotiator who will do what it takes for as long as it takes. The one person with experience who could also provide the necessary political clout as Obama’s personal emissary is obvious: former President Bill Clinton.
]]>The vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the Palestinian application for non-member status is a foregone conclusion. They’re going to win and it’s not really going to matter much, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, the decidedly warped world of diplomacy around the Israel-Palestine conflict has managed to [...]]]>
The vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the Palestinian application for non-member status is a foregone conclusion. They’re going to win and it’s not really going to matter much, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, the decidedly warped world of diplomacy around the Israel-Palestine conflict has managed to give us a small degree of drama around the bid, which is also illustrative of why there seems to be so little hope for change.
I posted a draft of the resolution on my blog earlier this month. You can see the final version here (pdf). There is simply nothing there that anyone with even the mildest interest in resolving the conflict could have the slightest objection to. This says a lot about where Israel and the US stand. No, the drama lies outside, with the Israeli-US-UK efforts to scuttle the initiative.
It’s been clear for quite some time that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was not going to back down from bringing this resolution to the UNGA. At this stage, any threatening actions by Israel or the US could cause the PLO’s collapse, which Israel very much wants to avoid. So they had no way to stop the initiative from going forward and instead tried to change the substance of the resolution.
That, too, failed, but the changes they tried to make are instructive. Israel wanted to change or insert three conditions, none of which made any sense for the Palestinians. The US took the three conditions whole cloth and tried to convince the Palestinians to insert them. When that failed, it was passed off to the UK, who could offer the Palestinians something the US could not — namely, a yes vote on the UNGA resolution if they agreed to these conditions. Based on various reports, it seems that the Palestinians simply wanted to end the debate and went ahead and submitted the proposed resolution to forestall further discussion of it.
So, all the attempts at change seem to have failed. But the truth is that there is very little here for Israel to be worried about, at least for the time being. And this is why their reaction, as well as those of the US and UK, are all very telling. Let’s look at the three conditions Israel wanted to insert:
- 1. Israel wanted the resolution to state that the Palestinians would not seek membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Had the Palestinian Authority (PA) agreed to this, it would have sacrificed the one tangible benefit it gets from the General Assembly’s recognition of its non-member status. The other benefits are a matter of prestige and hopefully some diplomatic weight. But this is something the Palestinians can actually use at some point. Israel does not want to answer to the ICC, a court in which it is not a member, but whose decisions can make Israel more uncomfortable and give weight to protest movements, especially in Europe, where there is much more regard for international law than in the United States.
- Indeed, had the PA agreed to something like this, the reaction in the West Bank might have been as bad as if they had agreed to withdraw the resolution altogether. That issue only gets magnified in the wake of Hamas emerging from the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza not only alive, but strengthened politically and with a ceasefire whose terms are surprisingly favorable to the government of Gaza.
- I strongly suspect that while the possibility of Palestine going to the ICC is probably the single most vexing aspect of this move in Israel’s eyes, they also probably knew that this was a non-starter, and perhaps didn’t even really want the PA to agree, as it might have spelled doom for the quisling Authority. In any case, it was a foregone conclusion that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would refuse Israel’s condition.
- 2. Israel wants a clause stressing that this is a symbolic decision that grants no sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza Strip or East Jerusalem. This was just an attempt at bullying. The UNGA resolution is, by definition, symbolic. It does not carry the weight of law, but merely expresses the view of the GA, as far as such weighty matters as sovereignty are concerned. Yes, specific statuses in the GA can allow the Palestinians access to certain international bodies, but there is no recognition of sovereignty here, nor could there be.
- Israel wants this kind of statement to blunt the impact of the resolution in the diplomatic field, but really it wouldn’t do much of that either. It was just a way to diminish the Palestinians’ claim on paper, and more than anything else, it was a lead-in to the one thing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really hoped to get out of this.
- 3. Israel wants any decision to include a Palestinian commitment to renewing direct negotiations with Israel without preconditions. This has become Netanyahu’s Holy Grail. He would love nothing more than the continuing sham “peace process” to drag on while settlements expand. But he also knows too much had already been discussed in the Oslo process, and fears, perhaps with some reason, that US President Barack Obama might eventually press for an endgame along the lines of the Clinton Parameters. Even if he doesn’t, Bibi doesn’t want to maintain the framework of withdrawal from more than 90% of the West Bank and some sort of sharing of East Jerusalem.
- For Netanyahu, “no preconditions” is a mantra, but one which means something very different than what the term implies. “No preconditions” means starting from absolute zero from the Palestinian point of view. It means no presumption that the 1967 borders are the starting point for discussion, or that there is any legitimate Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem. It means forgetting the Oslo Accords, other than perhaps the lines that Netanyahu wants to hold talks with the starting point at the facts on the ground. Those facts involve the settlements, including those in East Jerusalem that cut the city off from the rest of the West Bank and hemmed Bethlehem in, among other Palestinian towns. They include separation between the West Bank and Gaza and no presumption that they must be rejoined.
- Within that framework, any land Israel surrenders, any settlement or outpost Israel evacuates, is a “concession” to the Palestinians and more than that, a gift and symbol of Israeli largesse. Given not only Netanyahu’s right-wing orientation, but the even more radical rightward tilt of his party and, even more, his coalition, this is the only way he could sit and talk with the Palestinians, even if it is just for show.
- In other words, no preconditions means no to any Palestinian conditions at all and yes to plenty from the Israelis.
Ultimately, Israel knew it would have to tolerate this Palestinian move. It really couldn’t even respond to it without risking its West Bank subcontractor whose demise would mean that Israel would have to foot much more of the bill for its occupation. So, they tried to get the one thing they thought they had at least an outside shot at: talks without preconditions.
Israel’s failure to achieve that goal is not surprising. But the buy-in Netanyahu got from both the US and UK is something we should all be looking at. Abbas didn’t break off talks with Netanyahu on principle, or even because of settlement expansion itself. He broke them off because he knew that, after 17 years of negotiations in the shadow of expanding settlements, the clock had expired and the Palestinian people would no longer tolerate such a state of affairs. The peace process had been exposed as a sham to cover an entrenching occupation, and only a complete halt to settlement construction would allow Abbas to come back to the table without seriously risking the existence of the PA.
Maybe the US and UK knew that Abbas would not accept the “no preconditions” condition and that’s why they felt comfortable pressing for it. But I doubt it. Both countries simply want to see talks resume, fearing the stalemate and vacuum diplomatic silence produces while Hamas continues to establish itself as the more credible Palestinian leadership body.
And what choice do the US and UK have? The same choice they’ve always had, the same one that was always the only way this was ever going to be resolved: pressure both sides — but especially the powerful and comfortable one, Israel — to make the deal. (Pressure on Israel has been totally absent, while both the US and UK are quite practiced in pressuring the Palestinians). Remind them that the exports they both depend on, the cooperation they both need, will no longer be so forthcoming if they don’t achieve a lasting peace.
And, of course, that is an option that neither country is willing to take for no good reason other than domestic politics. This isn’t about forcing anything on anyone. Israel and the Palestinians are perfectly free to choose their own course, but if they choose one that is contrary to US or UK interests, those countries can also choose not to do business with them. This wouldn’t exactly cripple either nation, but domestic politics continue to rule the day, and the craven leaderships in both countries cannot even conceive of such actions.
]]>For all the hawkish Mideast rhetoric among the GOP presidential field, Newt Gingrich is quickly distinguishing himself for right-wing stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the latest such posturing, the former House speaker cited an example of Palestinian incitement against Israelis — a real issue, but just [...]]]>
For all the hawkish Mideast rhetoric among the GOP presidential field, Newt Gingrich is quickly distinguishing himself for right-wing stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the latest such posturing, the former House speaker cited an example of Palestinian incitement against Israelis — a real issue, but just not quite in the fact-free way Gingrich confidently spoke of in last week’s Republican debate.
Gingrich was asked about his earlier remark, plucked from “an ideological tract disguised as history,” that Palestinians are an “invented” people — a view he hasn’t walked back, but qualified with support for a two-state solution to the conflict. At last week’s GOP presidential debate, however, Gingrich doubled down and declared of the Palestinians, “These people are terrorists.” He went on:
They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?’ We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.
Watch a video of Gingrich’s remarks at the debate:
Gingrich invoked truth and spoke with certainty. But an Associated Press fact check of his quite specific claim — that U.S. money pays for school textbooks that teach math by counting Jewish deaths — found it didn’t check out:
Three researchers — [George Washington University political scientist Nathan] Brown, Itamar Marcus from Palestinian Media Watch and Eldad Pardo from IMPACT-SE — said the example Gingrich cited in the Dec. 10 Republican debate does not exist in the texts. Gingrich’s office did not respond to two emailed requests for further comment.
Incitement in the Mideast conflict is a complicated and serious issue, and it’s an impediment to peace. By making false claims about incitement, Gingrich cheapens the discourse on this serious issue.
The full AP article describes religious schools in Occupied Palestinian Territory — constituting about 750 Palestinian students of the Territories’ 1.6 million students — that glorify martyrdom. A study found that government schools, which teach more than 700,000 students, had two examples of anti-Jewish sentiments in their textbooks, but the largest concern was that the Israeli national narrative was omitted from the books.
Last year, the Washington Institute For Near East Policy (WINEP) noted some progress against Palestinian incitement in textbooks, while important areas of concern persist. “We need to recognize what needs to be improved and recognize and praise the progress that’s been,” WINEP chief Robert Satloff said. “We need to stay away from hysteria and its opposite, whitewash.”
]]>Jon Huntsman laid out his foreign policy views on Monday, but, while showing a strong grasp of U.S.-Asia policy and calling for a scaling back of U.S. military deployments, his vision of the U.S. role in brokering an end to the Israeli-Palestinian bordered on incoherent.
Early [...]]]>
Jon Huntsman laid out his foreign policy views on Monday, but, while showing a strong grasp of U.S.-Asia policy and calling for a scaling back of U.S. military deployments, his vision of the U.S. role in brokering an end to the Israeli-Palestinian bordered on incoherent.
Early in his remarks, Huntsman commented that “we saw the Palestinians make an end-run around the American led peace process because they lost confidence in it and in our ability to lead.” Indeed the Palestinian attempt to seek statehood through the U.N. was widely interpreted as a vote of no confidence in both the U.S.’ led peace process and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sincerity as a negotiating partner.
But 25 minutes later, in a response to a question about Israeli settlement expansion, Huntsman offered a very different vision of the U.S. role in the region, saying:
- I think we must recognize that in a region of change, now might not be the time for negotiations. We have to listen, I think, very carefully to what leadership in Israel has to say about the timing issue.
And, if now is not the time, I don’t think we can force the process, but what we can do during this time of uncertainty is to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel and remind the world what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States. This we have not done in a very long time and, so long as there is not any blue sky between United States and Israel, it doesn’t matter what plays out in the region.
Watch it:
How, exactly, Huntsman envisions regaining Palestinian confidence while declaring that “now might not be the time for negotiations” is an important question and one with no obvious answer. Huntsman’s expertise, both professionally and as a diplomat, have focused on East Asia but his lack of urgency in resolving the Middle East conflict flies in the face of positions taken by senior military leadership and the State Department. While establishing credentials as a “pro-Israel” politician has become more important than ever, Huntsman’s deference to “what leadership in Israel has to say about the timing issue” could come at the expense of U.S. national security interests and further tarnish the respect for U.S. leadership which Huntsman aims to restore.
]]>