How to force the hands of a conservative hardliner. Here in the US, the hard line adopted by Cheney needs to be put away in the same fashion.
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In two minds over a new state
John Lyons, Middle East correspondent | May 23, 2009
Article from: The Australian
A FEW hours after his meeting with US President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked his media adviser Mark Regev to round up the Israeli radio journalists travelling with the entourage to come to a special briefing at his hotel.
Although he'd just had one of the most important meetings of his long political career, Netanyahu remained focused on his real audience: the Israeli public.
His suspicions that the meeting would be negatively portrayed in Israeli newspapers the next day would prove correct. The second biggest selling newspaper ran a front page headline that said "Mahloket!" (Hebrew for controversy).
Netanyahu was determined to go on the offensive the following morning in Israel, so gave interviews to all the radio journalists to offset the expected negativity of the newspapers. Israelis are enthusiastic consumers of morning radio, and Netanyahu reached beyond the papers to present his version.
He showed he's learned the importance of convincing Israelis that he gets along well with US presidents.
Martin Indyk, the Australian who became Bill Clinton's senior adviser on the Middle East, writes in his new book, Innocent Abroad, that the breakdown in Netanyahu's relationship with Washington contributed to his loss of the prime ministership in 1999.
Israelis may not like the incumbent in the Oval Office at any particular time, but they regard the US as Israel's most important ally; without it they could be in trouble on three fronts: Hezbollah, Hamas and possibly Iran.
When Netanyahu, at 10.30am on Monday, walked into the White House, he needed no directions. He's an old hand in the White House, having sat through countless hours of meetings with Bill Clinton as they tried to resolve one of history's longest-running conflicts, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Indyk writes that the Netanyahu era became "the winter of our peace process discontent". His references to Netanyahu throughout Innocent Abroad offer little cause for optimism. He writes about "Netanyahu stalling on the implemention of the Oslo accords and Clinton's efforts to budge him producing little result"; "concern that it would provide the opportunity Netanyahu was looking for to avoid fulfilling Israel's Oslo obligations"; "(Ariel Sharon) had taken note of how Yitzhak Shamir and Bibi Netanyahu, the two previous Likud leaders, had mismanaged relations with American presidents".
Another Middle East heavyweight, Dennis Ross, has given similarly damning critiques of Netanyahu, which The Jerusalem Post highlighted this week. Ross, also a Middle East adviser to Clinton, wrote in The Missing Peace that Netanyahu was "nearly insufferable" in his first meeting with Clinton, "lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs".
Ross wrote that after Netanyahu left the room, Clinton observed: "He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires."
The momentum for the Obama administration's preferred outcome, a two-state solution, had been growing ahead of Netanyahu's visit to Washington this week.
Key figures in the leading pro-Israel lobby group in the US, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, had come around to supporting it. They joined a growing list of those who want it: the Obama administration wants it; its predecessors, the Bush and Clinton administrations wanted it; the 27-nation European Union wants it; individually, France, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic want it, and all of them told Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman this face to face recently; the UN wants it; Australia wants it, both Labor and the Coalition; the Vatican wants it; the Palestinian Authority wants it.
Inside Israel, Netanyahu's three predecessors wanted it: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon; Israel's President Shimon Peres wants it; Opposition leader Tzipi Livni wants it: it was part of her platform for the February election and her Kadima party won the most votes of any party (although under Israel's complicated system the right-wing parties formed the Government because their bloc, led by Likud, won more votes than the centre-left bloc); 62 per cent of Israelis want it, according to the latest poll, although Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon says he thinks the figure is likely to be as high as 75 per cent.
The key question is why Netanyahu is standing against such concerted opinion.
No question mystifies foreign diplomats in Israel more than this. One senior diplomat recently predicted to me that Netanyahu was trying to let time pass after the election so he could finally commit to a two-state solution.
He must have made a secret deal, he said, with one of the many parties he needed to form his coalition government, and as time passed he would find a way to back out of it.
When that had not happened by the time of the Obama meeting, the diplomat said: "From Netanyahu's point of view, would you necessarily want to be seen to buckle on day one?"
Among foreign observers and diplomats, opinion about Netanyahu's strategy tends to fall into two camps. The first - harsher - interpretation is that his right-wing power base is pleased with the status quo as Israel is quiet internally and it allows Jewish settlements to continue to grow.
The second - kinder - interpretation is that Netanyahu genuinely does not think the present circumstances are right for any peace deal; with Hamas in control in Gaza any independent Palestinian state could be used to attack Israel.
While on the surface Netanyahu looks to be out of touch even with majority opinion inside Israel, a closer look shows that in fact he is more in harmony with public opinion than many outsiders realise, as one would expect of someone who has been elected prime minister twice, 13 years apart.
A poll last week by Israel's Channel One showed a majority of Israelis - 62 per cent - want two states. But when asked whether they would support a Palestinian state that had its own army and ability to make agreements with other countries, an even bigger majority - 72 per cent - said no.
This is the sentiment Netanyahu is capturing, a fear engendered by years of warfare. Hamas's firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel for eight years has entered the national psyche.
As Channel One's political editor, Ayala Hasson, tells Inquirer: "My interpretation of the (poll) result is that people are ready to give up land but the Gaza example is the reason for these figures." Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor reinforces that view: "We dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza (Strip) and look what happened."
Netanyahu says he will not agree to any Palestinian state that controls its own airspace: Israel's insurance that Iran does not use any Palestinian territory to attack Israel.
There is also a political element to Netanyahu's opposition to a two-state solution: his own fragile hold on government. One man can destroy his Government at any moment: Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The party Lieberman leads, Yisrael Beiteinu - Israel is our Home - is the most important member of Netanyahu's coalition next to his own Likud party.
A two-state solution means, inevitably, not just an end to settlement expansion but the dismantling of some, and Lieberman is one of the strongest supporters in the Government of settlements: he himself lives in a settlement on the West Bank.
The second key question is: what is the alternative to a two-state solution?
Twenty per cent of Israel's population is Arab and most demographic predictions say Israel's Arab population will grow faster than its Jewish population.
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, there are now 5.5 million Jews living in Israel and 1.4 million Arabs. The Jewish birthrate is 1.6 per cent and the Arab birthrate 2.6 per cent.
One of the significant changes since Netanyahu was last prime minister (1996-99) is the emergence of a significant, credible force inside Israel that supports a two-state solution and, consequently, an end to the expansion of settlements.
That movement is led by Livni and, based on the election three months ago, it represents about 50 per cent of voters. Livni warned last week that the only real alternative to a two-state solution was a binational state.
"The idea that there will be one state for two peoples instead of a Jewish and democratic state of Israel is a strategic threat no less than any other threat," she said.
"Time is not on the side of those who want to keep Israel a Jewish state, time is not on the side of the moderates in the region, and therefore we must not drag our feet and delay the inevitable with unfruitful negotiations."
One of Netanyahu's strongest supporters, adviser Dore Gold, rejects criticisms that the Prime Minister is dragging his feet.
"Benjamin Netanyahu approaches this question with a very clear foundation," Gold tells Inquirer. "Israel is prepared to transfer to the Palestinians all the powers they need to rule themselves minus all the powers to undermine the security of Israel."
During Netanyahu's last term, Dore became Israel's representative at the UN and is now a member of his advisory team.
He says it is far better that Netanyahu refuse to accept a full Palestinian state now than agree to one, then during subsequent negotiations retract some of the powers of a state, such as control of airspace.
"He's focused on powers, not semantics of a state."
The other key player is, of course, the Palestinian side; as Netanyahu was meeting Obama, the Palestinians were turning on themselves.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas this week swore in a new government headed by Salaam Fayed.
Hamas, which runs Gaza and despises Fayed, opposed it, but the sting was that Fatah also condemned it, and Fatah is the support base of the Palestinian Authority.
Inside Fatah, there is a deep split between the old and new guards; the old guard resents Fayed, a former World Bank economist, because he has targeted the corruption in theirranks.
All this means that a Palestinian Government based on a fragile coalition supported by a small group, new-guard Fatah, needs to make concessions to an Israeli Government based on a fragile coalition supported by Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu.
For all the pessimism after this week's White House meeting, there is a story in Indyk's book which suggests that with Netanyahu what you see is not always what you get. Indyk recalls how after the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Netanyahu ran a gruelling campaign to become prime minister against the sentimental favourite, Peres, which included attack ads showing Peres shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
Over pictures of the handshake, Netanyahu's campaign overlaid shattered glass that changed into flashes of blown-up buses and Israeli victims of terrorism.
But after winning office, Indyk writes, Netanyahu was photographed at the White House warmly shaking Arafat's hand.
There was a hint of that this week: Netanyahu held his ground with Obama but immediately on returning to Israel he announced he would resume peace talks with both the Palestinians and the Syrians.
The following day, Israeli security forces went into a Jewish outpost on the West Bank and demolished it; for all the bluster of many settlers, there was no resistance.
But the difficulty of the Middle East was reflected by the reaction. Rather than acknowledge something it had demanded for years, the Peace Now activist group said it was merely a public relations exercise, as it was just a "wee outpost".
The settlers, for their part, were just as contemptuous. They returned a few hours after the outpost was demolished to rebuild it.
And so this tragic circle keeps turning. |
