Israeli and Palestinian officials have been in Washington laying the ground for President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel and the West Bank, scheduled for next month and the first since he took office four years ago. Topping the agenda, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, will be efforts to restart the long-stalled peace process. Last week Palestinian officials said they had urged the White House to arrive with a diplomatic plan. The US president began his first term on a different footing, ignoring Israel and heading instead to Cairo where he made a speech committing the US to a new era in relations with the Arab world. Little came of the promise. Now he apparently intends to start his second term — as Netanyahu resumes office too, following last month’s elections — with an effort to engage with Israel and the Palestinians that is almost as certain to prove an exercise in futility.
The prospect of reviving the peace track between Israel and the Palestinians is not one that is appetising for either Obama or Netanyahu. Both are bruised from locking horns over a settlement freeze — the key plank of the US president’s efforts — during his first term. But equally, it seems, the price of continuing inaction is high too. The Palestinians have repeatedly embarrassed Obama at the United Nations, not least by isolating the US in November as it opposed an upgrade in the Palestinians’ observer status. Inertia also looks risky given the growing unrest in the West Bank over hunger-striking prisoners.
Ahead lie potentially even bigger headaches, including the doomsday scenario — from Israel and Washington’s perspective — that the Palestinians approach the International Criminal Court to demand Israel be investigated for war crimes.
The perennial optimists have been searching for signs that Obama is readier this time to get tough. Neither of the president’s recent major appointments — John Kerry as secretary of state and Chuck Hagel, nominated as defence secretary — has been welcomed in Israel.
US determination has been buoyed, it is argued, by what is seen as a tide change in Israeli public opinion, highlighted by the surprise electoral success of centrist Yair Lapid and relatively poor showing by Netanyahu’s Likud party. Netanyahu’s officials sense similar motives, complaining that Obama’s visit so soon after the election is direct “interference” in coalition-building. The centrists, they fear, will be able to extract concessions from Netanyahu, who will not wish to greet the US president as head of an extremist government. Israeli officials, meanwhile, look eager to mend fences: they have hopefully codenamed the visit “Unbreakable Alliance” and announced an intention to award Obama Israel’s highest honour, the presidential medal.
The more hopeful scenarios, however, overlook the obstacles to a diplomatic solution posed both by Israel’s domestic politics and by the Palestinians’ inability to withstand Israeli bullying. Not least, they ignore the fact that Netanyahu’s Knesset faction is the most rightwing in Likud’s history. He cannot advance a peace formula — assuming he wanted to — without tearing apart his party. Equally, there is nothing in Lapid’s record to indicate he is willing to push for meaningful compromises on Palestinian statehood. On this issue, he occupies the traditional ground of Likud, before it moved further right. A recent poll found half his supporters called themselves right-wing. Last week Netanyahu signed a coalition pact with another supposed centrist, Tzipi Livni, a former Likud leader who now heads a small faction called Hatnuah. The goal, as one Likud official cynically put it, was to use Livni to “whitewash the Netanyahu government in the world’s eyes”.
In other words, Netanyahu hopes a Livni or a Lapid will buy him breathing space as he entrenches the settlements and pushes Palestinians out of large areas of the West Bank under cover of what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz termed a “booby-trapped diplomatic process”.
What of the Palestinians? Will they not be able to mount an effective challenge to Israeli intransigence, given an apparent renewed US interest in diplomacy?
Here is the rub. Netanyahu already has a stranglehold on the politics of his potential peace partners. He can easily manipulate the fortunes of the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on the two biggest tests he faces: the “peace process” overseen by the international community, and reconciliation talks with the rival Palestinian faction Hamas. The latest talks between Hamas and Fatah broke down in Cairo this month, even though unity, in the view of most Palestinians, is a precondition of their seeking viable statehood. The talks’ failure followed the “arrest” by Israel of 25 Hamas leaders in the West Bank, seizures that Palestinian human rights groups and Hamas warned were intended to disrupt reconciliation.
Meanwhile, Israel has repeatedly undermined Abbas’s rule, and kept his PA close to collapse, by turning on and off one of its major sources of income — tax monies Israel regularly collects on behalf of the Palestinians and is supposed to pass on.
As a result, Abbas is trapped between various pressures impossible to reconcile: the need to keep Israel happy, to maintain legitimacy with his own people and to foster a shared political agenda with other Palestinian factions.
The sticks that Israel wields force Abbas to keep the door open to negotiations even as most Palestinians recognise their utter pointlessness. Likewise, his constant need to appease Israel and the US serves only to widen differences with Hamas.
The Palestinians are stuck in a political and diplomatic cul-de-sac, unable to move forward either with the development of their national struggle or with talks on viable statehood. Whatever Obama’s intentions, the reality is that this will be another four years of diplomatic failure.
“The sticks that Israel wields force Abbas to keep the door open to negotiations even as most Palestinians recognise their utter pointlessness. ”
But what is in this for Israel ? Sure, they have an incredibly sophisticated machine but where is it going? What is the end game ? Do Zionists honestly think they have a long term solution to their existential question? They want apartheid- do they really think they can sell this in Galut?
Israel is so like the Emperor and his new clothes.
The more hopeful scenarios, however, overlook the obstacles to a diplomatic solution posed both by Israel’s domestic politics and by the Palestinians’ inability to withstand Israeli bullying.
I don’t think the Palestinians are looking for a diplomatic solution. I’ll be amazed if there isn’t a full-blown Palestinian uprising during Obama’s visit. The Palestinians have done an excellent job of ignoring Israel and the US on the issue of the UN upgrade and reconciliation talks.
Abbas will likely take-up the issue of settlements with the 10th Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly before going to the ICJ and ICC over the prisoners in Israel, the settlements, and the blockade/apartheid wall/tax revenue extortion. There is ample evidence of apartheid and persecution.
Obama and Netanyahu ought to know that the status quo is simply unsustainable. They no longer have the capacity to keep the Palestinians in check. The news this weekend said Netanyahu had released the tax revenues to the Palestinians and was asking that they prevent an intifada. I wish them lots of luck with that strategy (not)! Abbas and Meshall are calling for a non-violent intifada.
Obama is a waste of time. He’s a corporate whore. Sure he’s better than the Republicans but he’s still a creature of Wall St.
Hope and change were killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan shortly after his inauguration.
Good analysis, Jonathan, but your conclusion is no more inevitable than “segregation now, segregation forever.” Israel has become a right-wing mob, riling itself up to pillage and plunder, justifying itself on racist and religious beliefs in existential threats on every front.
That mob will melt away in the face of relentless criticism of human rights violations, underscored by dying hunger strikers, dying torture victims, former IDF soldiers breaking barriers, Oscar nominations, more and more and more American Jews turning away in disgust. That mob is already losing its mojo, as reflected by Lapid’s stunning success, garnered by focusing on domestic issues, jobs and rent. The rise of domestic issues means the mob has lost interest in the existential threat mantra. Last summer, an Israeli yoghurt maker was selling its product via a mock-up of the existential threat mongers trying to get American generals to start a war with Iran, in which an Arab slang word endorsing their product was clownishly misinterpreted by the Israelis as a go-ahead for nuclear war.
Enter Obama, as the lonely but determined-to-stand-on-principle sheriff who must talk the mob out of a lynching, by calling out individual Israelis and reminding them of their domestic agendas, their wives and kids, standing for law and order, international law and order in this case, because, those who stand for continued criminal behavior can only sound crazed in that quieter, more dispassionate conversation. If not Obama, then an Israeli who has had enough.
Four more years of the same is not at all probable. Too many people must continue to make a quiet dispassionate decision to continue to be international criminals, unsupported by the thrill of an out-of-control mob.
Obama badly blundered when he “blinked first”, in his confrontation with Netanyahu.
Wrecked Hillary Clinton’s effort to stop the growth of the illegal colonies in the West Bank. Vali Nasr’s new book (out in April) explains some of the background inside the White House, regarding Obama’s great blunder.