David Weinberg, Director the CIC’s Israel office, comments on the Obama and Netanyahu speeches, the settlement dispute, the turmoil in Iran – and the interplay between them:
Prof. Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University (where Prime Minister Netanyahu gave his major policy address last week), believes that the Netanyahu speech successfully delineated the Israeli national consensus and solidified the Prime Minister’s position as the mainstream Israeli political leader.
Inbar points to the fact that a series of polls taken this week found that over 70 percent of Israelis find themselves in agreement with Netanyahu – quite a feat for any Israeli prime minister! He attributes this to the Prime Minister’s emphasis on the historic rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and to Jerusalem, and on to the pragmatic position he staked out on the outlines of Palestinian statehood, i.e., ready for a repartition of the Land of Israel to allow for Palestinian independence as long as the Palestinian state accepts the permanent legitimacy of the Jewish state and does not have the ability to threaten it.
“The speech positioned Netanyahu at the centre of Israeli politics,” Inbar says. “His coalition remains strong, and a majority of the Kadima opposition party prefers to join the government too. Capturing the centre of Israeli politics should allow Netanyahu flexibility if there is a real opportunity for peace, as well as the needed stature to lead Israel should it enter into protracted conflict,” – whether that be a military confrontation with the Palestinians or diplomatic conflict with the US.
Prof. Stuart Cohen indeed sees dark shadows of conflict with the Obama Administration lurking in Netanyahu’s call for demilitarization of a Palestinian state. While the insistence on Palestinian demilitarization has been a central plank of Israel – and American – policy for years, Cohen fears that Obama will also attempt to apply the principle to Israel.
“Netanyahu’s insistence on demilitarization opens the door to demands for mutual demilitarization, including the diminution of Israel’s military presence along the highways of Judea and Samaria and the introduction of foreign military forces into the West Bank prior to the signing of a full Israeli-Palestinian agreement. In fact, mutual limits on military force have been the pattern of previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements brokered by the US. Far from soothing American-Israeli tensions, Netanyahu’s call for demilitarization could yet prove to be a source of their exacerbation.”
In the meantime, the calls from Obama (in his Cairo University speech) and Netanyahu (in his Begin-Sadat Center speech) on the Arab world to extend a hand in peace to Israel have fallen completely flat. No Arab leader has responded positively, probably because they sense that Obama doesn’t really have any hard expectations from them.
Instead, Obama has turned his attention almost exclusively to Israeli settlements, creating the impression in Arab capitols that Washington is going to “deliver” Israel. The impression of a sharp rift between the US and Israel over settlements grew today, as the two countries abruptly called off high-level talks in Paris on the issue.
Israeli commentators have been caustic in their derision of President Obama’s “naiveté” in seeking rapid Mideast solutions. Arabist Dr. Guy Bechor of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Institute wrote that “when I read that President Obama is calling for normalization of ties between the Arab world and Israel at the early stages of his ‘peace plan,’ I shrugged. Yet when I read that he intends to settle the Palestinian refugees in the Arab states they currently live in, and grant them monetary compensation, I was amused.”
“These are pipe dreams, just like the ‘Arab democracy’ vision of his predecessor that collapsed loudly and brought disaster to the region. This is a rookie plan of an intern who believes that the Israeli-Arab conflict can be resolved with a quick and arrogant gesture.”
“Arab states will never renounce their demand to send back Palestinian refugees to Palestine, that is, to the State of Israel… The Arab political establishment wishes to realize the ‘right of return’ – not for the sake of the Palestinians, heaven forbid, who are hated in most Arab States, but rather – in order to weaken Israel, destroy it from within, and sink it in the sea of returning Palestinians… (Arab states) hate the Palestinians, but admire the Palestinian problem. They hate the refugees, but admire their right of return. The Arab states have not been maintaining the refugee problem for more than 60 years in order to renounce it.” Certainly not, unless they are really, significantly pressured to do so.
In the meantime, Arab leaders feel no pressure to move towards Israel. Not from Obama and not by the situation. They know better than to expect any grand peace breakthroughs that would require them to pay a diplomatic price. The Palestinians are hopelessly and violently divided between the radical Islamic, Iranian-backed Hamas and the secularist, corrupt Fatah movement. The Iranians are rapidly approaching a nuclear weapon. Little progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace is possible under these circumstances.
What Arab (and Israeli) leaders really want is for Obama to forthrightly and forcefully tackle the Iranian bomb effort as The New York Times emphasizes again today. Yet in the Cairo speech, Obama conceded that Iran has rights to peaceful nuclear power, and did not back this up with clear opposition to Iran’s military nuclear effort. He sounded no warnings to Teheran, and offered no reassurance to Arab regimes panicked by Teheran’s nuclear drive.
And over the past week, as Teheran exploded under the oppressive hand of a crooked Ahmadinejad regime, President Obama laid back, saying that he doesn’t want to “meddle” in Iranian affairs; saying that he still wants to “engage” the Iranian government and people.
He is, said one Israeli pundit, too busy fiddling with settlements to deal with Teheran burning.
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