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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Are the US and Israel about to clash? By Ira Chernus
Here's the question few peole are asking
as 2012 ends, especially given the effusive public
support the Obama administration offered Israel in
its recent conflict with Hamas in Gaza: will 2013
be a year of confrontation between Washington and
Jerusalem?
It's true that the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears dead in
the water. No matter how much Obama might have
wanted that prize, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has rebuffed him at every turn. The
president appears to have taken it on the chin,
offering more than the usual support for Israel
and in return getting kloom (as they say in
Hebrew). Nothing at all.
However, the
operative word here is "appears". In foreign affairs
what you see - a show
carefully scripted for political purposes - often
bears little relation to what you actually get.
While the Obama administration has acceded
to the imagery of knee-jerk support for whatever
Israel does, no matter how outrageous, behind the
scenes its policies are beginning to look far less
predictable. In fact, unlikely as it may seem, a
showdown could be brewing between the two
countries. If so, the outcome will depend on a
complicated interplay between private diplomacy
and public theater.
The latest well-masked
US intervention came in the brief November war
between Israel and Gaza. It began when Israel
assassinated a Hamas leader deeply involved in
secret truce talks between the supposedly
non-communicating foes.
Destructive as it
was, the war proved brief for one reason: the US
president quickly stepped in. Publicly, he
couldn't have sided more wholeheartedly with
Israel. (It felt as if Mitt Romney had won, not
lost, the election.) In private, as he pressured
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi to force Hamas to
a truce, he reportedly pushed Israeli Netanyahu
just as hard.
The truce agreement even had
an Obama-required twist. It forced Israel to
continue negotiating seriously with Hamas about
easing the blockade that, combined with repeated
destructive Israeli strikes against the
Palestinian infrastructure, has plunged Gaza so
deep into poverty and misery. Talks on the
blockade are reportedly proceeding, though wrapped
in the deepest secrecy. It's hard to imagine
Israel upholding the truce and entering into a
real dialogue to ease the blockade without
significant pressure from Washington.
Washington is also deeply involved in the
tensions between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority (PA) in the West Bank. When PA President
Mahmoud Abbas recently asked the UN General
Assembly to accord Palestine observer status,
Israel publicly denounced any such UN resolution.
The Obama administration wanted to offer a far
softer resolution of its own with Israeli
approval. The Israelis gave in and sent a top
official to Washington to negotiate the language.
In the end, the US had no success; the
stronger resolution passed overwhelmingly. Israel
promptly retaliated by announcing that it would
build 3,000 additional housing units in various
settlements on the West Bank. To make the response
stronger, the Israeli government indicated that it
would also make "preliminary zoning and planning
preparations" for new Israeli settlements in the
most contentious area of the West Bank, known as
E1. Settlements there would virtually bisect the
West Bank and complete a Jewish encirclement of
Jerusalem, ending any hope for a two-state
solution.
Washington can lay down the
law There is a history of the Israeli
government publicly announcing settlement
expansions for symbolic political effect, and
then, under US pressure, pursuing only limited
construction or none at all. Some observers
suspect Netanyahu is now playing the same game.
As the New York Times reported, "For
years, American and European officials have told
the Israelis that E1 is a red line. The leaked,
somewhat vague, announcement ... is a potent
threat that may well, in the end, not be carried
out because the Israeli government worries about
its consequences." Prominent Israeli columnist
Shimon Shiffer was more certain. "Netanyahu," he
wrote, "does not plan to change the policies of
his predecessors, who assured the Americans Israel
would not build even one house in problematic
areas" like E1.
Maybe that's why Netanyahu
sounded so tentative on the subject in an
interview: "What we've advanced so far is only
planning [in E1], and we will have to see. We
shall act further based on what the Palestinians
do." Israeli officials admitted to the New York
Times that the move on E1 was "symbolism against
symbolism".
Several European nations took
the E1 threat seriously and responded with
unusually sharp criticism. Some Israeli insiders
claimed that Obama's hidden hand was at work here,
too. The American president, they speculated, gave
the Europeans "the green light to respond with
extreme measures... The European move is
essentially an American move." If so, it was all
done in private, of course. (The White House
publicly denied the claim.)
Peter Beinart,
editor of the Open Zion page at the Daily Beast
and author of The Crisis of Zionism, claims
administration officials have told him that such
behind-the-scenes maneuvering is Obama's new
strategy. Publicly, Washington will "stand back
and let the rest of the world do the confronting.
Once the US stops trying to save Israel from the
consequences of its actions, the logic goes, and
once Israel feels the full brunt of its mounting
international isolation, its leaders will be
scared into changing course."
As Beinart
suggests, international isolation is what worries
Israelis most. A cut-off of US military aid would
be troubling indeed but in itself hardly fatal,
since Israel already has the strongest military in
the Middle East and a sizeable
military-industrial-high-tech complex of its own.
What Israel needs, above all, from the US
is diplomatic support to protect it from
international rejection, economic boycotts, and a
diplomatic tsunami that could turn Israel into a
pariah state. Political analysts have long assumed
that any Israeli leader who loses the protection
of the US would pay the price at the polls.
That's why some insiders, like Daniel
Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt,
think Obama can "lay down the law" to Israel on E1
- behind closed doors, of course. The influential
Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer puts the
situation in the simplest of terms: "It is clear
who is boss."
Obama's new diplomatic
weapon The rules of Israel's political
game, however, may also be changing. That's a key
to understanding why 2013 could be the year of
confrontation between the leaderships of the two
countries. Netanyahu has allied his Likud party
with the strongest party to its right, Yisrael
Beitenu. To seal his victory in the upcoming
election on January 22, he's put his political
fate in the hands (or talons) of his country's
hawks.
If he wins (which everyone assumes
he will), he'll have to satisfy those hawks - and
they don't care about shrewd secret bargaining or
holding on to allies. What they want, above all,
are public displays of unilateral strength made
with much fanfare, exactly like the recent
settlement-expansion announcement and the
accompanying threat to turn E1 into an Israeli
suburb. Many observers have suggested that the
primary audience was Netanyahu's new,
ever-more-right-wing partners. Plenty of them
still don't trust him, especially after the
ceasefire in Gaza under pressure from Washington.
Most analysts saw the Israeli announcement
as a public punishment of the Palestinians for
their success at the UN. The BBC's Kevin Connolly
had a different interpretation: Israeli hawks felt
that letting the UN vote pass without some strong
response "would be seen as a sign of weakness".
Israeli political life has always been
haunted by a fear of weakness and a conviction
that Jews are condemned to vulnerability in a
world full of anti-Semites eager to destroy them.
The hawks' worldview is built upon this myth of
insecurity. It demands instant retaliation so that
Jews can show the world - but more importantly
themselves - that they are strong enough to resist
every real or (more often) imagined threat.
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