Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa | Analysis

MIDEAST: Peace Talk Without Peace Vision

Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

TEL AVIV, Jun 15 2009 (IPS) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much anticipated policy speech about his peace intentions was suffused with peace rhetoric, but it was starkly short on a peace vision.

The Sunday night speech at the Begin-Sadat Peace Centre at Bar Ilan University spotlighted a leader quintessentially focused on a single target – political survival: survival between conflicting challenges – that from a U.S. President who wants a Palestinian-Israeli peace based on two states, and that from his own right-wing coalition which rejects outright the concept of an independent Palestinian state.

The Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, declared dismissively that Netanyahu would have “to wait a thousand years” before Palestinians would be ready to accept his terms.

Little wonder the Palestinians sounded sorely disappointed: Netanyahu gave no commitment to end the occupation, reiterated Israel’s determination to retain the whole of Jerusalem as its “united capital”, rejected any possibility of a compromise on Palestinian refugees, and even had fulsome praise for the Jewish settlers in the West Bank whom he called “Israeli pioneers”.

For all these shortcomings, the Obama Administration was listening for one thing, and one thing only: would the Israeli prime minister finally acknowledge the necessity for a Palestinian state? He may have squirmed at the buzzword but, in the end, Netanyahu did utter the phrase over which he has balked ever since his election back in February.

He did so only on strict conditions: “If we get a guarantee for demilitarisation and necessary security arrangements for Israel, and if the Palestinians recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people, we will be willing in a real peace agreement to reach a solution of a demilitarised Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state,” he said.


The Netanyahu calculation seems to have been clear-cut – that, in the end, the Palestinians will save him from himself by rejecting his terms as the basis for resuming peace talks. It’s as if Netanyahu had put his foot in Barack Obama’s peace door ostensibly to prize it further open whereas, in reality, all he has done is to have put his foot in the door so as to trip up the Palestinians so that they fall before entering the Obama peace room.

“It was vantage Netanyahu,” says David Landau, the former chief editor of Haaretz, who is currently completing a book about how another Israeli right- wing leader, former prime minister Ariel Sharon, had himself gone down the road which Netanyahu is now so reluctant to take.

Netanyahu had been warned by his own camp not to succumb to the demands that he finally state his readiness to accept a future Palestinian state in the West Bank. In domestic political terms, by coming to terms with a degree of Palestinian sovereignty, he has crossed some sort of right-wing Rubicon.

But, his formulation was in the end so niggling that his own Likud party ideologues – and even the settlers themselves – say they don’t consider his commitment a tangible threat to the settlement enterprise. They will only be really alarmed, they say, if Netanyahu allows the Palestinian state eventually to begin taking shape.

“We don’t like it but we can live with it,” said Dani Dayan, a settler leader. Many Netanyahu supporters praised the prime minister for “skilfully circumventing international pressure.”

Israel’s modus operandi during 20 years of failed peacemaking with the Palestinians has often been problematic. Even when successive governments demonstrated a genuine commitment to move the peace process forward, it was invariably accompanied by the creation of new realities on the ground and, in turn, the subsequent positing of new conditions to the Palestinians.

That inevitably impeded real progress towards peace. The continuing expansion of settlement building and dramatic increases during that period in the settler population – even as Israel was engaged in peace talks – is the starkest example of that.

Enter a new reality – this time, a reality shaped not by Israel, but by a U.S. Administration that assesses Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians first and foremost in terms of U.S. national interests.

Wisely, the U.S. took Netanyahu’s acceptance of a Palestinian state at face value. U.S. officials deftly side-stepped the Israeli leader’s constraints. His speech was termed “an important step forward.”

A White House statement said “President Obama believes this solution can and must ensure both Israel’s security and the fulfilment of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for a viable state, and he welcomes Prime Minister Netanyahu’s endorsement of that goal.”

For all the reluctance of his government partners to embrace the Obama peace vision, Netanyahu may well have managed to consolidate his coalition. On the other hand, the prime minister now faces the prospect of being hoisted by the Administration on his own Palestinian state petard: the U.S. seems determined to push hard on the peace process – whether or not the Palestinians are prepared to subscribe upfront to the Israeli conditions.

Netanyahu’s whole speech was carefully calibrated to securing a U.S. tick for their position on how to proceed towards resolving the Middle East conflict in the hope that that would put him in a position to press the U.S. to deliver on Israel’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear quest, said Yaron Dekel, political analyst at Israeli public television. The weekend election results in Iran may indeed have boosted Netanyahu’s hopes in this regard.

It’s far from certain, however, that the U.S. will allow Netanyahu to skip over the real issues that still need to be addressed in order to transform the present verbal commitments to peace into a tangible peace process: in his speech, Netanyahu again brushed off the U.S. absolute settlement freeze demand. He’s unlikely to get off that easily.

 
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