Barack and Bibi

Has Bibi Won the First Round?
by Patrick Seale

On two key issues of Barack Obama’s foreign policy -- Palestinian statehood and reconciliation with Iran -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has chosen to fight the American President. He has refused to bend to Obama’s will, and is instead seeking to outwit and defeat him.

Thus, to save his right-wing coalition -- and his own job -- Netanyahu has not hesitated to offend Obama and even put at risk Israel’s vital relationship with the United States. The fact that he has done so suggests that he thinks he can win the present battle of wills. Indeed, Netanyahu may already have won the first round.

The evidence is fragmentary, but seems to be there nevertheless. If a State Department spokesman is to be believed, the United States is softening somewhat its demand for a total Israeli settlement freeze before Israeli-Palestinian negotiations can begin. Washington also seems to have embraced Israeli demands for tougher sanctions against Iran, if it refuses to halt uranium enrichment by a September deadline. Obama had earlier mentioned September as a tentative date when the situation would have to be reassessed.

These apparent concessions to Israeli demands may be only tactical. In squeezing Netanyahu, Obama has proceeded with great caution. The American president has not yet revealed his own battle plan. It is as if he has wanted the Israelis to reach certain conclusions by themselves, rather than be pushed.

To Netanyahu’s way of thinking, however, it is Obama who is beleaguered -- not himself. After all, from Netanyahu’s standpoint, Obama has committed the cardinal sin of daring to equate Israeli and Palestinian interests, and of reaching out a hand of friendship to Iran, a country Israel has long identified as a dangerous rival. Netanyahu wants Iran struck down, much as Israel and its friends pressed the United States to strike down Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for seeming to pose a long-term strategic threat to the Jewish state.

It is now clear that Netanyahu has no intention whatsoever of ending the occupation and settlement of the West Bank, or of conceding Palestinian statehood in any meaningful sense. Regarding Iran, he has spared no effort to press the international community to punish Iran with paralysing sanctions, while hinting that Israel would itself strike Iran, with or without America’s green light, if Tehran did not put an end to its nuclear programme.

These are arrogant and short-sighted positions. They point to a lack of fresh security thinking in Israel. It is as if Netanyahu and his civilian and military colleagues were blind to the evolution of international (including American) opinion regarding Israel, and to the looming changes in Israel’s strategic environment.

Indeed, it is as if Israeli leaders remained persuaded that harsh and brutal methods -- the continued seizure and settlement of Palestinian land, the repeated assaults on Israel’s neighbours, the political assassination of Arab opponents -- would continue to work in the future as they have done in the past. In other words, that Israel would always be able to dominate the entire region militarily, and would therefore have no need to make concessions.

Netanyahu was in Europe this past week. After meeting Britain’s Gordon Brown and Germany’s Angela Merkel, he declared that no settlement freeze had been agreed; and that he would certainly not accept a freeze in East Jerusalem, where building has, in fact, been speeded up. Meanwhile Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has warned Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad that Israel would not tolerate him declaring a de facto Palestinian state by 2011, if negotiations had not progressed by then.

Netanyahu may indeed have boxed himself into a corner, lulled by the fact that Obama has not yet published his peace plan. There is talk of a tripartite meeting between Obama, Netanyahu and Mahmud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, in New York at the end of September.

This may be when Netanyahu could face some real heat. To outside observers, Obama has not retreated an inch from the position he outlined in Cairo on June 4. “Israelis must acknowledge,” he then declared, “that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Obama might have added that Israel’s land grab must not only be stopped, but put into reverse. For the conflict to be resolved, settlements will have to be evacuated; borders defined; Jerusalem shared; and a solution agreed for the refugees. To focus on Israel’s security alone, as Netanyahu evidently prefers, would be to elude and fudge other key problems which will need to be addressed.

Netanyahu will need to be persuaded that it is dangerous for him to subvert the central planks of Obama’s Middle East policy; dangerous to take on a regional power such as Iran, with its prickly nationalism, ancient civilization, a population ten times that of Israel, and a land area vastly bigger; dangerous to reject the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which is still on the table (but for how long?); dangerous to keep building in Arab East Jerusalem; dangerous to seek to destroy Hamas by the pitiless siege of Gaza; dangerous to delay liberating Gilad Shalit by a prisoner exchange; above all, dangerous to keep on piling up hate against Israel by a callous indifference to Arab interests and to Arab life.

However difficult it may seem, the time for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict has arrived. Barack Obama is the one world leader -- indeed the only one in our lifetime -- who has a chance of pulling it off. He knows that it holds the key to America’s future relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and that it is the only way to exorcise the curse of terrorism, which is spreading like an epidemic.

A comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace would stabilise the region, introduce a new era of prosperity, guarantee Israel’s long-term security, bring Iran into the circle of friendly nations, and even allow Washington, with the enhanced authority of a successful peace-maker, to bring an honourable end to its costly and misguided war in Afghanistan.

Netanyahu may have won an early round against Barack Obama, but he has by no means won the war. We have seen only skirmishes so far. The real battle is yet to come.


Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Copyright © 2009 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global