Middle East
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Netanyahu needs a friend
November 8, 2009 - 11:14 AM | by: Michael Tobin
As of this writing, 3:38 PM Jerusalem time, officials in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office are unable to say whether US President Barack Obama will snub Israel’s leader when he gets to the US. That is primarily because the Prime Minister and his top aides are on the plane en route to the States. American officials have already said they will meet, but an air of desperation has Israelis eager to get that confirmation, breathe deep and say the President will sit down with the Prime Minister.
This is a departure from the Prime Minister who defiantly turned his back on the President Obama’s call for a freeze in settlement construction. Netanyahu announced plans for more construction and shored up his power base by enhancing his popularity with the right wing majority in Israel. Now, suddenly Netanyahu is looking to cozy up to the US.
For an answer why, look to developments in the Palestinian territories. On Thursday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, of the moderate Fatah party, announced that he would not run for re- election. No doubt, this was Abbas’ protest over his frustration with Israel’s refusal to stop building settlements and his exasperation when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that final status negotiations should begin before Israel stops building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This forces Abbas to eat his own ultimatum of ‘no talks without a settlement freeze’ and continues to make him look weak and ineffective to his constituents.
However, Abbas has made this threat before and pundits think, like most of what the Palestinian President has done in office, this threat is impotent. His Fatah party has yet to name a replacement candidate. Most think the elections scheduled for January 24, 2010, will be postponed indefinitely. The logistics will be difficult enough to hold elections in the West bank and East Jerusalem, but without an agreement on Palestinian Unity, Hamas will likely prevent elections from being held in the Gaza strip.
Still, the Palestinian equivalent of a constitution says if Abbas resigns and there is no replacement, the Speaker of the Parliament would be named as President. That Speaker is Aziz Duek, a top politician from Hamas. The notion of having Hamas in charge of both Gaza and the Palestinian Presidency has Prime Minister Netanyahu looking for a friend.
Couple that with the proposal offered up by the Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyad in August of this year. It calls for a massive focus on development of Palestinian institutions and a unilateral declaration of Palestinian Statehood within 2 years. European leaders, the Quartet of Middle East negotiators (US, EU, Russia and the UN) all jumped on board with the proposal. The Obama administration announced a $20 Million dollar grant to back the proposal. This proposal has widely been embraced because it is a radical, Western departure from the old PLO path of armed struggle to liberate Palestine using all options.
Israel embraces parts of this proposal like “bottom up” state building. Prime Minister Netanyahu has frequently spoken about Palestinian “economic prosperity” as the pathway to peace. But that unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood causes sweat to form on the brows of Israel’s leaders. If the world were to recognize a Palestinian State along the 1967 borders, suddenly all of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank - populated with half a million settlers - would be recognized as illegal incursions into sovereign territory. Use of force by Palestinians against the settlers would have new arguments for justification.
On top of that, Israel has security concerns. Leaders look at what happened in Gaza and fear that a West Bank, without an Israeli military presence, will fall under the control of Islamic radicals like Hamas. Dan Diker of the think tank Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs writes “Hezbollah’s 4000 rocket attacks from the North in 2006 and Hamas’ 10,000 rocket and Mortar attacks from Gaza, culminating in the 2006 Gaza war, both underscore the potential rocket threat against Israel’s cities that could emerge from a Palestinian state in the West Bank if Israel were to withdraw to the Pre-1967 lines.”
To combat those threats, Israeli leaders are doing two things: They are quoting language from the 1993 Oslo agreement which said, “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of a permanent status agreement.” And they are looking to get chummy, once again, with the leader of Israel’s best ally who they defied and embarrassed when Netanyahu announced that he would keep building new housing units in the West bank.
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