Netanyahu’s Fancy Footwork

Israel’s Prime Minister succeeded in advancing the Near East peace process – although minimally – while passing the buck to the Palestinians.

Success! Benjamin Netanyahu actually used the phrase “Palestinian state” – albeit in a way that aroused skepticism that Israelis and Palestinians would ever come to a two-state solution. Equally minuscule is the contribution of the settlement lobby. The Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech that appealed mainly to the politically right of center, not least because, despite his attempts to go forward, he remains firmly bogged down in long-outdated Likud Party ideology.

Anyone looking to place blame for the Near East conflict exclusively on the Palestinians has to be wearing pretty large blinders. For example, they have to ignore the fact that the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank since the Oslo Accords took effect has grown from 110,000 to over 300,000. Those settlers will have no worries about the future because Netanyahu says they can stay right where they are and continue to expand.

Despite that, Netanyahu, like Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni before him is ready to accept the idea of a Palestinian state – sort of. The referenced state would have very restricted sovereign rights. It would have to open its airspace to the Israeli air force for training exercises and the Palestinians would not be allowed sole control of their own borders. Above all, they would not be permitted to have their own military forces. Not that all this is new with Netanyahu.

Similar caveats had been proposed as early as the Camp David negotiations during the summer of 2000. Even the liberal Geneva peace accords, worked out by both Israelis and Palestinians, made provisions for a demilitarization that would be enforced by a multinational peace keeping force stationed in the future Palestine.

In any case, Netanyahu can’t expect to get an enforced copyright on the idea that Israel would never be threatened by a Palestinian state because of security guarantees from the international community, and particularly from the United States.

Even more problematic is his insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the “national Jewish homeland.” Even if Netanyahu doesn’t make that a precondition for negotiations, it remains an enormous hurdle that neither the Egyptians nor the Jordanians had to accept prior to their peace pacts with Israel. It seems as though Netanyahu is trying to pass the buck to the Palestinians, and they reacted appropriately. “Sabotage of the peace process,” was one of the milder responses, and Netanyahu had to endure even sharper criticism from Israeli liberals: “patriarchal,” “colonialist” and as Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar put it, “in the best neoconservative tradition.”

But what President Obama thought of Netanyahu’s speech is more crucial. The peace process may have been minimally advanced by it; for Netanyahu, it was a giant step. Modern education theory prescribes that every success has to be positively reinforced, so there was praise from Washington. A start was made. But the path to peace is long and enforcement will be necessary