Trading Sanctions for Settlements
Obama Needs a New Mideast Policy
Article Summary and Author Biography
There is an alternative to the Obama administration's misguided policy, since Israelis care less about holding onto settlements than about stopping Iran's nuclear program.
BRET STEPHENS is a Deputy Editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the newspaper’s foreign affairs columnist.
Snapshot
The expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem was a provocation aimed at the United States -- and only made the path toward long-term peace more difficult. If the Obama administration hopes to preserve its role as a broker of future Mideast peace talks, it must hold firm in applying international resolutions on the issue.
Author Interview
Ehud Yaari answers questions about U.S.-Israeli relations and the Middle East peace process.
Snapshot
The expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem was a provocation aimed at the United States -- and only made the path toward long-term peace more difficult. If the Obama administration hopes to preserve its role as a broker of future Mideast peace talks, it must hold firm in applying international resolutions on the issue.
Author Interview
Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Daniel Ayalon answers questions about U.S.-Israeli relations and the future of the peace process.
When Joe Biden touched down in Tel Aviv on March 8, there was no indication that his visit would set off the most serious crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations in decades. The U.S. vice president arrived carrying the text of an effusively pro-Israel speech that was meant to assure skittish Israelis that the Obama administration would remain as committed as any of its predecessors to their security. Such an assurance, the administration evidently believed, was essential if the United States was to persuade the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remove settlements from the West Bank in order to make way for a Palestinian state.
But Biden’s plans were soon upended. On March 9, a mid-level official in Israel’s Interior Ministry announced the approval of the fourth stage in a seven-part approval process for the construction of 1,600 residential units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. Geographically, Ramat Shlomo is in north Jerusalem, within the city’s municipal boundaries, and successive Israeli governments have insisted that they would never relinquish these areas in any final settlement with the Palestinians. But because the neighborhood lies across the Green Line (which separates pre-1967 Israel from those territories captured in the Six-Day War), it is widely seen by non-Israelis as being part of East Jerusalem, the side of the city envisioned as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Biden wasted no time in condemning the announcement, although he was also quick to accept Netanyahu’s apology for its timing.
Less forgiving, however, were Biden’s principal counterparts in the administration. On March 12, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu “to make clear the United States considered the announcement a deeply negative signal about Israel’s approach to the bilateral relationship,” according to Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley. And the president himself reportedly gave Netanyahu the chilliest of receptions when they met in the White House the following week.
Sundry pundits and policy experts are cheering this turn of events, saying the administration’s tough stance is good for America’s interests in the region, good for its standing in the Muslim world, and good for Israel’s long-term interests, too. But those now cheering may soon find themselves disappointed by what the Obama administration’s approach actually achieves. Why? Because it flies in the face of three hard political realities: Israeli, Arab, and American.
The Obama administration's approach flies in the face of three hard political realities: Israeli, Arab, and American.
The Israeli reality is that the maximum Israelis are prepared to offer is less than the minimum Palestinians are prepared to accept. The Arab reality (which goes far to account for the Israeli reality) is that Islamism has broadly supplanted secular and nationalist politics, at least at the level of public sentiment. The American reality is that there are limits to what Washington can or is likely to do to reshape Arab or Israeli views in a way that would favor a settlement of the conflict.
Consider each of these realities from the perspectives of the players themselves.
First, imagine yourself as a quintessential middle Israeli -- barely religious, by no means enthralled by visions of Greater Israel, a self-described pragmatist who is only keen to be nobody’s fool. For 20 years, you have voted with the winner in every parliamentary election, from Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party in 1992 to Netanyahu’s Likud in 2009. You had high expectations for the Oslo accords and supported the withdrawal from Gaza, but you also cheered Ariel Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002 and Ehud Olmert’s wars with Hezbollah and Hamas.
If you are that Israeli -- which is to say, the constant plurality of the country’s recent past -- what conclusions are you likely to draw about the country’s peace-making efforts? The first conclusion is that peace with this generation of Palestinian leaders is unlikely. Correctly or not, Israelis overwhelmingly believe that Ehud Barak made a generous offer to Yasir Arafat at the 2000 Camp David talks and wasn’t even met with a counteroffer. The same goes for Ehud Olmert’s even more generous offer (again, in Israeli eyes) to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008.
The second conclusion is that although separation from the Palestinians is desirable in theory, it is very risky in practice. Israel withdrew from its “security corridor” in south Lebanon in 2000 but wound up having to go to war against a well-armed Hezbollah a few years later. Ditto for what happened after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. You have come to believe that even if Israel were to withdraw from the last millimeter of the West Bank, Palestinians would still find a reason to gin up claims against you, probably through continued insistence on the so-called right of return.
The third conclusion is that trends in Palestinian politics bode ill for a long-term settlement. Hamas handily won the 2006 parliamentary elections and easily evicted Fatah from power in Gaza the next year. Last year, the Fatah powerbroker Mohammed Dahlan insisted that the party would not urge Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist and, moreover, that Fatah itself (as opposed to the PLO) had “never recognized Israel’s right to exist.”
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