On his first trip to Egypt since his re-election as Israel’s prime minister in March, Benjamin Netanyahu said his new, far right government was committed to peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.
But in the press conference that followed yesterday’s summit between Mr Netanyahu and Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, neither mentioned what many observers here see as the central conflict in yesterday’s meeting: which Middle Eastern leader will win the ear of new US president Barack Obama.
Mr Netanyahu will visit Washington next week, followed by Mr Mubarak later this month. It is thought that each leader will use his opportunity to fight for influence with the US president, whose own policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain unclear.
“There is a kind of a struggle to win the United States for both of them, to win the Barack Obama administration,” said Gamal Abdel Gawad, an analyst at the semi-official Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
“I think that Egypt is in a better position in that regard. It looks like the American administration tends to perceive the Arab-Israeli conflict as the central conflict in the region.”
It is the perceived centrality of that conflict to Middle Eastern security that Mr Netanyahu hopes to alter, Mr Gawad said.
Mr Netanyahu has sought to recruit Egypt, along with the Jordanian government, Israel’s only other Arab peace partner, in convincing Mr Obama that Iran poses a substantial security threat in the region. Mr Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, tomorrow.
“He needs Mubarak; he needs an Arab alliance. And I think he is interested in how he can bring his anti-Iranian and the Egyptian anti-Iranian position for his own interests,” said Walid Kazziha, head of the department of political science at the American University in Cairo.
“He’s probably told the president, ‘Look, we differ on a few things here and there; we even differ on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, but there are things on which we can co-operate and which, if we develop them, would create momentum on other problems’.”
On the question of Iran, Mr Netanyahu may have found a receptive ear in Mr Mubarak. In recent months, Egypt and other Arab states have accused the majority Shiite country of meddling in Arab affairs. Among Arab states, Egypt has taken the lead by engaging in an escalating rhetorical conflict with Iran and its proxy groups: Hizbollah, a militia and political party in Lebanon, and Hamas, an Islamist militia and political organisation that controls the Gaza Strip.
But if Mr Netanyahu hopes to distract Mr Mubarak and, perhaps eventually, Mr Obama, with a perceived Iranian security threat, he may have misjudged the extent to which Egypt fears the Islamic republic, Mr Kazziha said.
“Each one of them is harping on a different note. I think with Netanyahu, Mubarak will be saying the Palestinians. Netanyahu will be saying the Iranians. And although Mubarak may have a soft spot on that, he’s not going to make it his priority” meeting Netanyahu.
For Mr Netanyahu and his government, winning US support will be crucial – perhaps even more than it was for other Israeli prime ministers.
If Mr Netanyahu’s past style of governance is any indication – he was prime minister from 1996 to 1999 – he will continue to look westward towards the United States for diplomatic support while neglecting the political interests of the Arab countries in his own backyard.
“He doesn’t think that he needs the Arabs, or that he needs Palestinian goodwill or Arab goodwill to survive in the Middle East,” Mr Kazziha said.
“If he knows he has won [US support], nothing else in the world will matter, neither Europe nor the Arab world.” But the US government, even before the Obama administration, expressed support for the Arab Peace Initiative and its emphasis on a future Palestinian state.
Mr Netanyahu chose not to use his meeting with the international press yesterday to answer the urgings of Arab governments that he endorse a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
His continued reluctance could become a problem in his bid to promote himself in Washington as a peacemaker.
Both the United States and Egypt support a two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Mr Netanyahu’s ambivalence on the issue has been a growing cause of concern for the Obama administration, said Marina Ottaway, the director of the Middle East programme for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
“The real challenge [for Netanyahu] is to demonstrate to the US president that he’s still a partner in the peace process,” Ms Ottaway said.
“The statements he has made in the past about the two-state solution has created an enormous amount of scepticism in Washington. What does it mean to be a partner in the peace process if he keeps rejecting the two-state solution? He has stated repeatedly that he is still a partner in the peace process, but he has been at best ambiguous about endorsing it.”
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