The following joke is making the rounds in the Prime Minister's Bureau these days: What do Americans do when something breaks down in their home - when the sink is blocked up, the toilet overflows, a fuse burns out? Simple: They ask Barack Obama to give a speech and the problem is solved.
Half a year after Obama took office as president, and three and a half months after Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, Israel-U.S. relations are at a low point. From Israel's perspective, Obama looks like a weak leader afraid of engaging the ruffians from North Korea and Iran, and trying to cover up his weakness with highfalutin speeches and unfair pressure on Israel. From across the Atlantic, by contrast, Netanyahu looks like a peace rejectionist who is trying to cover up his extremism with nonbinding declarations and by meddling in American politics.
Netanyahu is convinced that Obama deliberately wanted to engage him in a confrontation in order to placate the Arab world by demonstrating a somewhat distant attitude toward Israel. As the prime minister sees it, the president's Jewish advisers, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, incited Obama against him and are trying to promote Jewish left-wing organizations in America. It sounds paranoid, but even paranoics have enemies. There is evidence that even during the election campaign Obama's advisers debated distancing the U.S. from Israel as a basis for establishing new relations between America and the Arabs and Muslims. Nor is there anything surprising about this. Every leader wants to show that he is different from his predecessors, and if George W. Bush was perceived in the Middle East and Europe as too pro-Israel, it's clear why Obama would want to cool down relations with the Israelis. The election of the right-wing Netanyahu only played into the hands of Obama and his staff: He presented them with a convenient target for their pressures.
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This most obvious expression of the new policy was Obama's unequivocal demand that Israel freeze construction in the settlements, down to the last scaffold. It was a calculated maneuver, with the pressure directed precisely at the most sensitive spot. The settlements are an object of animus throughout the world and criticizing them exacts no political price in the American arena. No member of Congress and no Jewish leader will position himself opposite the White House and bellow "Yes to natural growth in Nokdim!" From the point of view of Obama and his aides, the call for a freeze in the settlements was the most convenient way to scold and corner Netanyahu, without his being able to defend himself, and also to threaten his coalition's continued existence - should he crack and accede to the American demand. Perfect.
Two months after the Obama-Netanyahu meeting in Washington, in which the president presented the prime minister with the demand for a settlement freeze, there are increasing signs that the administration is curbing its pressure campaign against Netanyahu. Although Obama has not backtracked, he has agreed to make the settlements issue part of a broad diplomatic package, which will include gestures by the Arab states, Palestinian agreement to renewal of negotiations, and perhaps also a revival of the Syrian track. In the meantime, Israel has not frozen construction in the settlements. Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, discussed with Defense Minister Ehud Barak a formula for a partial freeze and the creation of a "common database" - a transparent cover for wasting time.
In his meeting with leaders of the American Jewish community on Monday, intended to signal the end of the crisis in the president's relations with Israel, Obama tried to convince his audience that he was also pressuring the Palestinians and the Arab states and to show that the dispute with Israel was "in the family." According to reports from the meeting, Obama tried to play down the dispute over the settlements but insisted that advancing the peace process and bringing about the establishment of a Palestinian state will also contribute to Israel's interests and that he will not forgo these elements. He also displayed impressive expertise about details.
Not one good word
All the reports emanating from Washington indicate that Obama will not issue a detailed peace plan any time soon. Netanyahu's fear - that Washington will demand that he withdraw from all the territories and divide Jerusalem - will not become reality in the near future. The administration distinguishes between "substance" and "process" and will now focus solely on creating the framework for negotiations and also probably on setting target dates for the parties involved. There is no reason for Netanyahu and his coalition to lose any sleep over that.
Netanyahu seemingly won this round, then, but that is no cause for joy on his part. Even the most optimistic assessment, even the most flattering to Netanyahu, shows that Obama has emerged from the arm-wrestling contest with a slight advantage. First of all, in an effort to get Obama off his back, Netanyahu had to accept the idea of "two states for two nations." Second, Obama dismissed Netanyahu's call that stopping Iran's nuclear project must precede any political move. Third, and most important, Netanyahu failed to establish relations of trust and intimacy with the president and the administration. He has no tacit agreement on policy. And it's not that he doesn't want it: Netanyahu's bureau is envious of the total coordination that existed between Ehud Olmert and the Bush administration.
The reports that emerged from Obama's meeting with America's Jewish leaders did not refer to even a single good word said by the president about the prime minister. Not even praise for Netanyahu's speech at Bar-Ilan University. Obama distinguishes between Israel and its prime minister. Nor did the leaders of the Jewish community come to praise Netanyahu and regale the president with his exploits. At the end of the day, Israel needs the United States far more than vice versa.
Prime minister Yitzhak Shamir also heroically resisted pressure on the settlements from president Bush, the elder, and from his secretary of state, James Baker, until missiles began to rain on Tel Aviv in the first Gulf War. America came to Israel's defense, but it exacted the price when it dragged Shamir to the 1991 Madrid Conference and helped topple him from power.
Still, Obama seems to have gone too far in his demand for a total settlement freeze, and he will have to swallow at least some of his pride. The moment America declared Israel's security a sacrosanct value, Netanyahu knew he would not face a threat of delays in the supply of spare parts for the air force, a tactic the previous administration resorted to, along with demanding the dismissal of top defense officials, when it wanted to punish Israel for selling arms to China. Netanyahu was also proven right in his belief that the Saudis would not come up with any generous gestures and that the Palestinians' refusal to renew the negotiations would play into his hands. There is nothing like Arab rejectionism to take the heat off Israel.
Obama made a mistake in ignoring Israeli public opinion. In so doing, he allowed Netanyahu to cobble together a political consensus against a settlement freeze, and to portray him as an unfriendly president who is toadying to the Arabs.
The president seems to be having trouble distinguishing between Israelis and American Jews. His visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp immediately after his Cairo speech was meant to balance the impression that he was extending a hand to Arabs and Muslims, with a parallel move aimed at the Jews.
Indeed, that's how it was perceived by American Jewry; but in Israel it was taken as an affront. The Israeli narrative attributes the state's creation to a historical bond from biblical times, to the Zionist struggle and to the victory in the War of Independence. Obama's message in Cairo - that Israel was established as compensation for the Holocaust - was perceived in Israel as an adoption of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Zionist stance. Obama blew it, and Emanuel didn't explain to him why.
But it was politics that decided the day. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal pro-Israel lobby in Washington, proved that all those who eulogized it after Obama's election were very much mistaken. AIPAC did not try to defend settlement expansion or to openly back Netanyahu. Instead, the lobby undertook a quiet move, almost without publicity, using its tried and tested means: enlisting Congress to signal the president to lay off Israel.
On the day of Netanyahu's visit to the White House, Obama received a letter, signed by 73 senators, that was couched in impressive understatement. It did not mention settlements, but rather expressed ardent support for the peace process, gently called for clearing up the disputes with Israel on a basis of proximity and friendship, and contained a list of demands aimed at the Palestinians. The signatories included a majority of the members of the president's party. It was a repeat of AIPAC's huge success in 1975, when the lobby was able to scuttle Henry Kissinger's "reassessment" plan by means of a letter to president Ford signed by 76 senators. One can surmise that on this occasion, too, AIPAC did not make do with the letter but also worked the corridors. A few weeks went by, and the message was internalized by the White House: You can have differences with Israel, but you cannot slap it publicly.
Until the next time.
First refusal
On the wall of Gen. Abdel Razak Yihyeh's study hangs an aerial photograph of his native village, Tantura, not far from Haifa. The photo shows the small offshore islands and a motorboat trailing white foam. Yihyeh was born in Tantura 80 years ago, in the same year in which my father was born in Tel Aviv. When my father joined the Palmach, the pre-state commandos, Yihyeh joined the Army of Salvation, under the command of Fawzi al-Qawuqji. The two may well have taken part in the same battle in the War of Independence.
But afterward their lives took very different turns. The refugee Yihyeh advanced in the security establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization and became the chief of staff of the Palestinian Army of Liberation and the interior minister of the Palestinian Authority. He is now a security adviser to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The Kalashnikov-bearing guard in front of his home in Ramallah and the blue Toyota in the driveway attest to his official status.
I paid a visit to Yihyeh, aka Abu Anas, on Wednesday, together with Wafa Amr, a journalist who has long covered the PA and the political process for international media outlets. I reminded Yihyeh of our first meeting, in Taba, during the initial talks on implementing the Oslo accords in 1993. Avi Benayahu (now the IDF spokesman) organized a photo then: the Palestinian general walking on the beach with his Israeli counterpart, Uzi Dayan. "Yes, at that time we tried to achieve peace through security," Yihyeh recalled, "but Israel refused then to set a time limit on the interim period. Prime minister [Yitzhak] Rabin said there were no holy dates and he torpedoed the effort."
Yihyeh, who was never a member of Fatah but rose through the ranks as an independent, led the PA's security reform. After Hamas seized power in Gaza two years ago, he relates, there was great concern that the West Bank would fall into the hands of the armed gangsters who were terrorizing the streets there. Yihyeh proposed a different approach for dealing with them. His predecessors in the PA's Interior Ministry wanted to start by reorganizing the security forces. Yihyeh preferred to operate on the ground, from the bottom up, to take on the "gangsters" by force. Don't deal with the Israelis now, he told his staff; first we have to put our own house in order.
The confrontation was successful: The armed gangs handed over their weapons or hid them. PA police appeared on street corners. "And we also eradicated crime," he says. The police presence is pronounced in Ramallah, and in the past few weeks officers have begun to enforce the parking laws, ticket drivers and tow cars parked in red-and-white zones. Yihyeh then turned to addressing the plan to reorganize the security forces, and is now busy drafting their structure with a pencil on a pad of yellow notepaper.
He met Netanyahu in 1996, accompanied by Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, two top security figures at the time. Yihyeh says he proposed a way out the deadlocked talks on an agreement in Hebron. He is angered by the prime minister's current demand that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as the Jewish state. "Our forefathers have been here since Adam and Eve," he says. "My father and my grandfather and my father's grandfather were born in Tantura. Netanyahu's father and grandfather were not here." And what about Obama, I asked him. Do you see a chance for a new political process? "Obama talked fine at first," he replied, "but then the Americans started to talk to Israel about the settlements. Why in the world should Israel and the United States decide which settlements will remain on our land? They have to ask us first."
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