The Israeli Embassy in Washington helpfully sent their allies in Washington a set of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's talking points in relation to his speech in Congress yesterday and to AIPAC at the weekend, which were published by Ben Smith of Politico. They are the following:
Netanyahu's vision of peace:
1) Mutual Recognition of the Jewish state and the Palestinian State
2) A Palestinian state that is independent and viable
3) A Palestinian state that will be fully demilitarized, with an Israeli military presence along the Jordan River.
4) The settlement blocs and areas of critical strategic and national importance will remain a part of Israel.
5) In any peace agreement, some settlements will end up outside Israel's borders.
6) The solution to the Palestinian refugees will be found outside Israel.
7) Jerusalem will remain Israel's united sovereign capital.
First of all, it should be noted that, as is obvious and has been pointed out by Zvika Krieger of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, these stances are "Israel's starting offer for negotiations." The same applies to a number of the Palestinian official positions, for example on the right of refugee return. In other words, serious Israelis and Palestinians understand that major compromises will have to be made on these and other positions in any actual agreement. Second, these points and Netanyahu's substantive positions in his speech before Congress were restatements of his May 16 speech at the Knesset in which he laid out these positions and claimed that they were a “consensus” among most Jewish Israelis.
Because there is no ongoing diplomatic process between the two parties, and hasn't been one since late September, and it isn't likely to resume anytime in the near future, the diplomatic implications of these speeches are fairly limited. The speeches are both best seen as more political than diplomatic. Domestically, Netanyahu was seeking, and indeed succeeded, in establishing himself as the unquestioned leader of the Israeli center-right and far-right coalition, fending off challenges from rivals within his Likud Party and others such as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the largely Russian immigrant Yisrael Beiteinu Party, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai, head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party. It's become clear that a combination of factors have driven the Israeli polity seriously to the right over the past decade, and even more over the past five years. This began with the extreme reaction to the second intifada that led to the political resurgence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and has been further exacerbated in recent years by the growing population and political organization of right-wing oriented Russian immigrant and ultra-Orthodox communities. Sadly, there is little doubt that the current right-wing coalition government in Israel really does represent a combined majority sentiment in Jewish Israeli society that brings together the center-right, the far-right and elements of the extreme-right. The Israeli left, and even the traditional Israeli center, is marginalized to the point of being moribund, at least for now. Representing the current face of the old-school Jabotinskyite ultra-hawkish and maximalist but secular Likud orientation, through his three consistent speeches in the past two weeks at the Knesset, Congress and AIPAC, Netanyahu has strongly consolidated his position as the leader of this uneasy right-wing coalition and fended off the possibility of any serious challenge for the foreseeable future. His position as Israel's prime minister seems more secure than ever, and it's hard to imagine that a new election would leave him in a weaker rather than a stronger position vis-à-vis both his right-wing “frenemies” or any challenge from the traditional center or the left.
The second sense in which these speeches, especially the two in the United States, were political rather than diplomatic was a thinly-veiled effort to bolster the chances of Republicans unseating Pres. Obama in the upcoming 2012 elections. It's no secret that Netanyahu is deeply uncomfortable with Obama, and that the two men have a testy, if not indeed acrimonious, relationship and little regard for each other. Neither can afford an open public confrontation, but Netanyahu's public lecturing of Obama following the President's Middle East policy speech was stunning in its arrogance. Obama did not fail to indirectly communicate his exasperation during his own AIPAC speech. Netanyahu directly accused Obama of not understanding reality, while, more diplomatically, Obama said Israel (read Netanyahu) needed to face certain uncomfortable realities, in effect returning the compliment.
Obama's Middle East policy speech was essentially a recitation of familiar American positions, but he was explicit about a number of items that have usually remained implicit: that negotiations must be based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps; that the parties should focus on borders and security understandings first; and that there would have to be a “full and phased” Israeli military withdrawal from the areas that will become a Palestinian state. He also failed to rule out dealings with a new Palestinian government arising from the “national reconciliation agreement” recently signed by Fatah and Hamas, although he said there were "profound and legitimate" questions about the deal for which Palestinians would have to provide “a credible answer.” This is clearly a reference to the Quartet conditions and the role Hamas will be playing in any new Palestinian Authority government. But it does stand in contrast to demands by Netanyahu and his American supporters that no dealings with any Palestinian government arising from the agreement are acceptable.
None of this is shocking or dramatic, and Obama's positions were unsurprising, reasonable and consistent with well-established American policies. Netanyahu's extraordinary overreaction was partly the reflection of a genuinely visceral sense that Israel's international isolation on the future of the occupied territories is growing, not only with the international community at large, but with the Obama administration and, indeed, the American foreign policy, intelligence and military establishment in general. The contrast between what Obama, the United States and the international community are envisioning as the essential elements of a two-state agreement and the talking points cited above as reflected in Netanyahu's speeches is quite stark. However, there was also a histrionic and theatrical quality to the enraged response, which I think was clearly intended to give political cover to Republican presidential hopefuls like Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney to issue strong denunciations of the President on Israel policy, which they immediately did. Even after Obama's AIPAC speech -- in which he shifted tone and emphasized US-Israel cooperation (designed, of course, to please his audience), but did not alter any of his positions and did issue a stark warning to Israel that international (and implicitly American) impatience with the lack of progress on peace negotiations is becoming untenable -- some of Netanyahu's Republican supporters like Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin continued to issue dark warnings to Jewish Americans that a second term for the President would be a disaster for Israel.
It's long been observed that Netanyahu thinks, acts, and talks more like a right wing American Republican than any version of an Israeli politician. His speech before Congress was masterful as an object lesson in how to speak to an American, and particularly congressional, audience. Given the paucity of talent in the present GOP field, it's even tempting to speculate that were he in a position to do so, Netanyahu would actually have a very good shot at winning the Republican nomination for US president in 2012. As things stand, however, it was merely a secondary goal, but an important one, of his reaction to Obama's speech, and some of the tone of his own in Congress, to help nudge Republicans towards what looks like an unlikely victory in November of next year.
Having established all of that, let's look at the talking points -- the so-called “vision of peace” the Israeli Embassy released on Netanyahu's behalf -- point by point, bearing in mind that these are opening bargaining positions at best and, in context, actually political positions aimed primarily at a domestic Israeli audience and secondarily at having an impact on US internal politics.
1) Mutual Recognition of the Jewish state and the Palestinian State
The question of mutual diplomatic recognition between Israel and Palestine is largely an onus on the Israeli side, since the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, recognized Israel formally and irrevocably in the Letters of Mutual Recognition in 1993. In return, Israel merely recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians. Therefore the Palestinians have recognized Israel for almost 20 years, while Israel has never recognized a Palestinian state or allowed one to be created. On the contrary, it has continued building settlements and deepening the occupation in many ways during this period, and the number of settlers since 1993 has increased from 200,000 to more than 500,000.
What this talking point refers to, however, is not mutual recognition between two states, but the new demand that first was raised at the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and has become an obsession with Netanyahu that Palestinians recognize Israel, as he usually puts it, as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” This is therefore not a political but an ideological demand, essentially asking the Palestinians to embrace the fundamental precepts of a classical and very old-fashioned Zionism rather than agreeing to accept Israel as a neighbor with which they will live in peace and security, and as a legitimate member state of the United Nations that is free to define itself as it wishes. I have written before about how problematic this demand is for Palestinians, how unnecessary it is for peace (which is why it played absolutely no role in diplomacy or negotiations prior to 2007), and how it is an attempt to foreclose or prejudice genuine final status issues such as refugees and, by extension, Jerusalem. I will have a more detailed evaluation of this in a forthcoming article, and I've written extensively about it in the past.
2) A Palestinian state that is independent and viable
This represents a genuine reason to be hopeful and optimistic. Historically, Netanyahu and almost all Likud party leaders have been opposed to Palestinian statehood, but he is now on the record on numerous occasions in support of the concept. It is still debatable what he means exactly by the terms “state,” “independent” and “viable,” but this position is an extremely constructive one on its face. It demonstrates that while, as I noted above, the entire Israeli polity has shifted quite dramatically to the right over the past 10 years, the Israeli right itself has also shifted dramatically in its rhetoric about Palestinian independence. Many leaders and parties that absolutely ruled out Palestinian statehood, including Netanyahu, in the past now accept the concept at least in theory. This can only be regarded as progress. Absent a genuine negotiating process, it will be impossible to test Netanyahu's commitment to this principle or what he precisely means by the words cited in this talking point. It is very deeply in the Palestinian interest to try to find a formula as soon as possible to return to those negotiations so as to test these assertions and discover whether he means what he says and what it is he thinks he is describing. Until then, Netanyahu is free to make this commitment without any fear that he will actually have to participate in its realization or clarify his positions on these terms.
3) A Palestinian state that will be fully demilitarized, with an Israeli military presence along the Jordan River.
The first element here is problematic in some ways but almost certainly achievable. For many years now the Palestinian leadership has made it clear privately and implicitly that it seeks a non-militarized state of its own volition, because it recognizes that wasting money on a small army that will not be able to mount or win wars is completely pointless and that all resources should be focused on developing Palestine's infrastructure and extremely promising human capital. The wisest Palestinians look to something approximating the Costa Rican model in which the state is non-militarized, but with a strong police and border force to ensure security, and remains neutral in armed conflicts. This approach has helped to give Costa Rica a much higher standard of living than its Central American neighbors, and the Costa Ricans have managed to use their neutrality and international support for their position of non-belligerence to avoid being drawn into the many vicious conflicts and civil wars in Central America over the past decades. Palestine can and should attempt to emulate this wise approach, but it is much more politically achievable as a deliberate and independent choice that the Palestinians make in their own interests than as an Israeli demand. The Israeli leaders know that this is a Palestinian intention, and they also know that by making it an Israeli demand they make it more difficult to sell to the Palestinian constituency. It is therefore cynical and unhelpful to harp on this issue, which is best left to the Palestinian leadership that is thought to be committed to the principle on solid political and strategic grounds.
The second principle here, what Netanyahu has repeatedly referred to as a “long-term Israeli military presence along the Jordan River,” is an absolute nonstarter for the Palestinians and can only be regarded as either an opening gambit he knows full well will have to be abandoned or, if he intends to stick to this to the bitter end, as a conscious effort to sabotage a workable agreement. A Palestinian entity that does not control its own borders will not be a “state” in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather a bantustan and vassal of Israel. Palestinians will not, then, have achieved independence, but a deeply modified and attenuated form of ongoing occupation. This demand is completely at odds with Pres. Obama's terms laid out in his Middle East policy speech in which he specifically called for “the full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces” from the Palestinian state. Obama said “that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.” Obviously, this is completely inconsistent with Netanyahu's unworkable, unreasonable and unacceptable demand that Israel would continue to control, at least on a long-term basis, the Palestinian border along the Jordan River. The Palestinians have repeatedly said that they would accept the presence, possibly over a long-term, of international peacekeepers on their borders, including Jewish troops and even commanders from other countries, but a continued Israeli military presence in or on the borders of Palestine is totally unacceptable. It is simply contradictory to the most fundamental concept of Palestinian independence, and if Netanyahu intends to insist on this till the bitter end, even as negotiations begin to approach the conclusion of a permanent status agreement, he will be deliberately and willfully sabotaging such an agreement because it will be a clear-cut negation of Palestinian independence.
4) The settlement blocs and areas of critical strategic and national importance will remain a part of Israel.
Everyone agrees on the principle of a land swap. There is no question that there are settlement blocs, Jewish areas of occupied East Jerusalem, and perhaps some other geographically small areas of the occupied territories that would be annexed to Israel in exchange for equivalent territory ceded to the new Palestinian state. So in that sense, this principle is noncontroversial. However, Netanyahu has been deliberately vague about what settlement blocs he has in mind, although he has said that some settlements will be outside the borders of Israel at the end of an agreement. So it is a welcome recognition on his part that Israel does not intend to annex all settlements. However, some large settlements, particularly Ariel, extend deep into the territory of the West Bank, almost bifurcating it. Netanyahu has spoken in terms of being “generous” (an extraordinary term to be applied to territories under foreign military occupation) with the size of the territory of the Palestinian state. At the same time, in his speech at Congress Netanyahu denied that Israel is a “foreign occupier” at all and referred to the occupied territories as “the Jewish Land.” This might be Zionist boilerplate, but it doesn't bode well for what he thinks reasonable land swaps might entail. This is exacerbated by his reference to other “areas of critical strategic and national importance,” whatever they may be. He may be referring to areas of supposed military importance based on an anachronistic model of warfare that has been transcended by new technologies, or more simply to religious and political irredentism regarding areas like Hebron, which are a sine qua non for a genuine Palestinian state. So on the one hand this talking point is noncontroversial and even gives ground for some hope. On the other hand it contains implications that raise the deepest possible suspicions that what Netanyahu is imagining is simply impracticable and unworkable, as well as at odds with not just Palestinian but also international and American expectations and requirements.
5) In any peace agreement, some settlements will end up outside Israel's borders.
This point was covered above. I take it as an important admission, but of course he might be referring to small, largely irrelevant settlements, unauthorized outposts and other areas of limited significance. Again, a real diplomatic process will be required to test what he thinks he means by this and Palestinians should look for every opportunity to obtain such clarification.
6) The solution to the Palestinian refugees will be found outside Israel.
This is, and has for many years, been commonly understood as the inevitable outcome of negotiations since a wide-scale implementation of the right of return is a nonstarter for almost all Jewish Israelis for obvious reasons. However, the refugee issue is a crucial Palestinian negotiating card and it is right and proper that, as they prepare their people for the necessary concessions, they also protect this vital negotiating leverage and ensure that the most that can be secured for the refugees through a workable agreement is achieved and that this brutal and politically wrenching concession is reciprocated by a similar bitter political pill that Israel must swallow. That brings us directly to Netanyahu's final talking point:
7) Jerusalem will remain Israel's united sovereign capital.
All Israelis who are serious about peace understand that the Palestinian capital must be based in East Jerusalem, that this is a sine qua non of peace and a red line no Palestinian leadership can or will be willing to cross. In many ways it is the Israeli analogy to the Palestinian right of return issue: the deep, painful, existential concession that must be made because without it, the other side simply will not come to terms. It therefore has been for many years also commonly understood as the inevitable outcome of negotiations that the Palestinian capital will be in East Jerusalem. Now Netanyahu's language appears to be categorical in ruling out serious negotiations on Jerusalem, let alone it serving as a Palestinian as well as an Israeli capital. But parsing the language of this talking point carefully, there does appear to be some potential wiggle room for reconciling the two positions. Most parties on both sides would probably prefer not to see Jerusalem divided in any physical sense, therefore the "united" part is no dealbreaker. That Jerusalem will be Israel's “sovereign capital” does not necessarily rule out that Jerusalem can also be Palestine's “sovereign capital” as well. This sounds counterintuitive and contradictory, and may even sound like an oxymoron, but Jerusalem is a sui generis case for which a sui generis solution undoubtedly will have to be found. I do not think it is inconceivable that a united Jerusalem (that is to say without physical divisions such as roadblocks, checkpoints, customs and immigration stations, etc.) can simultaneously serve as the sovereign capital for both Israel and Palestine. It depends how one defines sovereignty, where and how that sovereignty is exercised, whether there is the possibility of separate sovereignties with joint administration or other formulas that could square this circle.
Because these were political and not diplomatic speeches, I'm sure Netanyahu intended all of his audiences to understand this as ruling out any compromise on Jerusalem, and that's how most people took it. That's certainly how it reads at first glance. But there is evidence that behind the decades of bluster about Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people” has always lurked a gnawing, grudging sense among serious Israelis that a compromise on the city will be necessary. Israel is often said to have annexed occupied East Jerusalem. That's not exactly correct. What Israel did was not an act of formal annexation, but the extension of Israeli civil law to all of what it defined as “Municipal Jerusalem.” In 1980, the Knesset passed the "Jerusalem Law," that declared: "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel." The law was declared null and void on numerous occasions by the UN Security Council, in resolutions all voted for by the United States, most notably Resolution 476 which reiterated “the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem.” Now that El Salvador and Costa Rica have removed their embassies from Jerusalem, all of which is still considered a “corpus separatum" under international law, Israel's international isolation on its maximalist claims regarding Jerusalem is again total.
Statements declaring or implying that Israel will make no concessions on Jerusalem and will not agree that any part of it will serve as the Palestinian capital might make for good politics in Israel or before Congress. But just as when Palestinians insist there will be no compromise on the complete implementation of the right of return for refugees, Israelis who believe in peace at all must be viewing absolutist statements about Jerusalem as vital negotiating leverage which they privately understand will require a genuinely painful but absolutely indispensable concession. It's understandable that neither party wants to undermine this kind of powerful leverage in advance of the resolution of the permanent status issues and the achievement of an end-of-conflict agreement. But it's also clear that both sides need to do more to prepare their respective publics for the compromises that, if they are at all serious about peace, they certainly know will ultimately be unavoidable.
Netanyahu's talking points contain no new ideas, but there are aspects of them that are promising and some that can be worked on in serious negotiations. Insofar as they are, as Krieger suggests, an opening gambit consciously crafted not as final positions but as starting points for a serious process, there is no reason to despair because of them, particularly given that negotiations are not presently ongoing and are unlikely to resume until after the 2012 US presidential elections. Still, Netanyahu has adopted some positions that place him very seriously at odds not just with the Palestinians, international law, and the international community, or even Obama personally. They pit him against a well-established consensus that the American national interest requires as essential and not optional the establishment of what Sec. Clinton called the “inevitable” Palestinian state and an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The apparent contradiction between American goals and interests and the vision for the future suggested by Netanyahu's talking points is going to be an increasing strain not only on the personal and political relations of the two leaders, but, in the long run, an increasing issue between the United States and its national interests on the one hand and Israel and the maximalist ambitions of some of its powerful political factions on the other. Even more ominously for Israel, as two of its most prominent and staunch supporters among the American commentariat, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, both pointed out in hard-hitting columns today, Netanyahu's policies and positions that have done nothing to advance the peace process are leading Israel in a clear and disastrous direction: its development into what both bluntly called an "apartheid state" and therefore an international pariah.
Front Page Features