The Congress press gallery is situated above the podium. One cannot see the speaker’s face, only his or her head. Yet the faces of the listeners, that is, members of Congress, can certainly be seen. Their enthusiasm over Netanyahu’s speech was genuine and sweeping.
As an Israeli I felt pride. The applause was given to my prime minister; to my country. I was happy to see that the elected representatives of the world’s greatest power identify with the State of Israel to such extent. Netanyahu won: He defeated President Obama in the confrontation over the 1967 lines; he defeated the doomsday-sayers who warned of a clash with the Administration; he even outdid his own estimates on the eve of the visit.
It was a huge victory, a historic victory, a knockout in the polls.
And then I was reminded of the good old days of Golda Meir. When Golda was Israel’s prime minister, the IDF controlled territory four times the State of Israel’s size. Life was good. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers crossed the Green Line daily, took any job, cleaned our staircases and washed dishes at restaurants. They were transparent, invisible.
The settlers settled. IDF generals were lavished with great admiration. Their names were all over the gossip columns. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan declared that Sharm el-Sheikh was more important than peace and most of the public agreed with him. Golda Meir contemptuously rejected diplomatic initiatives.
The Americans loved her: They loved the American chapter in her youth, her English, her rhetoric, the Jewish pride. She was so popular that Andy Warhol chose to paint her portrait alongside Merlyn Monroe’s.
Until the Yom Kippur War broke out.
Benign neglect
Golda missed the chance to prevent war because of inflated arrogance; the arrogance of a victor. That was not Netanyahu’s sin in Washington. Peace did not await him there. One needs two sides for an agreement, and a sober assessment of both sides shows that Abbas, just like Netanyahu, is unwilling to pay the required price at this time.
Yet there was an option to reach a two-state solution at some point, through American mediation. The outcome of Netanyahu’s trip to Washington terminated this option.
The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America’s UN ambassador and a New York senator, served at the White House early in his career. He wrote a detailed, highly pessimistic review of the state of African Americans at poor neighborhoods, and summed it up with a recommendation for the president to leave the situation as is. He called the policy he proposed “benign neglect.”
This is what top experts are proposing to Obama at this time: Let the Israelis and Palestinians be. Whatever you do won’t bring an agreement and will only harm you politically. By all means, let them face the same destiny until the end of days.
Obama is starting to act this way in practice. He is not rushing to appoint a Mideast envoy, he is not dispatching his secretary of state to the region, and he’s allowing the new regime in Egypt to enlist for Hamas’ cause. Why should he get tangled up in a messy situation?
The activity is shifting from the offices of politicians to the street. I don’t know what will be materializing in the coming months: I’m not prophet. Yet one does not need prophetic powers to realize that there will be no vacuum. On the Israeli side, the settlers and the rightist branch in the coalition shall fill the space that was created. Netanyahu kept the American policeman at bay.
On the Palestinian side, the space will be filled with a campaign aiming to deprive the legality of Israel’s very existence. It shall be conducted in international institutions, at governments and campuses worldwide, and on our border fences. It will be an ugly, outrageous and possibly murderous campaign.
On the eve of the Yom Kippur War, Golda Meir returned from a visit abroad. She preached to Austria’s Prime Minister, the Jewish Bruno Kreisky, and complained that he did not even offer her a glass of water. The Israeli public supported her wholeheartedly.
And then the war broke out.
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