How Israel Lost its Latest Chance for a Peace Process
Lieberman made his career with coarse talk: Israel, he said, should “cut off the head” of a disloyal Arab citizen, or take “a lesson from Putin” on how to deal with terror.
.. Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, the minister whom Netanyahu fired to make room for Lieberman, spoke bluntly at a press briefing on Friday. “To my great sorrow, extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel and the Likud Party,” he said. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was Ya’alon’s predecessor as defense minister under Netanyahu, angrily reinforced Ya’alon’s message on television later that night. Israel “has been infected by the seeds of fascism,” Barak said.
.. Ya’alon was the I.D.F.’s chief of staff when it crushed the Al-Aqsa intifada, in the early aughts. He ran the last Gaza war, advocated early on for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, and mocked Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent peace shuttles as “obsessive.” So his words of warning about Lieberman’s appointment carry particular weight
.. The first is ideological: neo-Zionist, religiously inflected zealotry for the Land of Israel, representing at most a fifth of Israel’s Jews and valorizing the settlement project as messianic. The second is reactionary: the conviction that Israel has no partner for peace, that an Arab leader’s motivation to destroy Israel will correspond directly with his capability—reinforced with references to the pathos of Jewish history.
.. Naftali Bennett, another far-right leader, demanded an end to the “festival of self-flagellation.” Herzog said, “This is what morality and responsibility sound like.” Ya’alon, for his part, who had dismissed veterans of the group Breaking the Silence as “traitors” for exposing routine violations of the I.D.F. code of conduct, could hardly permit attacks on the code itself.
.. Then things fell apart. Herzog told Ravid that he had asked Netanyahu to put their understanding of the peace process in writing, and that Netanyahu had refused to do so. Livni did not tell me precisely what that understanding was, but in last year’s election Herzog all but endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which Blair said on Wednesday would unlock “some steps of normalization.” A written commitment might well cause Bennett’s right-wing faction to bolt from the government, which would be, from Herzog’s perspective, all to the good.
.. For all his bombast, the former prime minister Ehud Olmert once told me, Lieberman is actually a pragmatist, one who supported the two-state solution when he was foreign minister (although, revealingly, his vision called for redrawing the border to place hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs on the other side).
.. The real question is whether, by making common cause with the settler right against the I.D.F., Netanyahu is taking on forces that may finally be too big for him to manipulate. The settlers already control education, justice, and rural development
.. Lieberman will bring the defense ministry into this orbit, and will likely try to advance the careers of officers sensitive to the settler agenda. (The political analyst Yoram Peri told me that as many as half of the rising officers in the I.D.F. today wear the settlers’ knitted yarmulkes.)
.. But the senior command, in both the military and intelligence services, remains hostile to Netanyahu. He has not only challenged their authority; he is challenging the prestige of Army service, and is threatening to debase the values with which they claim authority.