Policy vs. personality in Middle East politics.
Real policy differences over Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and the terms of the nuclear deal with Iran caused innumerable disagreements, many of them quite public. But during my time representing the United States here, I found that the caricature of universal Israeli hostility to Obama was overstated... the arrival of a president who “at last” would support Israel unconditionally and not pressure the country to limit settlement growth or make concessions to the Palestinians.Naftali Bennett, leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, declared, “Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state.”.. revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations toward a two-state solution, with the support of key Arab states.. With Obama, Israelis may not always have gotten everything they wanted. But they always got consistency. Obama held as a firm principle the idea that the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security was unconditional... relationship mature enough and durable enough to withstand such differences — but they needed to know that the United States was a reliable ally when it mattered most. And he delivered.. they came to appreciate was Obama’s style of leadership: steady, thoughtful, knowledgeable... he had the maturity, the discipline and the judgment to reach well-informed decisions that benefited Israel’s security... The result was a period of unprecedented intimacy between our militaries and intelligence services... I was struck by the depth of appreciation that senior Israeli military officers and intelligence officials expressed for Obama’s contributions to Israel’s security, often drawing a contrast with sentiments expressed by their politicians or the public... Amos Gilad, a longtime senior defense official.. told me: “It’s easy to criticize Obama. But on the military front, the relationship was incredible.”.. His unpredictability .. was already a source of anxiety.. Israelis now have to ask which Trump will show up for work each day — the friend who pledges his loyalty or the adolescent who can lash out at allies such as Australia and Canada, and perhaps one day Israel?.. His lack of knowledge, compounded by his aversion to reading and short attention span.. His carelessness.. shaken the confidence of the Israeli intelligence services in the reliability of the United States as a partner.. indifferent to democratic values and institutions and enamored of authoritarian leaders is harming the United States’ standing globally, which is never good for Israel... off the record, officials are beginning to acknowledge that something has changed... erratic, unreliable leader?.. David Ben-Gurion, gave President John F. Kennedy.. The best way you can help Israel, Ben-Gurion told him, is “by being a great President of the United States.”
Trump’s Push for Mideast Deal Perplexes Israeli Right
Many in ruling coalition, and West Bank settlers, are content with the way things are
Much of Israel’s governing coalition is pretty happy with the status quo.The Israeli economy is booming. Jewish population growth has nearly caught up with Palestinian birthrates. And the level of violence remains at historic lows. The wars ravaging the wider Middle East, meanwhile, have distracted regional attention from the Palestinians’ predicament and have even pushed countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia toward more cooperation with Israel.
.. “There is nothing more sustainable than the current situation that has already existed for 50 years and that is getting better all the time,” said retired Brig. Gen. Effie Eitam
.. That’s why Mr. Trump’s ambition to resolve the intractable dispute—a solution that would likely require Israel to accept Palestinian statehood and give up most of the territory it has occupied since 1967—has confounded Israel’s right-wing coalition ..
.. Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet—seeking to accommodate American requests—has already imposed modest new limits on West Bank settlement expansion.
That’s not something that the West Bank settlers’ leaders had expected from a Trump White House.
.. the Yesha Council, said it was disappointing that Washington still wanted to halt settlement growth instead of looking for new “out of the box” solutions.
.. it won’t be solved by one side getting an order not to build so that children [of settlers] cannot live next to their parents—while the Palestinians can build as much as they can, and are building new cities,”
.. “To be honest,” he said, “nobody knows what will happen with Trump tomorrow.”
The Man Who Would Beat Bibi
“I can’t think of any other democracy in which the same person was prime minister, or president, or head of state in 1996 is still the head of state,” Lapid tells me in an interview
.. Some these days even see him as Israel’s answer to Donald Trump, a celebrity come lately to politics, with no discernible ideology and a flair for popular slogans.
.. The latest polls generally show Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future” in Hebrew), leading Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party by about four seats in parliamentary elections.
.. Netanyahu is facing a rapidly spiraling investigation into a host of allegations involving gifts and perks from big donors and trading favors for positive media coverage, not to mention new pressures from the right wing in his coalition who feel emboldened by Trump’s ascension to push for harder-line policies.
.. the country’s Labor party, historically the main opposition to Netanyahu’s Likud, has all but collapsed—a fate not dissimilar to the old left in many European countries like Britain in recent years.
.. he is running as “an extreme moderate,”
.. Lapid’s patriotism, compelling biography and cheerleading nationalism on his overseas trips are clearly playing well in Israeli politics
.. In this day and age of Trump and Brexit, when fiery right-wing populists are challenging for leadership of both France and Germany in hotly contested elections that have establishment types openly fretting about the death of the liberal international order, Lapid’s equally corny appeal for the virtues of “responsible” centrism can have an oddly soothing effect.
.. Trump’s handpicked negotiator, his longtime personal lawyer Jason Greenblatt
.. He even was reported to have pushed Israel to freeze West Bank construction outside already established settlement blocs, a demand that veteran peace process watchers see as key for the Trump team to make if it is serious about getting Palestinians to the table.
.. “Trump didn’t move the Embassy, pressured Bibi to put the brakes on settlements and reached out to Abu Mazen. He seems to really believe he can be the peacemaker,”
.. If Netanyahu can’t deliver on more settlement-building from a supposedly favorable Trump administration, there are plenty on his right flank poised to criticize him. And then, there’s Lapid—officially still a two-stater though he talks increasingly these days not of peace but of “separation” between Israelis and Palestinians as the goal
.. the administration’s asks of Israel on restraining settlement activity are well within the range of traditional U.S. policy under previous administrations—much to the disappointment of some Israelis who thought it would be ‘anything goes,’”
.. But I don’t see any indication that ether Bibi or Abu Mazen is capable of taking risks necessary to get a deal
.. “The right wing has Bibi by the throat and he cannot afford to do anything to jeopardize his coalition. Bibi cannot afford any kind of cracks in his coalition and they all know it, so they’re all going to press him and he will bend to them, he has to. No politician in Israel planning to run in next election wants to talk about peace.”
.. essentially endorsing Lapid’s view that only a new centrism could save the country from the “abominable practice of both right and left to hand over the keys to the kingdom to parties that are essentially fanatic and anti-democratic.”
.. Haaretz, a liberal newspaper with which Lapid has developed a feud so pronounced he boycotts its reporters.
.. Lapid is also articulate, adaptive, well-read and savvy.
.. “It’s the problem of centrists all around the world,” he says. “You don’t get to say those inflammatory, very interesting things that the extremists from both sides get to say. You are talking on behalf of complexity
.. he’s disciplined enough not to get drawn into fights he’s never going to win.
Trump Drops Push for Two-State Solution in Mideast
President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hint at broader regional approach
“I believe that the issue of the settlements is not the core of the conflict, nor does it really drive the conflict,” the Israeli leader said. “I think it’s an issue that has to be resolved in the context of peace negotiations.”
.. Mr. Netanyahu has officially advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2009, but in practice he has approved increased settlement construction that the U.S. has said imperils that approach. He is under pressure from members of his right-wing coalition government to abandon support for a Palestinian state.
.. The Trump administration is discussing with Arab allies forming a military alliance that would share intelligence with Israel to help counter Iran,
.. Mr. Trump said on Wednesday his distancing himself from the two-state approach gives the Israelis and Palestinians leeway to reach a deal.
.. “The alternatives to a two-state solution would mean that Israel would have to choose between its commitment to democracy and the solemn obligation to be a homeland for the Jewish people,” Mr. Engel said, an apparent reference to the challenge of integrating more than four million people in the Palestinian territories with Israel’s predominantly Jewish population of eight million
.. Democrats and Republicans have vowed in the past to move the embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and a 1995 U.S. law requires the move. But since then, presidents from both parties have used a national-security waiver included in the law to avoid doing so.