NETANYAHU BETRAYS THE PEACE
Oslo peace accords have been wrecked by the Israeli leader’s bad faith, says historian Avi Shlaim
ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done everything he possibly could to destroy any chance of peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu sees peace with the Palestinians as impossible. He has never made the shift to peacemaker that many have hoped.
For years, Netanyahu has portrayed himself as the person who can best keep Israel safe in the “tough neighbourhood” of the Middle East. He has taken a hard line towards the Palestinians, putting Israel’s security concerns at the top of any discussion of peace. Critics commented that he would want to be remembered as “the protector of Israel. The one who created the means to be sure of the country’s future.
Last week, the White House strongly denied reported discussions between Netanyahu and Washington officials over plans to annex Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, in a rare display of discord between United States President Donald Trump and him.
Netanyahu said he wanted to coordinate any such move with the US because of the country’s strategic importance to Israel. Next month, Netanyahu will meet Trump in Washington.
Netanyahu has been put under pressure by the right-wing politicians to move ahead with legislation that will apply Israeli sovereignty to settlements in the occupied West Bank — the land that the Palestinians want for a future state which is currently under the jurisdiction of Israel’s military. This means that any annexation would destroy all effort to try and save the peace process.
The move will severely harm remaining prospects for a twostate solution to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, and draw international outrage, though Netanyahu’s government has been backed by the unstinting support of Trump.
Last December, Trump recog- nised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in a move praised by Netanyahu as “historic”, but denounced by the Palestinians and most of the world.
Netanyahu confessed that he managed to deceive then US president Bill Clinton into believing he was helping to implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation.
According to Avi Shlaim, Israel’s historian, “The Oslo peace accords were wrecked by Netanyahu’s bad faith”.
He failed to conceal his deep antagonism to Oslo, denouncing it as incompatible with the historic right of the Jewish people to the whole land of Israel. Ghastly, he spent his first three years as prime minister in a largely successful attempt to undermine and subvert the accords concluded by his Labour predecessors.
In 1996, Netanyahu became Israel’s first youngest directlyelected prime minister following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
Two years earlier, Rabin stood on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, to agree to a framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories.
Under the premiership of Netanyahu, the prospects for widerranging peace in the Middle East, which had seemed possible during Rabin’s time, were dead, too. More than 20 years later, the kind of peace that Rabin envisaged seems more distant than ever.
Netanyahu was defeated in 1999 by Labour leader Ehud Barak, who promised to push for a permanent peace deal and withdraw from southern Lebanon. In 2005, he resigned as finance minister when Ariel Sharon was prime minister, in protest of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
When Netanyahu was elected prime minister for the second time in March 2009, his government was criticised by some in the international community for not renewing a partial freeze on Jewish settlement-building, and for not avoiding a collapse in peace talks with the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, his right-wing party has tried to prevent or at least delay any pullout from the territories.
All of these claims have obvious parallels with the current situation. Netanyahu is again facing off White House attempts at a peace process. He has apparently made public by agreeing in principle to the creation of a Palestinian state, accepting indirect talks with the Palestinian leadership and implementing a temporary freeze on settlement building. At the same time, he has engaged the powerful pro-Israel lobby to exert pressure on the White House, which appears to have surrendered to Israel.
According to Gideon Levy, the columnist of the liberal newspaper Ha’aretz: “Netanyahu has always thought that Washington is in his pocket. Such a crooked way of thinking does not change over the years”.
According to Gideon Levy, the columnist of the liberal newspaper ‘Ha’aretz’: ‘Netanyahu has always thought that Washington is in his pocket. Such a crooked way of thinking does not change over the years.’
The writer, a former lecturer of UiTM Shah Alam and International Islamic University Malaysia, Gombak, is a Fulbright scholar and Japan Institute of International Affairs fellow