Israeli settlement-building resolution could backfire
Washington — The Obama administration portrayed its decision to allow the United Nations to condemn Israeli settlementbuilding as a way to finally and emphatically demand a stop to the activity.
But the move may backfire by hardening positions, both in the right-wing Israeli government and in the incoming Trump administration.
President-elect Donald Trump has already signaled his intention to roll back numerous U.S. policies that were aimed at promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He may now feel more emboldened.
“Things will be different after Jan. 20th,” Trump posted on Twitter after the United Nations vote, referring to the date of his inauguration.
Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would not abide by the U.N. resolution and said his government was canceling about $7 million in contributions that Israel makes to U.N. organizations. He has also recalled ambassadors from countries that backed the resolution.
“All of the American presidents after (Jimmy) Carter fulfilled the American commitment not to try to dictate to Israel the conditions for a final settlement at the Security Council,” Netanyahu said. “Yesterday, in complete contradiction to that commitment, including an explicit commitment from President Obama himself in 2011, the Obama administration carried out a disgraceful anti-Israeli blitz at the U.N.”
Trump will feel compelled to quickly “negate” the resolution, as Netanyahu has urged him to do.
And a backlash against the U.N. is being predicted. Trump has repeatedly called into question the effectiveness of world bodies like the U.N. and is likely to review the United States’ substantial financial support for the organization.
“The consequences of this will, in fact, be precisely the opposite of whatever the administration intended,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Washingtonbased nonpartisan Wilson Center who served as a Middle East adviser in three administrations.
The U.N. vote Friday marked the first time in years that the U.S. abstained from a vote criticizing Israel.
Traditionally, Democratic and Republican administrations have used their veto power to block U.N. resolutions that criticize Israel. Obama vetoed a 2011 resolution very similar to the one passed Friday.
The president’s decision not to block Friday’s resolution infuriated Israel’s staunchest allies in Congress and the Israeli government, which took the unusual steps of reaching out to Trump for help and accusing Obama of “colluding” with the Palestinians to write the resolution. Trump urged a veto. It is highly unusual for a president-elect to attempt to intervene in foreign affairs and publicly contradict the man he is to replace.
The Obama administration rejected the suggestion that it had worked with the Palestinians on the resolution, which was authored by Egypt and sponsored by four additional nations: New Zealand, Malaysia, Senegal and Venezuela.
The decision to abstain was the result of high-level diplomacy at the State Department and the White House, where officials were careful not to telegraph the administration’s intentions. That caught some off guard.
The abstention was a way to condemn Netanyahu, who has accelerated the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, contributing to his notoriously frosty relationship with Obama.
“Palestinians being displaced from their homes — that can be documented,” said Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser. “The statement of this Israeli government, that they are ‘more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history,’ can be documented.”
Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry have been repeatedly frustrated by their inability to get Netanyahu to freeze the expansion of settlements, which most of the world considers illegal.
“We’d been warning … for years that the trend line of settlement construction and settlement activity was just increasing Israel’s international isolation,” Rhodes said.