Netanyahu on losing side after Obama’s election win
With President Obama’s re-election, American relations with the Israeli government are likely to grow even frostier. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have never been friendly. But then Netanyahu openly supported Mitt Romney for president, the first time an Israeli prime minister has so publicly taken sides in a U.S. election.
“It was a terrible mistake by the prime minister of Israel to involve himself in American politics,” former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told me. “This has not been a very good morning for Netanyahu,” Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai told journalists in Israel the day after election day. And as an Israeli political strategist put it that day: “Netanyahu backed the wrong horse.”
Netanyahu rushed to make up with Washington. He immediately issued a statement declaring relations between the United States and Israel “rock solid.” He had his picture taken embracing the American ambassador. And he told other members of his party to stop carping about Obama. But it’s too
late. Netanyahu has dug a hole so deep he won’t be able to crawl out of it.
The Obama-Netanyahu relationship began to founder soon after Obama took office, when the prime minister refused Obama’s request to freeze settlement construction — just as every Israeli prime minister has done since President Jimmy Carter first complained. But since then, the Netanyahu administration has used settlements as a bludgeon.
Who can forget Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel in 2010, a trip characterized as an “apology tour,” intended to improve relations with Netanyahu? The very day he arrived, while Biden was practically prostrating himself to show Washington’s unyielding support, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced its decision to build 1,600 new apartments for Israelis in Arab East Jerusalem. To Israelis, they are not settlements. But no nation anywhere recognizes Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem.
And so it has gone ever since then. Early this year, an Israeli watchdog group said Israel built 1,850 new West Bank homes in 2011, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. As if that weren’t enough, on election day, Israel announced that it planned to build 1,213 more homes in East Jerusalem and 72 in Ariel, a West Bank settlement.
Netanyahu says he sees no reason to apologize.
“Construction in Jerusalem will continue the way it continues in London, Paris, Washington, Moscow and every other capital in the world,” he asserted. Some Middle East analysts like to say it’s time to stop worrying about settlements. Instead, Israel and the Palestinians should skip over that issue for now and open negotiations on the border between Israel and a new Palestinian state. Once that’s established, they say, the settlement problem will take care of itself. Few settlers will want to live in a Palestinian state.
That makes sense — if you assume that Israel and the Palestinians might actually sit down and talk anytime soon. Not likely.
This fall, Netanyahu seemed to embrace the Levy report, an analysis his government ordered. It makes the case that the West Bank actually belongs to Israel now, making settlements perfectly legal — negating any need to work toward a two-state solution.
Officially, his Cabinet endorsed only parts of that report. But then Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a television interview this month, stepped out of his accustomed role and seemed to say he’d be willing to forgo the Palestinians’ right of return to their former homes in Israel.
“I believe that West Bank and Gaza is Palestine, and the other parts are Israel,” he said, apparently trying to coax Israel to reopen negotiations. Netanyahu responded with cold contempt. What’s more, he has just allied his political party with the extremeright Yisrael Beiteinu Party, whose leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, openly opposes a two-state solution. This is the coalition Netanyahu put together, his new face for the nation and the world, for Israel’s elections in January.
Obama, even after election day, hasn’t said a word about any of this. If he’s paying attention, the president is probably seething. But “Obama is smart enough not to react to Bibi,” Olmert said. “He’s smart enough not to show he’s outraged.” Nonetheless, Olmert, like many others in Israel, is worried.
“Personal relations between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel is a major issue,” he said. After all, the United States is Israel’s only true friend and benefactor. “Personal trust between the two leaders is of great significance for Israel. I’m not certain we’ll have it for the next four years.”