It looks as if President Joe Biden will be running in two
races this year: one in America against Donald Trump and one in Israel against
Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe Trump could name Netanyahu his running mate and we
could save a lot of time. Biden’s support for the Israeli leader is costing him
his progressive base, while Netanyahu is now turning on Biden in ways that
could win Trump fresh support from right-wing American Jews. Trump-Netanyahu
2024 — that has a certain ring to it, not to mention an air of truth.
اضافة اعلان
Why do I say this? Because at a nationally televised news
conference Thursday, Netanyahu made clear something he only hinted at in recent
weeks. Despite the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 happening on his watch, he is going
to frame his campaign to stay in power with this argument: The Americans and
the Arabs want to force a Palestinian state down Israel’s throat, and I am the
only Israeli leader strong enough to resist them. So vote for me, even if I
messed up on Oct. 7 and the Gaza Strip war is not going all that great. Only I
can protect us from Biden’s plans for Gaza to become part of a Palestinian
state, along with the West Bank, governed by a transformed Palestinian
Authority.
I know what you are asking: You mean Netanyahu would run for
reelection by positioning himself against the US president who flew over to
Israel right after Oct. 7, where he put a protective arm around Bibi and the
whole Israeli body politic and gave Israel a green light to try to destroy
Hamas in Gaza, even if it led to thousands of Palestinian civilians being
killed in the process? Do you mean to save his political skin, Netanyahu would
run on a platform that would guarantee Israel had no American, Palestinian,
Arab, or European partners to help Israel’s governor exit Gaza or get its
hostages back?
Netanyahu still has not defined a political outcome for Gaza, a plan for keeping the peace and overseeing governance and security, or a legitimate Palestinian partner to help make it all happen. Without that, Israel could be stuck in Gaza forever.
Yes, I am seeing and saying both. Israel’s war on Gaza has
been for over 100 days and still has over 100 captives to recover, Netanyahu’s
No. 1 focus is Netanyahu.
He is searching for the most emotive political message to
get him just enough votes from the far right to remain prime minister and stay
out of prison, should he lose any of the three corruption cases against him.
Let me walk you through the sequence of events that
transpired this week that led to this conclusion, as I was a close-up witness
to part of them.
On Wednesday, I interviewed US Secretary of State Antony
Blinken, first offstage for this column and then before a large audience at the
Davos World Economic Forum. In the public session, I asked him to briefly
explain something I had discussed in private with him: why it feels as if
Israel is losing on three key fronts and why Israel could turn things around on
those fronts if it had a legitimate, effective Palestinian partner.
The three fronts where Israel is losing:
Hamas seems to be winning the global narrative war on social
media because of the thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza caused by the
Israeli bombing of the Hamas fighters who had deliberately embedded themselves
in tunnels and next to the homes of Palestinian civilians.
Second, Netanyahu still has not defined a political outcome
for Gaza, a plan for keeping the peace and overseeing governance and security,
or a legitimate Palestinian partner to help make it all happen. Without that,
Israel could be stuck in Gaza forever.
And third, Israel is being attacked from afar by pro-Iranian
nonstate actors, particularly the Houthis from Yemen and Hezbollah from
Lebanon. And the only way for Israel to deter and counter their threats,
particularly when it is still tied down fighting in Gaza, is with the help of
global and regional allies.
The answer to all three challenges, I argued to Blinken at
the public session, was for Israel to find and help build a credible,
legitimate, effective Palestinian partner, whether that is a reformed version
of the current Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, West Bank — which has
embraced the Oslo peace accords with Israel and worked with Israeli security
forces — or some completely new institution named by the Palestine Liberation
Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
If the PLO — with the help of the Americans, the Europeans,
and the pro-American Arab states and the encouragement of Israel — is able to
help stand up and sustain an effective Palestinian governing authority that has
legitimacy in the eyes of Palestinians, this could answer all three of Israel’s
problems. It would seize the narrative from Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian
backer by proving that Israel was not out for just revenge or conquest in Gaza.
It would provide Israel with a political authority to govern Gaza for the long
run that Israel could work with to ensure that a defeated Hamas could not come
back.
And a legitimate Palestinian partner would give cover for a
regional alliance of Americans, NATO, and pro-Western Arab states that could
help deter Hezbollah and confront the Houthis. Right now, only the Americans
and the British have been willing to push back on the Houthis for disrupting
global shipping and firing rockets at Israel, in part because others are
worried about looking to be doing Israel’s bidding while it is hammering Gaza.
If Israel were engaged with a Palestinian partner, Iran, and its local puppets
would be on the defensive, I argued.
In response to this argument, Blinken said at our public
discussion: “You now have something you did not have before, and that is Arab
countries and Muslim countries even beyond the region that are prepared to have
a relationship with Israel in terms of its integration, its normalization, its
security, that they were never prepared to have before and to do things, to
give the necessary assurance, to make the necessary commitments and guarantees,
so that Israel is not only integrated but it can feel secure.”
But the only way to achieve that alliance-in-waiting,
Blinken added, is by respecting the “absolute conviction by those countries —
one that we share — that this has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state,
because you’re not going to get the genuine integration you need, you’re not
going to get the genuine security you need, absent that. And of course, to that
end as well, a stronger, reformed Palestinian Authority that can more
effectively deliver for its own people has to be part of the equation.”
If Israel the US and its Arab allies were to adopt such a
regional approach, Blinken said, “All of a sudden, you have a region that’s
come together in ways that answer the most profound questions that Israel has
tried to answer for years, and what has heretofore been its single biggest
concern in terms of security, Iran, is suddenly isolated, along with its
proxies, and will have to make decisions about what it wants its future to be.”
In response to Blinken’s statement that Israel would never
enjoy “genuine security” without a pathway to a Palestinian state, Netanyahu
said: “In any future arrangement or the absence of an arrangement,” Israel must
maintain “security control” of all territory west of the Jordan River — meaning
Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. “That is a vital condition.” If this
contradicts the idea of sovereignty for the Palestinians, he said, “What can
you do? I tell this truth to our American friends.”
You don’t need to be a political scientist to see through
what Netanyahu is doing here. He is signaling to the right-wing West Bank
settlers in his coalition: Stick with me; I will make sure the Palestinians
never have a state in Gaza or the West Bank. And he is signaling to the wider
Israeli public: I was for total victory in Gaza, and if it is not achieved, it
will be because Biden and weakling Israeli politicians stopped me before I
could finish the job.
This is pure, cynical politics by a leader who knows that he
started a war with no endgame and that he has no idea now how to get out of it
with a lasting peace that secures Israeli hostages and does not involve a
permanent, morally draining Israeli occupation of Gaza.
You don’t need to be a political scientist to see through what Netanyahu is doing here. He is signaling to the right-wing West Bank settlers in his coalition: Stick with me; I will make sure the Palestinians never have a state in Gaza or the West Bank. And he is signaling to the wider Israeli public: I was for total victory in Gaza, and if it is not achieved, it will be because Biden and weakling Israeli politicians stopped me before I could finish the job.
Tellingly, Netanyahu was publicly called out Thursday by a
key member of his war Cabinet, his former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, who
declared that Israel needs elections and a more widely trusted government now.
Eisenkot, whose son was recently killed in Gaza fighting, said that whoever
speaks of the “absolute defeat” of Hamas “is not speaking the truth. … We
should not tell stories.”
For all these reasons, I was glad to see the Biden
administration respond, immediately, that for any US president to be credible
and to have the regional allies needed to protect Israel from Iran, he needs to
be able to say no to our Israeli friends, too. Or as the State Department’s
spokesperson, Matthew Miller said in an immediate answer to Netanyahu’s
remarks: For the Israelis, there is “no way to solve their long-term
challenges, to provide lasting security, and there is no way to solve the
short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza and establishing governance in Gaza
and providing security for Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian
state.”
I totally understand why, after Oct. 7, most Israelis don’t
want to even hear the words “Palestinian state.”
And I totally understand why Biden, a true friend of Israel,
insists on uttering them. Because every trend around Israel is only going to
get worse — more nonstate actors, more super empowered angry men with drones
from Best Buy, a more powerful Iran, more TikTok haters warped by streaming
videos of dead Palestinian babies in Gaza.
Forging a legitimate, unified, effective Palestinian partner
for a two-state deal with Israel that could defuse those threats may be
impossible to achieve, but believing that abandoning any effort to do so is in
the long-term interest of the Jewish state is a dangerous illusion. And that is
exactly what Netanyahu is peddling for his own cynical purposes. Shame on him.
Shame on his enablers.
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