Israel’s new peace strategy
PRIME Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered his much-hyped policy address on Sunday evening. It ­wasn't a speech that will win any literary awards or persuade political foes. But it has already achieved something far more important. In one fell swoop, Netanyahu has thrown the ball into the other court, both Palestinian and American.
HAVIV RETTIG GUR
PRIME Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered his much-hyped policy address on Sunday evening. It ¬≠wasn’t a speech that will win any literary awards or persuade political foes. But it has already achieved something far more important. In one fell swoop, Netanyahu has thrown the ball into the other court, both Palestinian and American.
The speech was a remarkable balancing act. Netanyahu leads a coalition that lies mostly to his right. His chief political partner is the unapologetically nationalist Yisrael Beitenu, and his own party is the Right-leaning fragment of the broad-based Likud in which he grew up. In leading the dramatic split from the party in 2005 to form Kadima, former premier Ariel Sharon took with him most of the Likud’s centrists, including Kadima’s chair Tzipi Livni. These centrists are today the Likud’s most vociferous opposition.
Yet despite his political situation, Netanyahu has worked ferociously to carve out political manoeuvring room that allows him engage in a meaningful peace process. He did this by coaxing the defeated and shrunken Labour Party into the coalition, even at the cost of the Defence Ministry, the most coveted cabinet post in Israeli governance. While magnanimous with Labour, he worked overtime to introduce into the Likud list well-known centrists such as Dan Meridor and Uzi Dayan.
Critics said he merely needed “fig leaves” to make his far-right government more palatable to outsiders, but Netanyahu aides said it was something more. It was a signal that Israel’s new leader was ready for compromise and peace. The first test of this claim came in Sunday’s speech, a text that will likely be deconstructed for years to come. First, Netanyahu at long last promised in no uncertain terms that the Palestinians would have their state. He offered one major caveat, an opening salvo in the negotiations with the Americans: that this state will not come at the cost (for Israel) of a militarised launching pad for Iranian rockets. Without demilitarisation, he warned, “sooner or later, we will have another Hamastan”.
Just like Iceland, Costa Rica, the Vatican and the Egyptian Sinai, Palestine will not have a military. But it will have political, cultural and diplomatic freedom. It will have its own institutions, its own education system, its own currency and markets — every attribute of sovereignty save the capacity to attack Israel. Second, Netanyahu laid out his chief demand from the Palestinians: the “public, binding and unequivocal” recognition that Israel is the nation-state of the Jews. Outsiders who laugh at the Israeli obsession with “recognition” are merely displaying their ignorance. This demand carries with it some important consequences.
For one thing, if the Jews are a nation (and the principle of self-determination would seem to suggest it is the Jews, not the Palestinians, who will decide on that score), then their right to a state would preclude any Palestinian resettlement in Israel. In this, Netanyahu speaks for virtually all Israelis. The Palestinian demand to resettle within Israel has no precedent in international law. Many democratic states, including Greece, Finland, Ireland and others, have an ethnically or religiously defined right of return similar to Israel’s. But none claim a right of return outside their own borders, which is the substance of the Palestinian demand.
Another consequence of recognising Israel’s Jewishness is that it has a dramatic effect on the Palestinian ability to make peace. In Netanyahu’s view, nobody makes a lasting peace with injustice. If the Palestinian leadership believes it is compromising with an illegitimate foe, then any peace agreement is unlikely to last. Indeed, it is unlikely to be achieved in the first place. To have a stable peace, the Palestinian discourse about Israel must change, much as the Israeli discourse about Palestine changed profoundly during the 1990s. They must come to see the Jews as a people with legitimate national aspirations, a just cause alongside their own that demands a compromise between two genuine and lawful national entities. That, Netanyahu is saying, would be a peace worth investing in.
In his speech, Netanyahu managed to present a clear negotiating position. How will Abbas react to the call for recognition of Jewish nationhood? How will Obama react to the demand for the demilitarisation of Palestine -— a view held by a majority of Israelis in the wake of the Gaza debacle? One thing is clear: Netanyahu has thrown down the gauntlet for the other players in the peace drama. We must now await their response.
Haviv Rettig Gur is the Jewish world correspondent for the Jerusalem Post.
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