Timing can be everything in diplomacy, but when it comes to the Middle East timing can be the enemy of peace and the wrecker of plans.
After eight years of a Bush administration that had little interest — beyond rhetoric — in a Middle East peace, along comes Barack Obama, who wants to seize the moment in the springtime of his presidency.
But instead of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who argued that a two-state solution with the Palestinians was necessary for Israel’s survival, Obama is dealt Benjamin Netanyahu as an interlocutor.
Netanyahu has little interest in losing control over Palestinian territories, and would much rather see a solution in which Palestinians would accommodate themselves to remaining under Israeli sovereignty.
And while discussions between Israel and Syria were developing indirectly through the good offices of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they have basically halted under Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister’s national security adviser, Uzi Arad, recently declared that Israel would not withdraw from the Golan Heights in full, even in return for a peace with Syria. This comes just as Obama is bettering America’s relationship with Damascus.
Netanyahu knows that a complete stand-off with the United States is not advisable politically. Israeli voters may choose hardliners from time to time, but they don’t want their country to stray too far from its one great benefactor and protector. Thus, after Obama’s barn-burning speech in Cairo, in which he reinforced America’s desire for a Palestinian state, Netanyahu, as the Economist put it: “spat out the required pair of words.”
Netanyahu’s version of a possible Palestinian state is so circumscribed as to be unacceptable to any Palestinian, no matter how moderate. But, like the old joke about the duchess who finally agrees to a liaison, but only in exchange for a million pounds, Obama can say: Well, now that we have established your principles, we can haggle over the price.
So far, however, Obama has failed on two important fronts. He has failed to persuade Netanyahu to stop expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and he failed in his mission to Saudi Arabia to persuade Arab states to establish some connections to Israel.
The two are not unconnected. Without a complete freeze on settlement activity Obama can consign an Arab-Israeli peace to the dustbin. The Arab states still have an offer on the table — peace and recognition for a return to 1967 lines — which Israel never formally answered, but, presumably, the answer is no.
For Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, a settlement freeze is anathema, and not even Olmert was able to face down the powerful settler movement. It contains religious fanatics comparable to those in the Muslim camp, and they do not hesitate to assassinate those, such as Yitzhak Rabin, who are prepared to make territorial compromises. Perhaps only Ariel Sharon, the father of the settler movement who later saw the light, could have carried the day against the settlers, but the timing of his debilitating stroke stepped in to stay his hand.
Timing didn’t help with the Palestinians either, for history may show that Fatah, which came around to accepting the state of Israel, could not survive the death of Yasser Arafat, the only man — for good or ill — who could keep the Palestinians united.
Timing has baffled both Obama and Netanyahu when it comes to Iran. Obama was counting on his policy of engagement to alter Iran’s nuclear ambitions, while Netanyahu believed that a military strike might be the only solution to what he conceives as a mortal threat.
Now, after the May events revealed serious splits within the Iranian hierarchy, all bets are off. Obama may not get his hopes for engagement, and Israel does not have the same Iranian bogeyman it had before mass demonstrations, and the iconic death of Neda Shalehi, revealed that there may be another Iran waiting to emerge. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be still in power, but as an Israeli diplomat asked the journalist Philip Stephens, “How do you bomb Neda?”
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