Israel

Wow. Just wow. The river of commentary about Israel’s recent election and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just keeps flowing. As I sat down to write this another piece popped into my inbox. Never has so much time been spent and ink spilled on what was a largely inconsequential event. Netanyahu called the election in order to consolidate his political position and he did precisely just that. The only places Netanyahu lost were North Tel Aviv, Twitter, and the editorial pages of most Western newspapers of record. For those who believed that a victory for the Zionist Union—a party list consisting of the Labor Party and Hatnuah, or “The Movement”— would produce a political dynamic conducive to a peace settlement with the Palestinians are either reality-denying optimists or simply do not understand the conflict. No matter the outcome of last week’s election there would be no peace deal because there is no deal to be had. The underlying structure of the conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians cannot satisfy the minimum requirements of peace for the other suggests prolonged stalemate. In the meantime, the annexation of the West Bank proceeds apace. Even if it was not quite the watershed event that it was built up to be, the Israeli election was nevertheless revealing in a variety of ways. Netanyahu: The Least Normal Politician in the World It is pretty clear that Netanyahu has a knack for rubbing people the wrong way. Secretary of State James Baker banned him from the State Department in the early 1990s when Netanyahu publicly trashed U.S. policy in the Middle East, saying it was based on “lies and distortions.” President Bill Clinton disliked him. And then there is President Barack Obama, who seems to loathe being within five feet of the prime minister. There is also a lot of Bibi-hate on social media as well as some serious bile directed at Netanyahu from big-footed columnists. No doubt he represents a worldview that many people do not like and he happens to be a smug dude, but Netanyahu is first and foremost a politician, even if some people who are supposed to help us understand the world refuse to see him that way—I am looking at you Thomas Friedman, Dana Milbank, and David Remnick. In all the commentary about Netanyahu, observers tend to dismiss the incentives, constraints, and cross-cutting pressures that people in his line of work face. He, they argue implicitly, is somehow different. Here is a question: What do most politicians want above all? If you answered that they want to help their country “become great again” or “help people” you would be wrong. I am sure that many of them want these things, but it is not too cynical to suggest that politicians want most of all to be elected (if they exist in a democracy) and once they hold office, they want to keep that position. Very often—and not just in Israel—this leads politicians to say and do things that are calculated exclusively to win votes. Under these circumstances why is everyone so aghast that Netanyahu renounced his June 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he indicated his support for a two-state solution? Did anyone actually believe him at the time? If so, I would like to meet them. Netanyahu’s acceptance of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel was grudging and caveated. The speech was a function of political duress borne of a popular new American president who took a different approach to Israel and the Palestinians than his predecessors. At the time, Netanyahu could not find safe haven in a Democratic Party-controlled Congress, which feared Obama. Back then, Netanyahu’s support for a Palestinian state was hardly credible and he has been walking away from it ever since. When the chips were down in the final hours of the Israeli election and he needed an extra push from the right, Netanyahu said, “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel.” In one single sentence, Netanyahu blew every Israeli right-wing dog whistle—Palestinian state, evacuate lands, attack grounds, radical Islam—and it worked. Supporting something one day and repudiating it another? Whatever works. That’s politics. Far more disturbing was Netanyahu’s “the Arabs are voting” statement, which was an appeal to the darkest instincts of some Israeli Jews who regard the Palestinian minority in the country to be a fifth column. The amalgamation of Arab parties—with some Jewish communists thrown in—known simply as the “Joint List,” gained thirteen Knesset mandates, which may help direct much-needed resources to the Arab sector. Still, Netanyahu’s plea, with all of its discriminatory undertones, has the potential to breed even further alienation among Arab citizens of Israel, which cannot be good for anyone. What Suboptimal Outcomes? It goes without saying that politicians say and do things that are in their own self-interest, but this can often lead to suboptimal outcomes for society. Netanyahu’s repudiation of the two-state solution and his warning about large numbers of Arab voters seem to fall into the category. The Sunday papers brought stories of the Palestinian leadership exploring ways to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes as well as considering to suspend security cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces, increase tension with the Obama administration, and threaten Israeli democracy. All this trouble seems likely, but aside from targeting Israel’s senior commanders for crimes against humanity it is not at all clear that Netanyahu’s constituency is worried. The majority of Israelis do not seem burdened by an almost half-century occupation and, for the hardcore supporters of the settlement project, there is no suboptimal outcome when one is fulfilling the messianic vision of the “whole Land of Israel.” Also, Netanyahu seems to have changed the dynamics of U.S.-Israel relations. Almost twenty-five years ago, the tension between the government of Yitzhak Shamir and the George H. W. Bush administration contributed to Yitzhak Rabin’s election in the spring of 1992. Analysts have thus come to believe that Israelis would punish their leaders who damaged the special relationship Jerusalem enjoys with Washington. Netanyahu has turned this idea on its head, making conflict with the United States a virtue in Israeli politics. The old rule may apply with a different American leader who may be more widely perceived to be friendly to Israel, but for the moment Netanyahu will not pay a price for being at odds with Obama. Is Israel Polarized? For a long time journalists, academic analysts, and the policy community have imagined Israel’s politics to be polarized between right and left. This view does not seem accurate, however. A rightward shift has been underway since 1977 when Menachem Begin’s Likud sent the Labor Party into opposition for the first time in Israel’s twenty-nine years of existence. Almost forty years later, Likud and other parties of the right and center-right have come to dominate the political arena with Labor Party interludes between 1992 and 1996 and again between 1999 and 2001. Since then Labor has joined Likud- or Kadima-led governments, but always unhappily and uneasily as one of a number of junior partners. It is true that the Zionist Union scored twenty-four seats in the Knesset, which is only six seats less than Likud, but it only managed to do so in cooperation with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party and they still could not knock off Likud. The centrist Yesh Atid Party took a beating, losing eight Knesset seats while Meretz, the standard bearer of the Israeli left, has five seats. Subtracting the religious parties, which are ideologically flexible, the election only looks close—fifty-four seats to fifty-three seats—when you include the Joint List’s thirteen mandates in the center-left’s tally. The reality remains that because Israeli politics demand “Zionist coalitions”—meaning those made up of exclusively Jewish parties—the groups representing the Arab sector do not count. Netanyahu: King of Israel As the election results came in last week, I tweeted, “Netanyahu is the most successful Israeli politician since David Ben Gurion.” Some Tweeps thought it was an unfair comparison to Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the State of Israel. I did not say they were successful in the same ways, however. Israel has serious domestic problems, especially a huge gap between the wealthy and poor and a very high cost of living, but even accounting for these issues it is hard not to conclude that Netanyahu’s track record is objectively impressive (meaning I do not agree with his views, but I am willing to admit he has proven to be effective): Since 1996 he has won four elections, closed off the possibility of dividing Jerusalem, and expanded the city. Netanyahu has also played a central role in making a Palestinian state impossible. All the while he was undermining a two-state solution, Netanyahu has kept American largesse coming and improved Israel’s position in the Middle East, where it enjoys strong security relations with Egypt and Jordan and finds itself aligned with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on most regional issues. Israel is isolated at the United Nations and university campuses to which a lot of Israelis would say, “Big deal.” And even though the Obama administration threatens to reevaluate the way it handles Israel in the UN Security Council, Netanyahu can count on Israel’s many friends in Congress, especially the Republican Party for which Israel has become a central issue, to do what they can to minimize the damage. For a right-of-center Israeli, that is a pretty darn good record. In the run up to the election, when faulty polls showed Likud trailing the Zionist Union, a variety of observers began speculating what the Israeli prime minister might do after politics.It now seems likely that when the Israeli prime minister calls the next American president after he or she has won the November 2016 elections, it will be Benjamin Netanyahu who will express the warm wishes and congratulations on behalf of the Israeli people. He is, as his supporters proclaim, the King of Israel.

Khaled Fahmy criticizes the Egyptian government’s plan to invest money in building a new capital rather than fixing Cairo’s endemic problems. Simon Cordall investigates the social and intellectual appeal of jihadism in Tunisia. Michael Koplow examines what the recent Israeli election shows about Israeli voting patterns and the likely policies of the incoming government.

Israel’s next government will assume the mantle of a strong and prosperous country. While facing a range of security challenges and tremendous regional turmoil, Israel today enjoys a preponderance of power over any likely regional threat or adversarial coalition. Its national economy is robust, and the country’s national cohesion remains exceptionally strong. Nonetheless, Israel’s overall strategic posture is vulnerable. Its national power and economic strength depend on less tangible factors, such as foreign relations, global alliances, and perceived international legitimacy. The Israeli government formed after the March 17 election will face four significant and interrelated challenges: First, relations between the Jewish state and the United States, its superpower ally and patron, are poor. Six years of bickering over Israeli settlement activities, Palestinian peace efforts, and the best way to contain if not counter Iran’s nuclear program have challenged bilateral relations. The next Israeli government will need to reestablish its traditional bipartisan base of support in Washington or risk becoming a party to domestic U.S. political squabbles. Second, Israel sees its largest regional threat coming from an Islamic Republic of Iran that openly calls for its eradication. While continuing to project influence regionally, Iran has advanced its decades-long effort to develop an indigenous nuclear enrichment program. With or without a P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United States, China, France, Russia, and UK—and Germany) agreement, Israel will see Iran and its regional allies as the greatest military challenge to its security. Israel’s next government will prioritize countering Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions. Third, Israel faces challenges from two different and rival Palestinian leaderships. Israel has fought Hamas, Gaza’s de facto government, in three deadly yet inconclusive rounds of conflict in the last decade. Left isolated and unattended, Gaza could erupt, with violence spilling over into Israel. Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which administers the West Bank’s major population centers via the Palestinian Authority, has shifted away from cooperation with Israel toward diplomatic confrontation in international fora, including the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. While Israel has a preponderance of military power, the Palestinians are attempting to level the playing field on the international stage. The PLO also threatens to suspend on-the-ground security cooperation with the Israeli Defense Forces. It is unlikely to desist absent an Israeli government that seeks to make peace and end the occupation of the West Bank. Fourth and closely related, Israel faces a trend toward international delegitimization in parts of Europe and the United States, where Israel has traditionally enjoyed unrivaled support. The growing perception that Israel opposes Palestinian national aspirations accelerates Israel’s isolation. The next Israeli government will face a Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement that is gaining momentum and threatens to take root with a new generation of academics and politicians, among others. Only a credible move to establish two states in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean could help thwart this. Israel has been largely reactive in the face of the upheavals sweeping the Middle East for the past five years. Yet the enormity of its most critical challenges may force the next Israeli government to adopt new initiatives and a more activist approach. For a comprehensive take on the upcoming Israeli election of which this posting is one part, check out CFR.org’s Expert Roundup by Benedetta Berti, Shlomo Brom, Natan Sachs, and Yossi Klein Halevi.

This article was originally published here on CNN.com on Tuesday, March 3, 2015. Despite the hype, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still managed to deliver a speech that was both magisterial and audacious. Pulling few punches, Netanyahu went to Washington’s epicenter and told assembled lawmakers that the United States’ president, Barak Obama, is negotiating a terrible deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The speech is likely to have an impact in three important ways: First, Netanyahu just made the deal that the Obama administration is trying to conclude all the more difficult. The Israeli leader pointed to some of the emerging deal’s core problems: first, leaving much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in place, and second, sunset provisions that would remove remaining restrictions after a decade. In doing so, Netanyahu gave the Obama administration’s biggest domestic critics a huge bat with which to club the president and his team. More fundamentally, the Israeli leader was effective in portraying the Islamic Republic not as a potential partner, but as the source of the region’s greatest ills. Second, the sheer audaciousness of Netanyahu delivering a speech in the capital while Secretary of State John Kerry is negotiating with Iranian envoys in Switzerland is likely to render impossible any future modus vivendi between President Obama and the Israeli prime minister. For the past six years, Obama and Netanyahu have been locked into an unending cycle of clashes followed by temporary truces. Tuesday, Netanyahu seemingly confirmed the White House’s deepest suspicions that the Israeli leader has long been working to manipulate partisan American politics against the president. Continue reading on CNN.com

Significant Developments ISIS. Ashton Carter, wrapping up his first overseas trip as secretary of defense, met with top U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Kuwait on Monday to review the U.S.-led international coalition’s strategy against ISIS. Carter announced that the Obama administration had “the ingredients of the strategy” to defeat ISIS militarily in Iraq and Syria, but that further efforts were required to combat ISIS’ use of social media. Meanwhile, the Pentagon on Tuesday walked back its earlier CENTCOM announcement of a spring offensive to retake Mosul from ISIS after Iraqi officials reacted angrily to the disclosure. A senior CENTCOM official had briefed reporters on details of the offensive, including dates and the number of fighters likely to be involved. The White House also distanced itself from the announcement, with spokesperson Josh Earnest telling reporters that he was not aware of the briefing and that the offensive “[wouldn’t] begin until the Iraqi security forces are ready.” Israel. Opposition Labor Party head Isaac Herzog today called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel his planned Congressional address next Tuesday saying it would cause “strategic damage to Israel’s standing and to the relationship with the United States.” U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice last night strongly criticized the Israeli leader’s planned Congressional speech, calling it “destructive to the fabric of the [U.S.-Israeli] relationship” in an interview with Charlie Rose. Meanwhile, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) reported on Tuesday that Netanyahu had declined to attend a private meeting with Democratic senators, calling Netanyahu’s refusal “disappointing to those of us who have stood by Israel for decades.” However, Israeli officials said today that Netanyahu will meet with Democratic and Republican Senate leaders in a closed-door meeting. Turkey-Syria. Turkish military forces entered Syria for the first time since the start of the Syrian civil war last weekend to secure the remains of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire and to evacuate the thirty-eight soldiers guarding his tomb. ISIS had threatened to destroy the tomb unless its guards lowered the Turkish flag adorning it. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that over five hundred troops, forty tanks, and over a hundred and fifty vehicles entered Syria through Kobani and successfully removed Shah’s remains and rescued the guards posted to the shrine who had been trapped by ISIS militants for several months. The Syrian government issued a statement on Sunday calling the operation a “flagrant aggression,” alleging that Turkey undertook the excursion without gaining permission from Damascus. Prime Minister Davutoglu told reporters on Sunday that he had notified the Syrian government, rebel leaders, and the coalition forces battling ISIS about the operation. U.S. Foreign Policy Qatar. Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani met with President Barack Obama on Tuesday, in his first ever visit to the White House. President Obama stressed the “strong security relationship” between the United States and Qatar, and said that Qatar was a “partner on a whole range of security initiatives, [including] in the [U.S.-led international] coalition to degrade and ultimately defeat [ISIS].” The leaders also discussed the situation in Syria, agreeing that the country could only be stabilized after securing the stepping down of President Bashar al-Assad. Iran. Secretary of State John Kerry testified on Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee to explain the State Department’s budget request. In hearings heavily focused on the ongoing negotiations with Iran, Kerry denied reports that the United States would accept a nuclear agreement that would constrain Iran’s ability to achieve break out capacity after ten years. He declined to offer further details on the talks. Kerry’s testimony came a day after he returned from the latest round of high-level talks in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear program. While We Were Looking Elsewhere Palestine. A U.S. District Court awarded over $ 218 million on Monday to ten U.S. families who were among the victims of six terrorist attacks perpetrated by Palestinian groups between 2002 and 2004. The jury found the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) liable for their role in knowingly supporting the attacks. The attacks killed thirty-three people and wounded over four hundred and fifty, including U.S. citizens. The final damages will amount to over $655 million under a special legal provision that provides for tripling the amount of damages awarded by the court. The PLO and PA announced they were “deeply disappointed” with the verdict, while Palestinian deputy information minister, Mahmoud Khalifa, vowed Tuesday to appeal the decision. Syria. ISIS militants have kidnapped over two hundred Assyrian Christians over the last three days after storming several villages in northeast Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a London-based watchdog. Thousands of Christians have resorted to fleeing the town of Tal Tamr in an effort to avoid abduction. ISIS has taken command of ten Assyrian villages around Tal Tamr that were previously under Kurdish militia control, and has also kidnapped militants fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) during an assault on Tal Tamr. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch released a report on Tuesday documenting the Syrian regime’s use of barrel bombs on at least fifteen hundred sites in rebel-held areas since the Security Council specifically censured their use in February 2014. Barrel bombs are prohibited under international law as they indiscriminately injure civilians upon explosion. Meanwhile, the Syrian authorities have released a prominent Syrian dissident, Louay Hussein, on bail. Hussein, who is the head of the pro-democracy “Building the Syrian State” movement, is charged with “spreading false news” and “weakening national morale.” His next trial is scheduled for March 3. Lebanon. Lebanese military experts and analysts announced yesterday that ISIS and the Nusra Front, who are mostly located near the northeastern border with Syria, are planning a large-scale attack on Lebanon, most likely in the second half of March, once the weather improves. The Nusra Front’s main goal for the offensive is to secure new supply routes, while ISIS seeks to gain traction in a bid to set up an Islamic “emirate” in Lebanon. ISIS’ leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, first announced his plans to create such an “emirate” last year in Iraq. ISIS announced recently that the command for the emirate in Lebanon would be led by Khalaf al-Zeyabi Halous, a Syrian militant who played a key role in the ISIS offensive to capture Raqqa in Syria in 2013. Yemen. Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi withdrew his resignation from Yemen’s presidency on Monday after he escaped from a month-long house arrest at the hands of Houthi rebels. He has since relocated to the southern city of Aden, and is seeking the support of political parties and southern tribes to retake power from the Houthi rebels. According to a Hadi aide, Saudi Arabia has relocated its ambassador to Aden and promised unlimited political and logistical support to him. Houthi rebels issued an official statement on Tuesday, saying Hadi had “lost his legitimacy to act as president.” Egypt-GCC. President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi on Monday applauded the support offered by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain, and stressed that efforts to cause friction between Egypt and the Gulf States would fail. The statement appeared to be a thinly veiled reference to the recent discord between Egypt and Qatar over Egypt’s airstrikes against ISIS factions in Libya last week in retaliation for ISIS beheading twenty-one Egyptian Copts near Benghazi. The situation also caused friction between the various members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) last Thursday, after the GCC publicly endorsed Qatar for announcing it had reservations about the Egyptian air strikes without the support of all members of the Council, prompting its secretary-general to issue a new statement in support of the strikes in Libya later that day. Egypt. A prominent Egyptian blogger and activist, Alaa Abd El Fattah, was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $13,000 on Monday by an Egyptian court. He was convicted for participating in an unauthorized demonstration against the use of military trials for civilians in November 2013. Two -dozen other defendants received more lenient sentences during the same trial. Meanwhile, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi authorized an anti-terrorism law on Tuesday, which authorizes officials to ban groups or individuals that are deemed to be a threat to national security, including people who disrupt public transportation. The law also gives officials the authority to freeze the groups’ assets. Tunisia. Tunisian officials announced on Tuesday that their security forces had arrested around one hundred suspected Islamist militants in Tunisia since the weekend, including some allegedly influenced by ISIS. At present, there are an estimated 3,000 Tunisians fighting in Syria.

South African and Israeli media report that the student council at Durban University of Technology is demanding that “Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should de-register.” The student council call has been unambiguously rejected by the university authorities. The vice chancellor of the university, Ahmed Bawa, even went as far as to say that the students’ request violated the South African constitution. The student action appears to conflate Judaism with the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Nevertheless, the student vote is deeply disturbing, given South Africa’s history of anti-Semitism. The Durban University of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal is a post –apartheid merger of a white technology school with one for “Indians,” as South Asians were referred to during the apartheid era. It has 22,000 students on four campuses divided between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The Jewish community in South Africa numbers perhaps 90,000, with most living in Johannesburg and Cape Town. They are, of course, part of the white population that numbers almost five million. There is also a small African tribe, the Lemba, that identifies as Jewish. Some South African Jews, such as Joe Slovo, were prominent in the anti-apartheid movement, and anti-Semitism could be found among the Afrikaner population, especially those that supported apartheid. In the 1930’s some Afrikaans language newspapers were anti-Semitic, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party had some admirers in South Africa, who opposed their country’s entry into World War II on the side of the allies. With the Israel-Palestinian conflict, such anti-Semitism as there is in South Africa is no longer identified with Afrikaners. Rather it is to be found primarily on college campuses and is a reflection of a bitter international relations issue rather than domestic South African politics.