Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week called Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging him to use his new unity government to advance the peace process with the Palestinians. She looked forward, she said, to Netanyahu's reply to a letter from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, so that the two could resume negotiations.
Perhaps Clinton had convinced herself that Netanyahu had been held back by right-wing coalition partners from freezing settlements and engaging in a credible peace process as the Obama Administration had demanded. But Netanyahu's letter arrived a few days later, rejecting a halt to Israeli settlement construction, and demanding that the
Palestinians return to talks with no conditions. Despite broadening his coalition -- largely for domestic political reasons -- Netanyahu's positions on peace remain unchanged. That's because they represent his own preferences. Netanyahu built a political career opposing and resisting the Oslo Peace process. And while he's adapted his rhetoric, his policies remain consistent. Sure, in 2009 he said the words "Palestinian State", taboo for a Likud leader until then, but his late father hastened to reassure the party faithful that Bibi was simply saying what he needed to say to keep the Americans off his back, and would set limits and conditions for such a "state" that no Palestinian leader could accept. Ben Zion Netanyahu, who died last week, wasn't wrong. As former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy recently warned, Netanyahu hasn't changed; Israel has changed, its consensus moving closer to the Likud rejectionist positions that were shared only by a minority during the Oslo heyday.
And there's a method in Netanyahu's game that dates all the way back to Israel's founding in 1948. Israel's founders didn't like the terms of the partition plan offered by the UN in 1947, but they accepted it in principle -- and then substantially revised it on the ground in the war that followed in 1948, creating the Palestinian "Nakbah". The UN plan had awarded 55% of what had been Palestine to a Jewish State of whose population Palestinian Arabs would have comprised almost half, and the other 45% of the territory would be a Palestinian Arab state. By the end of the 1948 war, Israel had control of 72% of the territory, driving out hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to leave behind a minority of just 20%.
The lesson is obvious: Changing the facts on the ground in your favorn is far more important than what you say in diplomatic chambers. International law and even US policy forbade Israel from settling civilians in the remaining 22% of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) after Israel conquered it in the war of 1967, but again, Israel simply changed the facts on the ground. One in ten Israeli Jews now lives on land occupied by Israel in 1967, the settler population having doubled during the Oslo years
Israeli leaders from Ben Gurion to Sharon were mindful of the demands of the international context, and the need to prevent Israel coming under significant international pressure. That was why Sharon, champion of the settlement movement, dismantled a settlement in Sinai in April 1982, in line with the Camp David agreement with Egypt. Yamit was a price worth paying to secure Israel's expanding West Bank realm. The same logic led him to abandon the settlements of Gaza in 2005 to formalize US support for Israel holding onto its core settlements in the West Bank.
For the same reason, Netanyahu has hesitated in recent weeks over retroactively legalizing settlements that had been illegal even under Israeli law, although he still may. His cabinet reshuffle in part was to trim the power of settler factions of his own party, lest they act in a reckless manner that prompts an international backlash.
The question is not really whether Netanyahu is politically able to evacuate settlements -- although the answer is probably not, because much of Israel today would oppose a violent showdown with settlers in order to make peace with Palestinians.) But Netanyahu has never intended to make any more than token gestures designed to appease international critics, while keeping his eyes on the prize, knowing that the past 64 years has proven that things deemed impossible in one political moment have become established, and intractable facts on the ground within years. Why stop now?
