The New Middle East (40 page)

It was a deliberate slap in the face from Israel in return for their sense of being slighted. ‘We felt like it was an ambush,’ the senior Israeli cabinet minister told me soon afterwards. ‘We don’t want to embarrass the administration and we expected the administration not to surprise us. Giving the statement about the 67 [borders], it was a surprise, we were promised this issue wasn’t going to be delivered.’ ‘There is a gap [between the White House and Israel], you can’t ignore it,’ he told me.

A few days later Netanyahu addressed the US Congress and received rapturous applause. By the
New York Times
’s droll account: ‘Mr. Netanyahu received so many standing ovations that at times it appeared that the lawmakers were listening to his speech standing.’
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American commentators described Netanyahu’s language during his visit as ‘unusually blunt for a visiting head of state’.
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I asked someone who was an official in the Obama administration at the time about Israel’s claims that the administration had mismanaged the peace process right from the start. ‘Well we brought back in [US Envoy] Dennis Ross and we didn’t get any further. If that were true then round two should have gone a lot better and round two wasn’t any better than round one.’ But the Israeli minister complained: ‘We realised, not for the first time, those we speak with like [envoys] Dennis Ross and [George] Mitchell and so forth are not in the inner circle. The inner circle is very different, different agenda with different understandings. The gaps are so wide, not just between us and the president but between the president and his staff.’ This was because the formation, not just the core ideas, of US foreign policy, particularly when it came to the Middle East, was firmly in the grip of the White House.

‘This is the most dysfunctional relationship between an Israeli prime minister and an American president that I have observed. I’ve worked for half a dozen secretaries of state and I’ve watched and studied this relationship even before I got into government,’ Aaron David Miller told me. He worked at the State Department for more than two decades and is now a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC.

The new Israeli government [because it is] broader will ease some of that dysfunction, but it’s a relationship that’s made much more complex by different personalities and different policy approaches. In the past, with Begin and Carter, and with Bush 41 and Shamir, they were very tense at times, but in both of those cases circumstances emerged that ameliorated the relationship and created a joint basis on which the two in each case could cooperate. What’s anomalous about this relationship is that four years in there isn’t a common enterprise. Even while the US–Israeli relationship becomes much closer, at the top there are serious problems.

The shape of the coalition that emerged after the 2013 Israeli elections has and will continue to temper Netanyahu’s proven willingness to stage big public rows with Obama, though it may not end them all. During Obama’s first term there was eventually a casual assumption by the Israeli government, and Netanyahu in particular, that if he wanted to he could defy the president and speak over the heads of the administration to the people and the Congress to successfully make Israel’s case. This attitude reached its peak during the 2012 presidential election when Netanyahu was considered to have openly supported Obama’s Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
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By then though, Obama’s personal thoughts on the Israeli PM were very public. In November 2011 at the G20 summit French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s private remarks with Obama were caught on an open microphone. ‘I can’t stand him any more, he’s a liar,’ Sarkozy said in French of Prime Minister Netanyahu. ‘You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day,’ Obama replied.
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‘Israelis are damaged, lonely, neurotic people who face genuine threats to their existence, so they need love badly,’ said the staunchly pro-Israel writer Jeffrey Goldberg on the eve of President Obama’s state visit in 2013.
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And during that visit Obama went out of his way to woo. It was a measure of how much they truly dislike each other that he and Netanyahu tried so hard to pretend they were the best of friends. Or rather that Obama and ‘Bibi’ were best friends. The US president went through press conferences throwing out Netanyahu’s nickname so many times that the bonhomie looked thoroughly forced. The interaction between the two men was ‘cringe-worthy’ said an Israeli commentator.
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Obama had come to make friends with the Israeli people, because he knew that he wasn’t going win over most of the politicians. For that reason he chose to speak before a convention centre in Jerusalem packed with university students, many of them already sympathetic to his message, instead of to the Knesset just down the road. It was clear from the excitement of the youngsters sitting around me that he was going to be warmly received, and sure enough when he walked on to the empty stage with no build-up or fanfare he still got a rock-star reception.

The speech, like his Cairo one four years earlier, was careful to press all the right buttons, but for a very different audience. It had bursts of Hebrew and lots of praise and empathy with the Jewish people in their suffering, and their struggle for a homeland. It was a fine speech, probably one of his best. During it he took the opportunity to do what Netanyahu had done to him back in Washington. He talked over the prime minister’s head to appeal for a more imaginative approach to the conflict with the Palestinians, telling the youngsters before him: ‘I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks.’ But then he told Israel that two years after the Arab Spring revolts it was time to accept the reality of its new neighbourhood and deal with it.

Israel needs to reverse an undertow of isolation . . . I understand that with the uncertainty in the region, people in the streets, changes in leadership, the rise of non-secular parties in politics, it’s tempting to turn inward because the situation outside of Israel seems so chaotic. But this is precisely the time to respond to the wave of revolution with a resolve and commitment for peace. Because as more governments respond to popular will, the days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders, those days are over.

His audience spent almost as much time on their feet as Congress did for Netanyahu, but the mood outside was more sceptical. America does not have to live within the boundaries it is trying to form. Israelis are not going to do a deal unless they feel secure, and the nature and history of Israeli society suggest that making them feel secure in this neighbourhood is probably impossible. As far as many Israelis are concerned, they tried pulling out of the Palestinian territory in Gaza and it left the south of the country exposed to regular incoming rockets fired by Islamist militants. Pulling out of the West Bank, in the minds of many people here, means potentially having those rockets fired into their biggest population centre, Tel Aviv, from just a few kilometres away. ‘We left Gaza completely. There were 22 settlements, 8000 or 9000 settlers. We left it without pre-conditions, on our own initiative. It was very difficult for us.’ The Israeli President Shimon Peres told me, ‘To bring back the settlers from there we had to mobilise 75,000 policeman. To build new houses we had to spend close to US$3 billion but we did it. We handed it over. So tell me why are they shooting at us? What is the reason? What is the purpose? Explain it to me I don’t understand. If it had gone differently it would have been much easier to then negotiate over the West Bank.’

The Arab Spring, regardless of Obama’s encouraging words, has only made Israel’s sense of insecurity worse. For the last forty years their two quietest borders were with their two biggest neighbours, Egypt and Syria. Dictators ran these places and, as Obama pointed out, the Israeli military had reached an accommodation with them both. Now across the northern border there is civil war in Syria with a growing jihadi presence. To the south in the Sinai Egypt’s army is struggling to deal with a hotbed of Islamic militancy. ‘Look at the map,’ said one of Israel’s top soldiers to me when we met shortly before President Obama arrived for his trip. ‘We are a small fragile place that everybody likes to hate and wants to do something about.’

Having Yair Lapid’s more centrist party in the new Israeli government coalition is not going to lead to a breakthrough in the peace process because alongside it is the pro-settler Jewish Home Party, which doesn’t believe in a Palestinian state at all. The issue of settlements, which were the root cause of the first bust-up, is going to be tougher to tackle with the new coalition line-up. For that reason, four years after telling the Israelis that settlements must ‘stop’ Obama told the Palestinians they weren’t going to. Standing next to Mahmoud Abbas during a brief trip to Ramallah, he said: ‘I will say with respect to Israel, that the politics there are complex and I recognize that that’s not an issue that’s going to be solved immediately . . . I will share with the Palestinian people that if the expectation is that we can only have direct negotiations when everything is settled ahead of time, then there’s no point for negotiations.’
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Obama said on the eve of his state visit: ‘My goal on this trip is to listen.’
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But it was clear before he climbed on the plane that none of the people he had come to meet had changed their point of view from the day he took office, so his administration clearly hadn’t been paying attention the first time around. He delivered one of those candyfloss speeches that seem huge and briefly excite but contain very little to bite into. The message, four years on from his first set-piece address from the Middle East, can be summed up as: ‘I do not intend to
personally pursue
this, because I’ve lost patience with the lot of you, so say hello to John.’

Secretary of State Kerry began with the tried-and-tested route of shuttle diplomacy to restart the process with all the enthusiasm of someone who had never experienced the huge disappointment of trying to get something substantial out of dealing with the two sides. He didn’t have to wait long to be bloodied in the ways of the politics of the peace process. Kerry began his pitch in April 2013, with a plan to boost the West Bank economy.
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That was immediately undermined by the resignation a week later of the Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, who would have been the man expected to see it through.

Fayyad was the only man the West truly trusted to spend their money wisely to build the economy and infrastructure of the West Bank. But Fayyad had no political support base of his own. Both Fatah and Hamas disliked him and saw him as an obstacle to their potential reconciliation. While the economy was strong he was safe. When it took a serious downturn after 2011 he was constantly sniped at by Fatah and fell out with Abbas. He offered to resign several times over the following years. That April he tried again and this time, despite objections from Washington, Abbas accepted it. So John Kerry began his stint of peace making facing a divided Israeli cabinet, a feud between the two biggest Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, and acrimony in the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Though Fayyad agreed to stay on until his replacement was found, the West had lost the one person in the PA it really believed in. The dispute left Abbas looking increasingly imperious. Hamas cheered Fayyad’s loss. Kerry suddenly saw why his boss had all but given up on the project in his first term. Kerry then made his job harder by telling Congress, ‘The window for the two-state solution is shutting . . . I think we have some period of time, a year and a half or two years, or it’s over.’
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That’s what you say to create a sense of urgency when all sides want a deal. They don’t.

The Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel had said the day before, ‘In another year and a half, apartments will be built in E1.’
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E1 is the area between Jerusalem and the existing settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. This was always one of the most controversial settlement programmes. Its opponents say building on the E1 area would almost completely cut Jerusalem off from the West Bank, and prevent the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had warned, ‘It would represent an almost fatal blow to remaining chances of securing a two-state solution.’
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If President Obama does decide to brace himself and personally plunge back into the peace process, he is unlikely to do it at the beginning of his new presidential term, during the two years Kerry thinks are make or break. Perhaps as his presidency winds down he will try again. However he will not be willing to put his credibility on the line again unless Kerry tells him there’s something serious to work with. He won’t go out on a limb unless the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are sitting there already. But if he does try again, if the latest cumbersome Israeli coalition holds together that long and Netanyahu remains Prime Minister, it’ll need to be a very different, publically tougher President than the one who sat through a telling off in his own front room.