Netanyahu's War Warning

Binyamin Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC is a rebuttal of the positions President Obama has urged upon him. The essence of Obama's position is that Israel should wait and not attack Iran because:

1. An attack by Israel alone is not likely to succeed.
2. Sanctions represent the best strategy for forcing Iran to give up its nuclear program permanently.
3. If necessary, the United States will attack Iran's nuclear program rather than let Iran create and deploy a bomb.

Netanyahu's response deserves close reading. If you weren't there (I was not) or haven't read it, here is the link to the official text.

Netanyahu directly addressed Obama's second point. He made polite mention of Obama's—really Congress'—latest round of sanctions, but then went on to express profound skepticism of sanctions:

For the last decade the international community has tied diplomacy. It hasn't worked. For six years the international community has applied sanctions. That hasn't worked either . . . [Israel has] waited for diplomacy to work. We've waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait for much longer.

The bottom line is that Netanyahu doesn't expect sanctions to work, certainly not in time to prevent Iran from getting a bomb.

Netanyahu then addressed Obama's other points more indirectly:

Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb. They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway; that it would be ineffective; that it would provoke an even more vindictive response by Iran.

Now, "some commentators" might refer to lily-livered European liberals whose comments are addressed to both Israel and the United States. But in fact nobody is arguing that American military action against Iran is likely to be ineffective. American military action against Iran is likely to be very effective. These arguments are being made primarily by the Obama administration as well as Netanyahu's domestic critics against unilateral Israeli action.

Netanyahu's rhetorical retort was devastating. He cited a letter by the American government to the World Jewish Congress in 1944, justifying the United States' abandonment of the Jews during the Holocaust. Having praised Obama's commitment to use force against Iran if necessary earlier in his speech, he implied that, in fact, if it became necessary for the United States to use force against the Iranian bomb then this administration was actually likely to leave the Jewish state in the lurch, just as the Roosevelt administration left European Jews in the lurch.

If this is an accurate reading of Netanyahu's meaning, it implies rejection of the Administration's first point as well. If the United States' commitment to bomb Iran cannot be relied on, that leaves Israeli action as the only alternative. As Netanyahu said, "As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never let my people live in the shadow of annihilation."

Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC comes across to me as a war warning, as explicit as Netanyahu can allow himself to be. I cannot know for sure, of course, that Netanyahu has dismissed as unreliable Obama's commitment to bomb Iran if necessary. But I think the chances of an Israeli attack on Iran have crossed the 50% threshold.

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I want to revise an opinion I wrote in yesterday's blog; and rather than revising the blog and pretending I didn't correct anything, I want to make my change of opinion explicit. I expressed entirely too much confidence ("probably true") that harsh sanctions can force Iran to forego nuclear weapons. I think it is possible that they may do so. It might be worthwhile to see what sanctions can do, provided that Obama's commitment to prevent by force the actual assembly of an Iranian bomb is ironclad. And it seems that Netanyahu rates Obama's credibility as pretty low.

Obama Fails to Reassure

The differences between Israel’s and the Obama administration’s policy on Iran is deep. The differences apply not so much to the objective of policy as to the details. The objective is to eliminate Iran’s military nuclear program. Neither side believes that the other’s proposed path to that objective is going to work.

First of all, a reality check: What is the status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program? What can they do?

There are two parts to a program to build a bomb. One is to master the necessary technologies. The other is to actually go ahead and put the thing together. For years Israel has been warning the world that Iran has been trying to acquire the capacity to build a bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report on Iran last November implies that the capacity exists:

- Iran has lots of uranium and is enriching much of it to 20% uranium-235 (the isotope that goes boom). From there it is a hop, skip and jump to enrich uranium to the 90% concentration of U-235 that bombs use. Enrichment gets faster and easier as the concentration of uranium-235 goes up.

- Another crucial technology is the sophisticated implosion device that crushes uranium together and sets off a nuclear explosion. Mastering this technology is indispensible in making a warhead small enough to fit atop a missile. The Iranians acquired blueprints of this device years ago from the Pakistanis; the North Koreans have shown they have mastered it, and will probably sell what they know to anybody with cash. The Iranians probably have it too.

- The weakest link in the Iranian technological chain is designing a missile that can carry a warhead weighing several tons to Israel. The Iranians are working on this but it’s not clear they have mastered the technology. The North Koreans have, though, and they sell Iran missiles.

So the bottom line is that the Iranians probably have all the pieces they need to make a deliverable bomb. It would probably take them eight months to year to put all the pieces together. That is, they are lurking just outside what is called the nuclear “threshold.” They can step over the threshold whenever they please.  What is holding them back is not any lack of capability but their assessment of what foreign powers are likely to do if they give the signal to build a real bomb. They are now working feverishly to move their uranium-enrichment facilities to an underground bunker near Qom where it might take a tactical nuclear weapon to dig them out. No doubt the bunker includes facilities for actually assembling a nuclear weapon as well.

At the start of the Obama administration, the Americans were still trying to argue that the Iranians had given up on building a nuclear weapon. At the time that meant “the Iranians have stopped trying to acquire the ability to build a bomb,” and the argument was false. Now the United States is again saying the Iranians aren’t trying to build a bomb, but the meaning is very different. Now they mean that “Iran hasn’t yet pushed the button that will automatically lead to the creation of a nuclear arsenal unless someone stops them.”

To move against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Israel has to attack it before the transfer of facilities to a new, deep underground bunker in Qom. Once the bunker installation is set up, Israel has lost its military options, unless it is willing to use a nuclear weapon first, with all that entails.

The United States is skeptical about an Israeli attack. Some of its reasons are good. First, unless it uses nukes Israel probably doesn’t have enough military power to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program. Iran is too big, too rich, its nuclear sources too widely dispersed. Anything Israel destroys conventionally can be rebuilt in time. Attacking Iran will unify Iranians with their government, now widely considered illegitimate. From America’s perspective, Israel can irritate Iran and create an open war, but it can’t really solve the nuclear problem.

Second, the United States claims that a long-term regime of painful economic sanctions can cause Iran to knuckle under, as happened in Libya and is perhaps happening in North Korea. Even if the Iranians actually build a bomb, they can be induced to take it apart and ship the components abroad if there is starvation and revolution in the streets.

My assessment is that if the United States and Europe are serious, then Obama is right on this one. And here comes the first issue on which the differences between Israel and the Obama Administration involve not just competing policy assessments but lack of trust. As Dan Senor points out in an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, Obama’s newfound determination to prevent Iran from achieving a bomb is—well, very new. Effective sanctions on Iran are the work of Congress, not Obama. Though he supposedly conceded the need for effective sanctions a year ago, he has been strangely dilatory in speaking uncompromisingly and passing sanctions with bite.

It’s not that he hasn’t done anything. The Europeans’ recent agreement to join in sanctions is partly due to of the IAEA report last November and partly due to Obama. But Obama acts like he has a guilty conscience about pressing the illegitimate, dictatorial, bloodthirsty and imperialist regime in Teheran. Iran is, after all, third world. Somewhere deep in Obama’s psyche there appears to be a reservation about the US “bullying” a country like Iran. It’s wrong thing for the United States to do. Iran ought to be treated nicely. At Aipac yesterday Obama talked about speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but he doesn’t have a very good record of using sticks.

From Israel’s perspective, the new sanctions regime and Obama’s commitment to it came about as a result of Israel’s uncompromising warnings that it will act if others don’t. Even so, sanctions have come too late. Iran will not back down before its nuclear project acquires effective immunity from attack in the Qom bunker. As said before, a persistent and determined sanctions policy might well force the Iranian regime, this one or another, to dismantle its nuclear project, even two or three years from now. But Israel fears that nobody else’s heart is really into the sanctions thing. When Israel no longer has the military option, everyone else—Obama included—will breathe a sigh of relief and go on to something else. And if Israel has to contend with a nuclear armed Iran, that’s just its tough luck. Tel Aviv isn’t New York or London, and the world now has ample experience shedding crocodile tears and building memorials to Jewish Holocausts. It’s their favorite PR activity.

In his AIPAC speech on Sunday Obama tried to reassure Israel that if the Iranians do push the button that launches the bomb-assembly process he will stop them with force. The United States has the ability to do this. It may even be able to break open the Qom bunker with sophisticated conventional weapons. “I have Israel’s back,” said Obama. If credible, this was an important new commitment. What Obama is saying to Israel is, effectively, “put your security in my hands.”

Frankly, I don’t believe him. I don’t believe he will use force to stop the Iranians from getting a bomb. It’s not an issue of American interests. I think that Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum or Joseph Lieberman would view the military destruction of an Iranian nuclear weapon as a critical American interest, and that they would do it. If they were to say to Israel, “Your ability to destroy the Iranian nuclear project on your own is marginal (this is true), persistent and intensifying sanctions can make them voluntarily give up the bomb project for good (probably true), and if all else fails and they actually go for a bomb we will blow the project to kingdom come,” well, as Israeli Prime Minister I wouldn’t like putting my security in another country’s hands but I would believe the promise because it reflected the speaker’s genuine convictions.

But I don’t believe Obama has Israel’s back. Or Saudi Arabia’s or Kuwait’s or Iraq’s. I think his deepest instincts tell him that starting a war is always bad, no matter who the enemy is or how much he threatens one’s own and one’s allies’ security. Especially if some of those allies are on the wrong side of “history” and expendable. If Israel has Obama at her back, she’d better keep an eye on her 6.

Israel's Attack on Iran-What's In It for Me?

It looks increasingly likely that Israel will attack Iran and that it will do so, not only without American support but with America’s disapproval. I don’t have inside information and don’t presume to be able to gauge when the probability passes 50% and becomes “more likely than not.”

I’ve always been skeptical about Israel going it alone against Iran. Iran is far. That matters a lot. It means that attacking Iran will place a great strain on the IDF, its pilots and aircraft. It means you have to invest a great deal of planning and effort in Israel to get even a modest result over Qom or Tehran. It means that the United States can bring the attack to an end whenever it wants by cutting off the flow of spare parts—send an F-15 out twice to Tehran, and you have to stuff hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of replacement parts into it even if it the enemy doesn’t lay a finger on it. Even if Saudi Arabia gives the IAF landing and refueling rights for this adventure the picture doesn’t change much.

And how do you bring such a war to an end? It’s sure not going to end with an Israeli armored division grinding through the ruins of Tehran. Iran is a large and populous country with over twice Israel’s GDP. What if they chuck a few missiles—conventionally-armed ones—at us every day? For ten years? How will ordinary Israelis stand up to that?

On the other hand . . . When people ask me whether Iran will use nuclear weapons on Israel and invite nuclear retaliation that will be ten times as deadly, I say “I don’t know.” I was trained as a Sovietologist and I knew how the Soviets thought. Their military developed theories of nuclear warfighting but their civilian leadership dreaded the notion. I rated the chances of a Soviet-initiated nuclear war as vanishingly small.

But Iran? Does anyone in Israel understand the Iranians as well as the United States and the Soviet Union understood each other? I certainly don’t. Recently Ali-Reza Forghani, a close associate of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, blogged that it was imperative for Iran to destroy Israel and outlined a plan for doing so by missile in 2014 (sorry, the link is to a British newspaper report, I don’t read Farsi). Given what we know about Iranian nuclear and missile technology, the plan and the timetable are entirely plausible. If Iran did that, then within three hours (Israeli cruise missiles are slower than Iranian ballistic missiles) twenty million Iranians would be dead. Are the ayatollahs deterred by that prospect? I honestly don’t know.

What if Israel does attack? It’s very likely that Israel will then be under massive attack from conventional missiles from Gaza and Lebanon. The solution for this in Lebanon is ground attack to take over the areas where the missiles are launched, after which Israel should destroy the missiles and go home; for Gaza it would be sufficient to take over permanently the southern part of the strip, cutting off the rest from Egypt. But this will take time. During the interim, for a week, or two, or four, things could get very badly disrupted:

The ports could be closed or only partially functional. Ditto with Ben Gurion Airport. These are the “lungs” through which Israel’s economy and civil society “breathes.” Everything, from oil and gas for power generation to flour and motor fuel, steel and wood, comes through those ports. The Reading power station could be damaged and offline.

I’ve been seriously thinking of doing something about it.

Item: Install two one-ton water reservoirs on our third floor. MAKE SURE to install them on one of the reinforced-concrete structural crossbars that hold up the third floor or you’ll have two tons of water crashing down through the ceiling of your bedroom. It’s enough to for everyone in the household to drink and wash hands, and to flush the toilets once a day for twenty days. Maybe even take a shower or two or do a laundry each week. If there’s no electricity there’ll be no pumped water in my town, Maale Adumim. Ah, and how do you run a washing machine?

Item: Household electric generator capable of producing 16 amps at 220 volts, to be run two hours a day. That’s when we’ll do the washing and cooking—the stove is electric. Item: 250-500 liters of gasoline. That’ll ensure we can put a few tankfuls in the car when gasoline deliveries stop. How does one safely store gasoline?

And the rest of the day—and night? Item: 200 candles. Emergency electric lighting, to be charged when we run the generator.

The cooktop runs on natural gas. Item: Four new 12-kilo bottles of cooking gas.  Hey presto, you can make yourself coffee in the middle of the day.  Item:  thirty liters of high-temperature preserved milk (and another thirty of soymilk for the kid with milk allergy).  We weren't thinking of running the refrigerator and there'd be no way to stock it anyway.

Item: 2500 calories per person per day, ten people, twenty days. Including flour, canned beans, canned meat, canned fruit, dried fruit with the vitamin C still active, ten boxes of cornflakes. . . . etc etc etc.

Item: 100 rolls of toilet paper and 10 liters of liquid hand soap.

Item: Battery-operated radio sets. Rechargeable batteries.

Item: If we have all this stuff and the country is disrupted, how do we defend it? Given my personal record of political activism I’ll never get a weapons license.

Item: $20,000. All this stuff can’t cost much less.

That’s what I’m thinking about these days.

Obama Strikes Back

Republican Bob Turner’s victory in New York’s deep, dark-blue 9th District, long part of the Democratic base, has shown how grave President Obama’s domestic political troubles are. While Obama’s economic record was the chief source of Democratic voter discontent in the 9th, Obama’s Israel policy also played a signiifcant role in this district with a large Jewish population.

In the week after the election, Israel unfortunately has become a political football in American partisan politics. Obama apologists are out there trying to convince voters how good Obama has been for Israel. If their style and manner actually reflect White House thinking, they only confirm that Israel has a genuine, serious problem in Barack Hussein Obama.

Two advance notices of Obama’s new line on Israel are John Heilemann, writing in New York Magazine (“The Tsuris”), and Tom Friedman writing in the Sunday New York Times. Both articles argue that Obama has been supportive of Israel on Iran, vis-à-vis Turkey, and on the Palestinians’ bid for recognition at the UN. Both argue that the Obama Administration has been doing favors for an ungrateful Israel, perhaps against America’s own interest. Here’s Heilemann, regarding Obama’s threat to veto Palestinian statehood in the Security Council:

Yet despite the damage thwarting that bid might cause to America’s standing in the region, the Obamans have never wavered in going balls-out [sic] for Israel.

Tom Friedman, as usual, is blunter:

[T]he powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.

Got that? In opposing the Palestinians’ move to demolish the peace process, the United States is doing Israel a favor. It’s not as if the United States is interested in the process—far more interested, in fact, than a majority of Bibi Netanyahu’s coalition. It’s not as if Iran’s nuclear weapons program (about which the Administration has done far less than it might have), or Turkey’s new anti-Israel policy, don’t threaten America’s entire alliance structure in the Middle East.

No, the United States is going out of its way to do Israel’s bidding. If this is the apologia the Obama administration is proferring to America’s pro-Israel voters, it is a poisoned chalice. It’s the whole Mearsheimer-and-Walt thesis, dressed up and pitched to the pro-Israel constituency: In fact, supporting Israel is not really in America’s interest. It’s just something Obama does, against America’s interest and his own better judgment, because he’s nice. Or dumb. Or because, as Tom Friedman suggests, his hand is forced and Israel manipulates American foreign policy.

Heilemann has the effrontery to suggest that Obama is the best friend that Israel ever had in the White House. He does catalogue a series of Obama “mistakes” regarding Israel. Not visiting Israel after Obama spoke in Cairo in June 2009 was a “blunder.” Obama didn’t unilaterally pressure Israel; his attempts to pressure the Arabs and Palestinians to accommodate Israel (in the words of Heilemann’s administration source, “to do some stuff on incitement [against Israel]”) were “underreported” by bad journalists. Regarding Obama’s insistence on turning Vice President Biden’s visit to Jerusalem in 2010 into a crisis, and his subsequent snub of Netanyahu in the White House—topped by a 72-hour ultimatum on freezing settlements, which Netanyahu ignored—Heilemann says the Obama White House “disputes the details.” Obama’s blindsiding Netanyahu by using the term “1967 borders” in his speech, given just before Netanyahu’s address to Congress, “caught Netanyahu by surprise.” Heilemann does say that the Administration’s basic approach to Israel, which ostensibly justifies calling Obama the “most pro-Israel president,” is “tough love.”

If I had a woman friend whose husband treated her to a series of “misunderstandings,” “blunders” and “surprises,” who claimed that he wielded “tough love” in order to get her to realize how she was fundamentally in the wrong, I would plead with her to move into a battered women’s shelter and to get a good lawyer.

To shift the blame for the Palestinian impasse at the UN to Israel’s shoulders, both Tom Friedman and John Heilemann rewrite history so as to leave out Obama’s responsibility for bringing matters to the present pass. It was Obama who singlehandedly led the Palestinians to base their approach toward Israel on unreasonable expectations. Obama decided to demand a settlement freeze, applying tremendous unilateral pressure on Israel to accede. By so doing, he encouraged the Palestinians to make public and get entrenched behind their most intransigent demands, those that make any kind of territorial compromise not so much impossible as irrelevant: No to acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state, no compromise on the Right of Return, no accepting a peace treaty as the end of the dispute. Under Abu Mazen, the Palestinians made the “Nakba” of 1948 the main theme of their PR.

Netanyahu may or may not have been serious about a negotiated peace, but Obama’s blunders had, for Israel, a positive consequence: It made clear that the Palestinians were interested in redressing the “injustices,” not of 1967, but of 1948 (the founding of Israel). Tom Friedman (echoing, no doubt, briefers in the Obama White House) blames Netanyahu for not putting forth a peace plan, but by September 2011 it has become clear that the most generous territorial offer was not going to solve Israel’s real problem with the Palestinians, which is that they are happy to take offers of territory and put them in their pocket but are simply unwilling to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Frustrated in his attempts to go for the full monte, constrained by Palestinian radicalism and the threat of Hamas, Abu Mazen chose to make a rapprochement with Hamas and to go for the UN vote.

Heilemann’s piece is simply PR hutzpa, trying to brazen out Obama’s hostility to Israel's government by pretending it is something else. By the end of the piece, the lengthy catalogue of things Heilemann has to try to explain away shows that he, and Obama, would have been much better off if Heilemann simply had not written.

Tom Friedman, however, has done something unforgivable. Once an Obama groupie, Friedman is frustrated by the severe challenges the current American administration faces. Seeing no solution, he has written an article that reverberates with unbelievable, impermissible overtones: Israel is to blame. Israel is responsible both for the United States’ Mideast dilemmas and for not producing a solution to them, a deus ex machina in the form of territorial compromise. But Israel is also responsible for forcing the United States to act against its own best interests.  Netanyahu has “boxed in” Obama; Republicans in Congress do Netanyahu’s bidding. They cannot conceivably have motives of their own for opposing the Democratic Party’s foreign policy or trying to win elections. It’s all . . . a conspiracy, Netanyahu pulling hidden strings behind the scenes.

It is painful to recall what this sounds like. This kind of argument has a long history, and historical consequences, that Mr. Friedman is well aware of. In making it he has entered dark territory no civilized person should traverse. One hopes he finds his way out soon.

If these White House apologists are the best that Obama supporters can do, they tend to confirm rather than dispel concerns about the Obama administration’s fundamental hostility to Israel. The themes the two articles share in common suggest that they both reflect a common wisdom that is in circulation in certain quarters. They suggest that someone is scapegoating the Israeli government for Mideast developments beyond Israeli or American control, or indeed for the Administration’s own blunders at home and abroad. They suggest far more than differences of opinion and analysis between the Israeli and American governments; they suggest a White House animus that distorts analysis and is fundamentally unfair.

Netanyahu’s New Stand on Settlements May Not Be Sustainable

In his speech to the Knesset on May 16 and in Congress on the 24th Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made a significant departure from his previous statements:  He indicated that he might be willing to give up the great majority of the West Bank in a peace agreement, involving the dismantling of settlements where almost 100,000 Israelis now live.  Some who have advocated this position for a long time are pleased that Netanyahu has seen the light.  They claim that by embracing this new stance Netanyahu has created a new Israeli consensus.  Their enthusiasm is premature.  It is far from clear that Netanyahu’s new position enjoys a consensus and even less clear that Netanyahu can sustain it in the future. 

Netanyahu’s address to Congress was a bold move intended to outflank President Obama.  So far Netanyahu has succeeded.  He made clear that Israel will not accept the basis on which Obama wants to conduct negotiations—a return to the 1967 lines, without appropriate security arrangements.  Obama tried to ambush Netanyahu by including mention of the 1967 lines in his own speech on the Middle East, only for Netanyahu to brush him aside and win applause on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.  It’s probably impossible now for Obama to apply real pressure to Israel to accept his position.  In the context of this signal victory, Netanyahu’s concession on settlements seems like a sweetener to moderates thrown in to increase support for his defiance of Obama.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to point to any real advantage Netanyahu gained by placing the homes of 100,000 of his fellow-citizens on the line.  His concession won’t satisfy any of his critics in Washington, Brussels or Ramallah, all of whom want much more.  And it’s hard to make a significant list of people who applauded him in Washington and who might have not done so if he’d simply not mentioned abandoning settlements.

The greatest weakness of Mr. Netanyahu’s new position on settlements is that it is predicated on the existence of negotiations.  It is not about to be implemented, and nobody can now foresee a time when it will be possible to implement it.  Israel and the Palestinian leadership are moving farther apart, not closer together.  A policy that remains only a theory is bound to lose relevance and such public support as it now enjoys with every passing month.

Mr. Netanyahu’s problem is compounded by Israeli public opinion trends.  Putting it bluntly, Netanyahu’s claim that his new position on settlements reflects the Israeli consensus is a stretch.  Insofar as public opinion polls can tell us anything, the Second Lebanon War of 2006 turned Israelis skeptical about almost every aspect of the peace process, and this skepticism has not abated.  One aspect of this skepticism is the sense that territorial withdrawals only whet the appetites of Israel’s adversaries for more—whether accompanied by formal agreements or not.  The Palestinian Authority’s reach for a unilateral declaration of independence, in violation of the Oslo accords, and the Fatah-Hamas rapprochement, do nothing to disarm this skepticism.

It is true that if the Israeli public were presented with a peace treaty on Netanyahu’s terms, all wrapped up and ready for ratification, the public might go for it.  The Israeli public has never yet rejected a proffered peace treaty.  But they would be uneasy.  Indeed, the Olmert government claimed to be negotiating something like the deal Netanyahu has in mind—the broader public has only the vaguest notion, if at all, of the ways in which Olmert’s position and Netanyahu’s new position differ.  Netanyahu himself was elected in 2009 to put a stop to those negotiations.

This does not mean that Israelis want to run the Palestinians’ lives.  There is a genuine consensus in Israel that Palestinians should run Palestinians’ lives—which they pretty much do right now.  What is absent is any real expectation that the parameters can be established by negotiations.  In its place there is growing support for the idea that Palestinian unilateralism should be matched with Israeli unilateralism: A de-facto partition of the West Bank.  On the Israeli right, this means providing the Palestinians with functional contiguity (not necessarily genuine territorial contiguity) while segregating and annexing areas Israel wishes to retain—not just so-called settlement blocs but all or most settlements and 40-60% of the territory.  This is the position of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party, Netanyahu’s biggest coalition partner, and is advocated by two Likud cabinet ministers, Yuli Edelstein and Moshe Kahlon.  The unilateral partition idea also has supporters on the left—Ehud Barak has expressed similar ideas in the past, though he would draw the partition line elsewhere.

Within Israel, therefore, as within the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu’s and President Obama’s preferred solution, a negotiated settlement, is on shaky ground.  Insistence that nothing change unless it be in the context of a negotiated solution, when no negotiations are in prospect, means that neither side can take practical steps to achieve genuine and important, though of course diametrically opposed interests.  It practically defies nature to expect that matters can continue in this state of suspended animation for long.  Indeed, the Palestinians have told the President what he can do with his preferred solution.   Palestinian unilateralism will increase pressure within Israel for Israeli unilateralism. 

Netanyahu’s new position is thus not one on which he can construct a new national consensus.  Opposition within Netanyahu’s government to Netanyahu’s new policy began to appear the morning after his Knesset speech.  Former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, a member of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, stated that the Jordan Valley must remain under Israeli sovereignty and that no Israeli security presence there is sustainable in the long run unless it is backed up by a permanent civilian presence.  Yaalon’s is probably the most senior and authoritative voice that could be raised against Netanyahu’s policy.  It remains to be seen whether other prominent figures within Netanyahu’s party will join him in the weeks to come, but forces within the Likud are already working to ensure that they do.

Kadima Contemplates the Abyss

The Fatah-Hamas reconciliation is likely to be bad news—especially for those unfortunates now likely to be targeted by Palestinian terror.  The first victim of the Fatah-Hamas rapprochement, however, is Israel’s largest opposition party—Kadima.  Its raison d’etre has just disappeared.

After the 2009 elections, a majority of the Knesset nominated Binyamin Netanyahu to the post of Prime Minister.  Netanyahu offered to take Kadima into his coalition and make Livni his #2.  Livni refused.  She took Kadima into opposition, where she has since argued that she can make peace with the Palestinians where Binyamin Netanyahu cannot.

Kadima’s peacemaking policy was founded upon the Hamas-Fatah rift.  Negotiations with Abu Mazen were possible even in theory only because Hamas, which insists on Israel’s destruction, mounted a coup d’etat against Fatah in Gaza in 2007 and was kicked out of the Palestinian coalition government.  With the reunion of Hamas and Fatah, Kadima is left without a policy.  80% of the Israel’s Jewish public probably agrees with Binyamin Netanyahu that it's impossible to negotiate with a Palestinian government, half of which wants Israel dead.  Almost everybody in Kadima also agrees with Netanyahu.  There hasn’t been a word from anyone in the party about the possibility of negotiation since the Hamas-Fatah deal was announced.  For Kadima, that means political oblivion beckons at the next election. 

Instead, the deal Livni refused two years ago has started to look pretty good.  In a revealing op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, Tzahi Hanegbi, a one-time Kadima MK convicted of graft who expects to run in the next elections, had the effrontery to suggest a text for “Bibi’s speech,” to be given in front of Congress in a few weeks’ time.  Scheduled before the fatah-Hamas reconciliation, this speech was supposed to include some grand new diplomatic initiative.  Those expectations have since diminished considerably.

Hanegbi, in fact, has nothing whatsoever to suggest regarding a diplomatic initiative toward the Palestinians.  Everything he has Netanyahu saying about them in his draft is nothing more than Netanyahu is already saying today:  No deal is possible.  Instead, Hanegbi’s proposed new “diplomatic initiative” involves an offer by Netanyahu to Kadima:  To prove to the world he is serious about peace, Netanyahu should offer to make Livni his foreign minister, to be in charge of negotiations with the Palestinians when and if they becoming possible.  Livni will prove to the world that Netanyahu is serious about peace, even though both Netanyahu and Livni now agree that peace negotiations are impossible.

Yeah, that sounds a little forced to me, too.

What’s really happening is that Kadima thinks it will be a lot easier to get someone, anyone, to vote for the party if the party’s bigwigs come to the next elections ensconced in ministerial office.  That will allow them to talk about how they’ve built roads, or absorbed immigrants, or—well, anything but that hopeless peace business.  They hope to save their political skins by riding on the Likud’s political coattails.

To support this analysis, let me mention that I was told this week by a reliable source on the Israeli right that Shlomo Mula, Kadima’s Ethiopian MK, told her that he hopes Netanyahu will now take Kadima into his government.  Mula is clearly hoping to stir up public support for the idea (my source isn’t even in the Likud).

Of course, Likud needs Kadima right now like a hole in the head.  Likud’s best move right now is probably to conduct a vigorous, aggressive PR campaign about how Israel has to gird itself for a situation in which peace has become impossible—and go to elections on the issue within six months.  That will probably give the Likud the dominant political position it sought and failed to achieve last time around.  For Kadima, it means that most of the party’s MKs will have to apply themselves to an unfamiliar and unwelcome activity—looking for work.

"Bibitours"

So the latest is that the Netanyahu couple are going to be investigated by the State Comptroller for taking airline flights and staying at hotels at the expense of organizations, like Israel Bonds or the Likud that invited Bibi to speak at their fundraisers abroad.  Those who broke this “scandal” are indignant that a public servant should accept first-class travel and downtown hotel suites from those who invite him to promote their causes

???

Netanyahu is one of the most well-known and popular Israelis.  It’s no surprise that his face sells bonds.  He’s also head of the Likud party.  Raising money for Likud campaigns is part of his job description.  An organization that invites a blockbuster like Bibi to its event makes what his flight and hotel cost many times over.  There’s no impropriety in his conduct.  If he has to spend all that time on the move in order to do his job, there’s no justification to inflicting Spartan conditions on him while he does.

It’s also the fact that Everybody Does It.  To his credit, the State Comptroller, at the urging of the Likud, said he would investigate the travel behavior of other ministers and prime ministers, past and present. Just recently several members of the opposition Kadima party flew to J Street’s annual conference.  What are the odds that they flew tourist and stayed at airport hotels?

I find it extremely curious that this alleged scandal broke just as the Knesset approved the “Sheshinski Law,” which changed the rate at which Israel’s considerable gas reserves are taxed.  I’ve been observing Israeli politics too long to believe in coincidence.  The law was a great blow to several Israeli tycoons, who will no longer be near the top of Forbes 500 list—they will have to content themselves with becoming ordinary common or garden billionaires.  They lobbied and threatened Netanyahu and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz with lawsuits—perhaps worse.  The two elected officials did their job and saw the legislation through the Knesset.

If this “scandal” did indeed break in retaliation for Netanyahu’s devotion to the public interest and public purse regarding gas royalties, the Knesset should consider voting him and his family lifetime free tickets on El Al as an act of gratitude.  The rate of commission will be considerably less than 0.1%.      

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Everyone’s talking about Richard Goldstone’s recantation, so a few words about that (He’s only worth a few words).  Goldstone’s original report pilloried Israel that’s what he was paid to do.  He’s been a UN investigating judge for years.  He investigated Serbia before turning to Israel.  That’s the source of his money and his ongoing international prestige.  He was hired to trash Israel and he knew that if he didn’t deliver the goods he’d never be employed by the UN again.  So he delivered the goods he’d been paid for.

Since then the money has been spent and the prestige turned out to be less than advertised, since the entire Jewish world now ostracizes him.  Goldstone recanted because the moral indignation aroused by his collusion with Israel’s delegitimizers made him miserable.  It’s not like he learned anything new that he didn’t know when he wrote his blood libel.  His attitude, then and now, is purely mercenary—and cowardly to boot.