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.