Middle East Analysis: What Has Happened to the Israeli "Left"?

Speaking to Ma'ariv, Israel's Industry, Trade, and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor Party) said over the weekend:

In the current sociopolitical situation, only a leader from the Right could pass a peace process through the nation.

[Prime Minister Menachem] Begin returned the Sinai. Could a Labor leader do that? Could a Labor leader have dared evacuate Gaza and destroy the settlements?

[Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin was killed just for Oslo [1993 accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization]. Does anyone think I could have evacuated Gaza? Only a leader from the Right could bring such a change. There is nothing we can do. That's the reality. Take it or leave it.

In Ben-Eliezer's mind, the relationship between Israeli right and left is almost independent from each other. The left can show no progress while the right has given all the "concessions" for the sake of the peace process. Indeed, he accused Labor of having a "self-destructive virus" and of failing to develop a new generation of leaders.

Israel-Palestine: Peres Says Settlements Halt When Peace Talks Start

Ben-Eliezer praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the close relationship between the premier and Defense Minister Ehud Barak:

Bibi wants to advance the diplomatic process with the Palestinians more than any leader I know. Despite the pressure he faces, he makes an effort day and night to reach a breakthrough.

Bibi and Barak broadcast the same language. They understand each other. They complete each other.

When asked why the public was heading toward the right, he said that "the nation is tired" and "sick of the Arabs."

The story is not ending up at here. Ben-Eliezer is answering the question of Haaretz's Yitzhak Laor, "Why has the left in Israel vanished?" In his analysis, Laor see the secular-religious consensus in the alliance between Netanyahu and Barak today. Against intimidations and pressures on this consensus, in which religious observers ignore the rights of Palestinians due to "the given rights from God" and secular people ignore the same rights because Israel is militarily and economically more powerful, he accues the masses of being obedient and afraid to oppose their leaders.

How can Mr. Ben-Eliezer explain Netanyahu's decision on declaring Jerusalem as "the eternal capital of Israel" and his insistence on "the natural growth" in the West Bank settlements? This scene is one of the suffering of the "left" in Israel, as elsewhere, since the demise of the Soviet Union and since the post-9/11 era's securitizing atmosphere. Israel can now claim a golden age to embed its policies into aggressive actions, as it did during the offensive in Gaza, and/or to play the "three monkeys", as it is doing right now on the settlements issue.

Is there any chance that the dead can come to life through resistance, as Laor argues, or are we now bound to invest our hopes in the Netanyahu-Barak alliance?

Middle East Inside Line: An Israeli Truce with Hamas?

Palestine: Abbas Claims Secret Israeli Talks with Hamas

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Hamas declared on Saturday that all groups in Gaza have reached consensus to halt rocket attacks upon Israel.

"We have agreed with the factions that nobody carries out any action involving rockets for now," said Hamas' interior minister Fathi Hammad. He stated that the aims of the agreement were to avoid another Israeli military operation and to enable people to rebuild after January's Israeli invasion.

Haaretz's Amos Harel writes that there is an implicit truce between Israel and Hamas, as the latter are aware that rockets have not caused severe damage to the "enemy" and the Israeli offensive broke the power of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority is claiming secret meetings leading to a truce between Hamas and Israel; the Gazan group denies the accusation.

Harel argues that the real tension for Israel is now in the north, as Hezbollah which has accumulated a tremendous arsenal since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. It was reported on Saturday thatthe Lebanese army opened fire on an Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle, and the Lebanese military chief said he would heighten border security.

Photo Diplomacy: The Meaning Behind the Picture at the Obama-Netanyahu Meeting

Haaretz Correspondent Roey Simioni offers an interesting take on photo diplomacy in Washington.

The only photo released by the White House of the recent meeting between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu shows both men talking seriously in a friendly and calm dinner setting. One might say that the Obama administration could have leaked a photo in which Obama is pointing his finger toward Netanyahu's face, or another pose which could raise questions regarding the atmosphere of the meeting. However this picture looks like the best of bad lot.

Here is Simioni's opinion:

A painting hangs on the wall beside the two leaders, which if Netanyahu did not see it, or saw it and did not understand its significance, then Obama, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, must have taken the trouble to explain to him its historic importance.

Obama's message to Netanyahu, if there really was such a message, is quite clear: If you end the blood feud and make a peace of the brave, you will be remembered in history as a great leader, like Lincoln (the former president most esteemed by Obama).

In the picture, which was painted in 1865 by the artist George Peter Alexander Healy, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is seen conferring with William Sherman, Ulysses Grant and David Porter, the commanders of the Union army. During conversations the four men held on the River Queen steamboat on March 27 and March 28 of that year, just over a week before the end of the U.S. Civil War, they discussed the conditions of the peace treaty they would offer the defeated Confederate forces. The accord, even if it had many deficiencies, brought about the reunion of the North and South, the economic recovery of the South, the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of African Americans.

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Following the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Paris, French President Nicholas Sarkozy phoned the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. According to Sarkozy's office, the French Presdient stated the conditions that would allow a quick return to Israel-Palestine talks, but the statement did not reveal the conditions.

After the conversation, an Abbas aide told Agence France Presse, "President Sarkozy had very important suggestions on how to move the peace process forward," without elaborating further. Another Palestinian senior official told AFP that both leaders talked about the idea of organizing a Middle East peace conference in Moscow, an idea Russia has been pushing for months.

Israel: Which is the Problem? Obama's Policies or Netanyahu's Culture of Fear?

Israel Update: Who’s Busted Now? White House Takes on Netanyahu

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Is the strained relationship between Israelis and the Obama Administration the consequence of mistakes made by the Obama Administration, as argued by Haaretz's Bradley Burston, or of a fear culture promoted by the Netanyahu Government, as New York Times's Henry Siegman contends?

Israelis and Obama
Henry Siegman

Polls indicate that President Obama enjoys the support of only 6 to 10 percent of the Israeli public — perhaps his lowest popularity in any country in the world.

According to media reports, the president’s advisers are searching for ways of reassuring Israel’s public of President Obama’s friendship and unqualified commitment to Israel’s security.

That friendship and commitment are real, President Obama’s poll numbers in Israel notwithstanding. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to reinforce that message during her visit to Israel. The presidential envoy George Mitchell has reportedly been asked to make similar efforts during his far more frequent visits to Jerusalem.

The White House is about to set a new record in the number of reassuring messages and video greetings sent by an American president to Israel, as well as to Jewish organizations in the United States, on this subject. Plans for a presidential visit to Jerusalem are under discussion.

Presidential aides worry that the hostility toward President Obama among Israelis can be damaging to his peace efforts. This is undoubtedly true.

But a White House campaign to ingratiate the president with Israel’s public could be far more damaging, because the reason for this unprecedented Israeli hostility toward an American president is a fear that President Obama is serious about ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Israelis do not oppose President Obama’s peace efforts because they dislike him; they dislike him because of his peace efforts. He will regain their affection only when he abandons these efforts.

That is how Israel’s government and people respond to any outside pressure for a peace agreement that demands Israel’s conformity to international law and to U.N. resolutions that call for a return to the 1967 pre-conflict borders and reject unilateral changes in that border.

Like Israel’s government, Israel’s public never tires of proclaiming to pollsters its aspiration for peace and its support of a two-state solution. What the polls do not report is that this support depends on Israel defining the terms of that peace, its territorial dimensions, and the constraints to be placed on the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.

An American president who addresses the Arab world and promises a fair and evenhanded approach to peacemaking is immediately seen by Israelis as anti-Israel. The head of one of America’s leading Jewish organizations objected to the appointment of Senator Mitchell as President Obama’s peace envoy because, he said, his objectivity and evenhandedness disqualified him for this assignment.

The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts is nothing less than pathological — the consequence of an inability to adjust to the Jewish people’s reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood.

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by a Jewish right-wing extremist is being remembered this week in Israel, told Israelis at his inauguration in 1992 that their country is militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. They should therefore stop thinking and acting like victims.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust — a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone’s Gaza fact-finding report — is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis.

This pathology has been aided and abetted by American Jewish organizations whose agendas conform to the political and ideological views of Israel’s right wing. These organizations do not reflect the views of most American Jews who voted overwhelmingly — nearly 80 percent — for Mr. Obama in the presidential elections.

An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has eluded all previous U.S. administrations not because they were unable to devise a proper formula for its achievement; everyone has known for some time now the essential features of that formula, which were proposed by President Clinton in early 2000.

Rather, the conflict continues because U.S. presidents — and to a far greater extent, members of the U.S. Congress, who depend every two years on electoral contributions — have accommodated a pathology that can only be cured by its defiance.

Only a U.S. president with the political courage to risk Israeli displeasure — and criticism from that part of the pro-Israel lobby in America which reflexively supports the policies of the Israeli government of the day, no matter how deeply they offend reason or morality — can cure this pathology.

If President Obama is serious about his promise to finally end Israel’s 40-year occupation, bring about a two-state solution, assure Israel’s long-range survival as a Jewish and democratic state, and protect vital U.S. national interests in the region, he will have to risk that displeasure. If he delivers on his promise, he will earn Israelis’ eternal gratitude.

Why do Israelis dislike Barack Obama?
Bradley Burston

There are many people, gifted with rare intelligence and tolerance for humankind, who, when addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, run off the rails.

This week, it was the turn of former American Jewish Congress national director Henry Siegman. Noting opinion polls showing that a bare six to eight percent of the Israeli public supports Barack Obama, Siegman concludes that the dislike for Obama is a reflection not of the president's policies, but of something essential - and fundamentally defective - in the Israeli people itself:

"The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts is nothing less than pathological," Siegman writes, calling it "the consequence of an inability to adjust to the Jewish people's reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood."

He concedes that polls show that a clear majority of Israelis favor a two-state solution, and thus, Palestinian statehood. But he argues that, while they insist that they much prefer peace, if put to the test, Israelis will prove to be liars, and opt for occupation. "Israel's public never tires of proclaiming to pollsters its aspiration for peace and its support of a two-state solution." Nonetheless, "the reason for this unprecedented Israeli hostility toward an American president is a fear that President Obama is serious about ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza."

Siegman's thesis makes no room for the possibility that the administration may have made more major mistakes in handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, than it has made in any other primary policy sphere

There is no allowance for the sense that when Barack Obama made an early priority of his presidency a high profile visit to Cairo, its centerpiece an extended address to the Muslim world, a subsequent personal appeal to Israelis might have helped him advance his peacemaking goals.

There is no consideration of the possibility that the administration failed in doing requisite preparation with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak prior to dropping on Israel the bomb of a blanket settlement freeze demand - which might have been well-received by the Israeli public, had it been accompanied by gestures on the Palestinian or wider Arab side. As it was, rumors of normalization moves were humiliatingly waved away by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, who wrote that a settlement freeze, even if agreed to by Israel, fell far, far short of his key nation's minimum preconditions for any steps toward relations with Israel.

Demanding not a freeze but total removal of all existing settlements as a mere initial precondition, the prince states that any gestures will have to wait until the return to Arab hands of the West Bank, the Golan, and Shabaa Farms in Lebanon. "For Saudis to take steps toward diplomatic normalization before this land is returned to its rightful owners would undermine international law and turn a blind eye to immorality."

But what should any of that matter to Henry Siegman? From the tone of his arguments, he belongs to the school of thought which suggests that hating Israelis is a form of working for peace.

So willing is Siegman to disavow any legitimate feelings on the part of Israelis, that he suggests that that their worst fears - of Iran, of rocket attacks, of world isolation and abandonment - not only are baseless, but are also a source of consolation:

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust - a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone's Gaza fact-finding report is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis."

Siegman doesn't merely think that Israelis are mistaken. He loathes them. In his reading, they are venal, deceitful, the source of the conflict and the obstruction to its solution. In Siegman's reading "the conflict continues because U.S. presidents ... have accommodated a pathology that can only be cured by its defiance."

It may be argued that Israel has much more to fear from people who think like Henry Siegman, than from Richard Goldstone. A close reading of the Goldstone report, and an open hearing of his views, as in this interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun, shows that Justice Goldstone cares a great deal about Israelis and the direction in which their country is headed.

Meanwhile, given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's opaque, work-in-progress assessment of current Israeli policy as an unprecedented restriction on settlement, but far short of what the administration would like, it should surprise no one in Washington if the White House has now managed simultaneously to alienate Israel's left, right, and center.

For Israel's sake, for the Palestinians' sake, and for the good of his presidency, the administration must radically reassess its approach to the Mideast conflict.

The fears of Israelis are real. The grievances of the Palestinians are just. If both peoples have one trait in common, it is that they cannot be bludgeoned, bribed, or sweet-talked into supporting a policy which favors only side.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are nothing if not good students. It is time to go back and hit the books. If they can broker a package deal which addresses the most critical needs of the Palestinians (including fostering Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, furthering PA security and solcial welfare responsibilities, easing the Gaza siege, and curbing settlement) as well as providing something Israelis can reasonably view as an advance over their current situation (such as making good on hopes for Muslim-world normalization measures), they have a chance of success.

If not, it is time to leave the people here who hate one another to themselves. And to Henry Siegman. In a place where dignity is everything, there is a certain honor to be gained in recognizing that you tried your best, but that peace will have to wait for a time when Israelis are less preoccupied with hating one another other, and Palestinians, the same.