Netanyahu

New York Red · February 21, 2009

Well, this b*gger will be the next Prime Minister of Israel. This article seems to imply that it isn't the disaster I think it will be.

I'm not buying it.

JERUSALEM — Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader chosen Friday to form Israel’s next government, likes to tell a story about his meeting last summer in Jerusalem with President Obama, who was then still the Democratic candidate.

In a Letter, a Leader of Hamas Makes an Appeal to Obama (February 21, 2009)

Times Topics: Benjamin NetanyahuAs it was ending Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Netanyahu aside from their aides to a corner of the room in the King David Hotel.

“You and I have a lot in common,” Mr. Obama said, according to Mr. Netanyahu’s account. “I started on the left and moved to the center. You started on the right and moved to the center. We are both pragmatists who like to get things done.”

Whether that turns out to be an accurate assessment will determine much of what happens in the American-Israeli relationship in the next couple of years and in efforts to make progress on Middle East peace.

But what is almost as noteworthy is that Mr. Netanyahu tells the story with pride and a kind of endorsement. Although he is a hawkish man of the right and runs the largest conservative party in Israel, he considers himself a pragmatist.

He has long said that he hoped to form a centrist governing coalition and he restated that ambition on Friday, calling on the centrist Kadima Party, led by Tzipi Livni, and the center-left Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, to join him in a unity government. Mr. Netanyahu and Ms. Livni have agreed to meet Sunday, but the negotiations are likely to be tough. Ms. Livni, his chief rival for the premiership, has said she would rather go into opposition than serve as a fig leaf for a coalition of the right.

Mr. Barak, whose Labor Party fared badly in the elections, has already said he would head into the opposition.

To many here, it is increasingly likely that Mr. Netanyahu’s government will consist exclusively of parties from the right, which oppose a Palestinian state and favor expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, making it much harder for him to exercise his pragmatic penchant.

Mr. Netanyahu, 59, who earned a bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and speaks flawless English, is no newcomer to Israeli politics or to claims of pragmatism. Raised in Jerusalem and in a suburb of Philadelphia, where his father was a history professor, he served in an elite Israeli military unit under Mr. Barak, the current defense minister. The author of several books, he has a daughter from a first wife and two sons with his current wife, Sara.

He was ambassador to the United Nations while still in his 30s and has held numerous ministerial posts. He was prime minister between 1996 and 1999, and although he opposed the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, he then met with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and forged an agreement with him to share the volatile West Bank city of Hebron.

That led ultimately to new elections (the Israeli right abandoned him) and victory for Mr. Barak.

Mr. Netanyahu remains a deep skeptic about the Muslim world’s intentions toward Israel and tends to highlight fears more than hopes for the region. He opposed Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 from Gaza, saying it would lead to Hamas rockets on Israel, which it did. Like other dark predictions of his, that has led Israelis to see him as a reliable guide to the region.

Today, he says stopping Iran from going nuclear is a much more important issue than whether a Palestinian state is established. He has made clear that the Iranian challenge is an existential one that could well lead to military action.

He believes that if Iran’s ambition for regional hegemony is checked and its nuclear program stopped, then its clients, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, will be of less concern.

Mr. Netanyahu does not plan to end negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, although he wants to refocus them on building the Palestinian economy and its institutions in the West Bank rather than on signing a comprehensive deal. The Palestinian leadership has openly disdained that approach.

Still, many of the steps that the departing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Palestinians have agreed to regarding economic development have stalled, and Mr. Netanyahu believes his ability to cut through bureaucratic red tape could make a difference. He has told the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, who is the international representative to the Palestinians, that he could more quickly build industrial zones, cut back on checkpoints and generally improve life in the West Bank.

Whether he would be willing to remove Israeli settlements, however, or give up enough territory to satisfy the Palestinians remain open questions, as does whether he could return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a peace accord. He has said no a number of times, and again last week, arguing for Golan’s strategic value.

But when he was prime minister a decade ago he explored the issue through an American intermediary. The Israeli election campaign in recent weeks tilted rightward after the war in Gaza, so he may have been campaigning rather than revealing his true intentions. Those on the left who dislike Mr. Netanyahu say they hope he is as personally ambitious as they suspect and that pressure from Washington will produce results.

“I don’t think he has much compunction in sacrificing an ideological position as long as it keeps him in power,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a liberal political scientist at Hebrew University. “We either need a prime minister who is ideologically committed to a two-state solution and has the power to move the country in that direction, or a very flexible opportunist who appears committed to the right but acts according to what is necessary.”

But Mr. Netanyahu’s associates and fellow Likud activists say that he remains committed to core principles and that his flexibility reflects a change in his party’s position.

“Likud as a party has made a major transformation in the last 15 years from being rigidly committed to retaining all the land of Israel to looking pragmatically at how to retain for Israel defensible borders in a very uncertain Middle East,” said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and a close associate.

For Mr. Netanyahu, that has meant accepting that much of the West Bank will be part of a future Palestinian state, but with Israel keeping control of the borders, airspace and electromagnetic frequencies. The state would also have no military, by his reckoning.

Whether such a deal would ever be acceptable to the Palestinians is far from clear. Equally unclear is whether the government he forms will allow him the freedom of action to go even that far.

Mike · February 21, 2009

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