Israel’s loss of imagination
Abbas will never be a Palestinian hero,but that will not cure Israels inertia.
Mahmoud Abbas will not perhaps end up as a Palestinian hero. But the Middle East’s most intriguing story — irrespective of,and yet consequential to,the Arab Spring — is how the imagination that deserted Israel soon after Binyamin Netanyahu took over in March 2009,never came back. More prosaically,the singular paralysis that has characterised Netanyahu’s regional and global diplomacy has kept Israel from improvising in the face of the irreversible changes wrought by political events in the Middle East.
The world watched (and Nato acted in one case) as a paradigm shifted. Israel waited,worried,waited further,and now has no choice but to worry on. Meanwhile,the moderately Islamist Turkish prime minister seized a point of resolvable friction to choose his moment of breach with Israel and project himself as the Anatolian philosopher and guide of the Arab world. And,a mob smashed the Israeli embassy in Cairo,bringing to the street the very chaos and subterranean enmity the Israelis despaired Hosni Mubarak’s fall would let loose. Then,the embassy in Jordan cleared out,fearing a similar mob.
While Netanyahu’s response to the Cairo incident was perfectly sane,he oversaw his own bungling of the negotiations with Ankara. Turkey may loudly claim that it no longer needs Israel,but Recep Tayyip Erdogan has,not without a calculated dose of cynicism,attempted the one thing Netanyahu couldn’t begin to think of: how to get ahead of the Arab Spring — in response to the changed reality of the Middle East; in response to anticipated changes in the near future. With Egypt volatile on its own post-revolutionary impatience,Syria staring at a catastrophic resolution,Jordan no longer inspiring confidence,and Turkey bent on playing self-appointed class monitor and supreme orator,circumstances have never been more fluid,uncertain and potentially disruptive for Israel since the 1978 Camp David Accords. Yet,Netanyahu has only rivalled the Palestinians in not failing to miss every opportunity.
Now,if Bibi ever was anything,it was a politician. The hawkishness of his first premiership,succeeding Labor’s Shimon Peres in 1996,was passé when he checked Kadima’s Tzipi Livni to return as PM in 2009. What then went wrong is a question answered by all,reductively,with one name: (Foreign Minister) Avigdor Lieberman. When the faintest hope of a “grand coalition” between Kadima and Likud (with or without Ehud Barak’s decimated Labor) proved to be illusory,Netanyahu’s second premiership unleashed a politics of a prime minister persistently afraid of being outflanked by Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu. As a result,the prophecy of doom has shocked itself with the accuracy of its foreboding of demographic changes skewering Israel’s politics and isolating it internationally.
In the last crisis-diffusion leg now,with the Mideast Quartet exhausted,Netanyahu has offered direct talks with Abbas at the UN General Assembly,trying to forestall his statehood bid. Abbas had already agreed to talk,but insists on making the bid. Assuming he does go ahead,Abbas will still not get his Palestinian state — not at this go,simply because the US will use its veto,however ruing its diplomatic losses post-Arab Spring. A full membership bid must clear the UN Security Council,with at least nine of its 15 members approving,with no permanent member exercising its veto.
So the proposal — even if Abbas makes simultaneous submissions before the UNSC (through the secretary-general) and the General Assembly — we may be looking at on Friday is the one by which the UNGA elevates the Palestinians to “non-member observer state”,with an appeal to the UNSC to recognise Palestinian membership. At most,the UNSC can pour over the bid while the Quartet tries to get the talks,suspended since last year,to resume. In any case,even full statehood is not going to change anything on the ground — and Abbas hasn’t made Hamas happy at all with his unilateral move. The repercussions of a tiny symbolic gain could well make this his last gamble,the reason why Abbas is unlikely to be a hero,ever.
None of which,however,delivers Israel from its inertia. When Netanyahu speaks at the UNGA,120 of the 193 member states will be pre-disposed to voting for the Palestinians. As his government shut the world out,or pretended to,the Palestinians went ahead with an exhaustive and continuous diplomatic campaign keeping precisely this Friday in mind. What adds to the irony is Israel’s visible unpreparedness that has left the default pro-Palestinian majority at the GA still less impressed.
Not for the first time are Israeli commentators lamenting Jerusalem’s failure to be imaginative and adventurous,seizing on the Arab Spring to endorse Palestine,since Netanyahu has accepted the idea of two states. That would have pre-empted this Friday,and not without gaining Israel a few friends. Instead,what’s returned to Israel in place of its political imagination are the words of the legendary satirist,Ephraim Kishon: “If at a Cabinet meeting in any other country the… minister announces,‘Gentlemen,only a miracle can save us,’ the statement spells catastrophe… With us,it simply means that a miracle will have to happen within two or three days.”
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
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