The Clinton replay

Meryl writes:

Here’s why I think the Obama administration is ratcheting up the pressure over 1,600 new housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of northeastern Jerusalem that will almost certainly remain Israeli in any future agreement with the Palestinians: The Obama administration is trying to topple the Netanyahu government. The Clinton administration did its level best to prevent Bibi from being elected in 1996, and worked very hard to get him thrown out as soon as possible thereafter. The Obama administration has found a stick, and they’re using it to beat the Netanyahu administration in the eyes of the world. The Chicago Machine lies and smears have gone out to the appropriate media outlets. The hyperbole is rising as the Machine cogs hit the media trail. It’s an all-out assault on Bibi and his administration.

Noah Pollak, in a similar vein:

It should be obvious, at this point, that Obama is trying to manufacture an immense political dilemma for Netanyahu by forcing him to choose between two crises — one with the United States should he accept the demands, the other with his coalition partners and the Israeli public should he reject them. For Netanyahu, this is a no-win situation. The only choice is between less damaging options.

Netanyahu should reject the new demands, because they are not made in good faith, they are a reversal of previous Obama commitments, and, most important, the proximity talks themselves are a trap.

And finally, Jeffrey Goldberg (via memeorandum):

I’ve been on the phone with many of the usual suspects (White House and otherwise), and I think it’s fair to say that Obama is not trying to destroy America’s relations with Israel; he’s trying to organize Tzipi Livni’s campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government. I’m not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it’s clear to everyone — at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog — that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai’s fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu’s surpassingly fragile coalition.

So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni’s centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset that does not have to rely on gangsters, messianists and medievalists for votes. It’s up to Livni, of course, to recognize that it is in Israel’s best interests to join a government with Netanyahu and Barak, and I, for one, hope she puts the interests of Israel ahead of her own ambitions.

Obama knows that this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success. He would rather, I understand, not have to deal with Netanyahu at all — people near the President say that, for one thing, Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu is very bright, and there is no chemistry at all between the two men — but he’d rather have a Netanyahu who is being pressured from his left than a Netanyahu who is being pressured from the right.

Goldberg, I think, is right about what’s going on, but his view of Israeli politics is skewed. Shas, for example, has been known to support the peace process, much to the chagrin of other religious parties. Eli Yishai wasn’t announcing a plan for a new community on a remote hilltop, but rather expanding the housing stock in an established neighborhood in Jerusalem.

And to call Avigdor Lieberman’s party “far right” when the party at least believes in territorial compromise is a woeful misnomer. Lieberman holds some views that are characterized as such, but his party, overall, is part of Israel’s mainstream.

Goldberg’s promiscuous use of “right” to describe Netanyahu and the current Israeli government, ignores what’s really happened. Robert Satloff writes:

At the same time, it is also true that a quiet revolution has been going on inside Israel on the peace issue. What has been lost amid the histrionics about construction permits in Jerusalem and Israel’s habit of delivering concessions to Washington weeks after the Obama administration wanted them is that Binyamin Netanyahu has led the Likud-led government into totally uncharted waters. With his Bar-Ilan speech, he became the third “revisionist” prime minister in a row to adopt the “two states for two peoples” paradigm, effectively consigning Greater Israel advocates to the margins of Israeli politics, where they have no national champion. Moreover, with his decision on a West Bank settlement moratorium, Netanyahu made a commitment that no Israeli prime minister since Oslo — Rabin, Sharon, Peres, or Barak — ever made, and in the process tacitly rolled back forty years of Israeli policy that rejected the idea of settlements as an obstacle to peacemaking. The result is that mainstream Israeli debate on the peace process now centers on the fitness of the PA as a negotiating partner and the extent of Israeli territorial demands — 2 percent of the West Bank? 4 percent? 6 percent? — and not on the more basic question of a repartition of Palestine that would leave the other side with the vast majority of West Bank territory in an independent and more-or-less sovereign state. Over time, these developments will be recognized as seismic.

Goldberg’s also wrong when he writes, “this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success” (i.e. a coaltion with Kadima instead of Yisrael Beiteinu). Israel had such a coaltion in 2000 and Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David. It had such a coaltion in 2008 and Abbas rejected Ehud Olmert’s offer as the coalition was unraveling.

The problem hasn’t been Israel. The problem has been the Palestinians.

And Meryl’s correct to recall the machinations of the Clinton administration. Netanyahu got his cabinet to approve the Hebron Accords given the assurances of Dennis Ross that Israel would be allowed to determine the future extents of its withdrawals. But though Arafat never kept any of the terms he agreed to back then, the administration spent the next year and a half (until Wye) battering Netanyahu politically and working to undermine his political support. Here’s Charles Krauthammer:

But even more significant than the absurd arbitrariness of this number is its very existence. Under the Oslo Accords, these interim “further redeployments” are left to Israel’s discretion (unlike the “final status” talks, at which Israel and the Palestinians will together negotiate their final borders).

Indeed, just 16 months ago the Clinton administration reaffirmed this principle. At 11 p.m. on the night of Jan. 15, 1997, as Netanyahu’s cabinet was agonizing over the proposed withdrawal from Hebron, it received an urgent memo from then-ambassador Martin Indyk stating the official US position that “further redeployment phases are issues for implementation by Israel rather than issues for negotiation with the Palestinians. The letters of assurance which secretary Christopher intends to provide to both parties also refer to the process of further redeployments as an Israeli responsibility.”

Sixteen months later in London, Albright tells Israel that its 9 percent is no good. The withdrawal must be 13.1 percent – or else she walks away. She gives Netanyahu three days to give his answer. He tells her: “I don’t need three days. The answer is no.”

So now we have a crisis. And though it was manufactured by State to put pressure on Netanyahu, it reveals instead a crisis of credibility for this administration: How can Israel make ever more dangerous concessions to the Palestinians when the American assurances it receives to offset those concessions are so perishable?

LAST week at the National Press Club, Albright gave a hastily arranged speech to explain her position. Its essential, tendentious theme was that all of the problems in the peace process are traceable to Netanyahu. Everything has gone to pieces, she averred, “in just two years.” You don’t need to be a CIA codebreaker to understand what that means: Netanyahu was elected prime minister two years ago this month.

The historic Hebron withdrawal, in which Netanyahu single-handedly brought Likud and the Israeli Right into the land-for-peace Oslo process, received nary a word. That’s because the only praise offered in her speech was reserved for Arafat.

Albright credits him for making “substantial changes in {his} negotiating position.” He had wanted a 30 percent Israeli withdrawal but was willing to accept 13.1.

How generous.

One of the great illusions of the peace process is that every few years, Israelis elect a right wing prime minister whose intransigence halts or reverses the success of the “peace process.” But as Satloff and Krauthammer observed, Israel’s “right wing” prime ministers since Oslo have all moved the “peace process” forward, though their concessions are pocketed by the Palestinians and ignored by the rest of the world. It is, I guess, easier to blame an Israeli Prime Minister who is subject to political pressure, but that hardly moves the “peace process” when the Palestinian leader refuses to make the smallest concession to Israel or even to peace.

Meryl, Noah Pollak and Jeffrey Goldberg are all correct in their reading of President Obama’s motives. It’s happened before. Goldberg, however, is wrong in his reading of the Israeli government and offers support to ongoing Palestinian intransigence.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad