Even the leader of the Knesset’s left-wing opposition now tacitly admits that peace is a pipe dream. The president would be wise to heed his warning.
The Obama administration is gone but its vendetta against Israeli prime minister Netanyahu lives on. Earlier this month sources identified as “former senior officials” claimed that the Israeli leader had sabotaged a credible effort to make a regional peace deal in February 2016. According to the account published in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz and subsequently picked up by the Washington Post, Netanyahu refused to accept Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal at a secret conclave with the leaders of Egypt and Jordan because his center-right coalition wouldn’t allow it.
Portraying Netanyahu as an obstructionist who is responsible for the failure to make peace was essential to the Obama administration’s justification of its dismal Middle East record. So it is unsurprising that Obama’s “senior officials” continue to criticize the prime minister as he forges a less contentious relationship with President Trump. Of course, if the truth were as damning as the former officials say, they probably would have exposed him while they were in power, when it stood to do him the most damage. But it’s not as damning as they say. The “missed opportunity” seems less earthshaking when one looks closely and realizes there was a key player missing from the Aqaba conclave: the Palestinians with whom the Israelis are supposed to make peace.
It’s in that context that a new statement from the head of Israel’s opposition must be understood. Isaac Herzog, the head of the Zionist Union — the second largest party in the Knesset, formed two years ago when Labor merged with two other center-left parties — issued a ten-point manifesto last week detailing his ideas about peace. While Herzog is unlikely to ever become prime minister and the Zionist Union may well be supplanted by the more centrist Yesh Atid Party as the chief rival to Netanyahu’s Likud the next time Israel votes, the Trump administration as well as the mainstream media ought to pay attention to his words.
That’s because despite its bitter criticism of Netanyahu and some clear differences with Likud in its details, Herzog’s proposal makes it clear that he is no more sanguine about the Palestinians’ willingness to make peace than the prime minister. It’s a fact Trump would do well to remember before he dispatches his designated Middle East peacemaker — son-in-law Jared Kushner — to the region on what may be as much of a fool’s errand as any of Kerry’s missions.
Herzog’s proposal makes it clear that he is no more sanguine about the Palestinians’ willingness to make peace than the prime minister.
Herzog pays a lot of lip service to a two-state solution, which Netanyahu has endorsed repeatedly in the past but has to some extent distanced himself from under recent pressure from his right-wing coalition partners. But much of the plan is also straight out of Netanyahu’s playbook, emphasizing Israel’s security needs and the complete demilitarization of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority as well as, more fancifully, Gaza, which is run as an independent state in all but name by Hamas terrorists. Herzog also mimics Netanyahu’s rhetoric about prioritizing economic development over immediate statehood. And he echoes Netanyahu’s insistence on drawing a distinction between Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and the main West Bank settlement blocs near the 1967 lines — where more building should be permitted — and outlying communities where growth might be frozen as part of a peace plan. (The latter line of reasoning was virulently rejected by President Obama and Kerry.)
The most important aspects of Herzog’s plan, however, are its conditions for a Palestinian state: final recognition of statehood will come only after a ten-year period during which the Palestinians completely cease all violence and incitement against Israel. Crucially, the ten-year cessation applies to Gaza as well as the West Bank, meaning Hamas would have to close up shop and join forces with its Fatah rivals in a new unity government dedicated to peace, even as the Israeli Army maintained its presence in the territories.
Herzog’s conditions are so unrealistic as to be farcical, but if they sound vaguely familiar it’s because their main elements bear a remarkable resemblance, minus the hopeful rhetoric, to the conditions that Netanyahu enunciated for Palestinian statehood during his meeting with Trump. Since Herzog’s plan makes statehood contingent upon conditions the Palestinians would never accept and couldn’t meet in any case, it is no more a road map to peace than Netanyahu’s past comments.
For Trump and his advisors the meaning of Herzog’s proposal ought to be clear: If even the leader of the left-wing opposition to Netanyahu knows that peace isn’t possible now, the Middle East real-estate deal of the century that the president longs to conclude is not even a remote possibility.
The Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians are eager for regional talks and hope that the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative — which Netanyahu has indicated he’s prepared to talk about — can provide a framework for an agreement. If it were just a matter of making a deal with those Arab states, which have been scared into the arms of the Israelis by Obama’s appeasement of Iran and the threat of Islamist groups such as ISIS, then a pact would have been signed long ago. The obstacle is and always has been the Palestinians, who remain mired in a century-old war against Zionism that still prevents even their supposed moderates from recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
Trump may have a grandiose notion that his negotiating skills — or those of his son-in-law — can achieve what countless diplomats over countless decades have failed to manage . But he shouldn’t ignore the basic consensus among Israelis about what it will take for peace with the Palestinians to become possible. Herzog’s plan is a warning to Trump that any commitment to negotiations ultimately doomed to run aground on Palestinian rejectionism will be a colossal blunder. Expecting anything good to come from doubling down on Obama’s mistakes is the sort of bad investment the new president is supposed to be too smart to make.