What does Bibi actually want?
http://972mag.com/what-does-bibi-actually-want/86773/
What does Bibi want? I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that question. With so many attempts to decipher him – in interviews with his proxies, accounts by former employees and analyses by pundits – speculation over the Israeli prime minister’s true intentions should have been recognized as an Olympic sport by now. TIME magazine had no problem twice posing the exact same question — will Netanyahu make peace – on its cover, 16 years apart.
The answer is hidden in plain sight: There is no master plan. The status quo, this ambiguity regarding the future, crisis management style – that’s Netanyahu, for better and for worse. His qualities do have an up-side: Bibi, now Israel’s second-longest-serving prime minister, behind the state’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, is also one of the most restrained leaders this country has known. Except for one short Gaza campaign, he has never launched a military operation or war.
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The Israeli conservative tendency to underestimate the Palestinian challenge is a mirror image of Labor’s hubris – and Netanyahu did end up facing some pressure over the occupation, which was all too expected. When that happened he started calling for direct negotiations “without preconditions,” knowing that he could drag the talks on forever while gaining the legitimacy of a peacemaker. This trick worked during his first term, and to some extent, during the first few months of the Kerry process. The Prime Minister’s Office didn’t even bother preparing an outline of its preferred solution. His negotiation policy amounted to posing new demands every now and then, from recognizing Israel as a “Jewish State” to lasting IDF presence in the Jordan Valley.
I think by now Netanyahu has started negotiating more seriously, but not with the Palestinians. His hope is to reach a new “agreement with the world” on a Palestinian entity — one that is less than a state. Livni, who is way more committed than Netanyahu to the two-state idea, has made similar statements recently.
Perhaps this should be the new style for everybody. Instead of negotiating in good faith with your victims you should negotiate with somebody else: keeping all the choice land that you have confiscated for illegal settlements and security zones (aka stolen) right in the middle of any future Palestinian state.
But hey, it's just another day on the apartheid picnic.