Only Obama offers change for Israel

[Turborama]

By Gideon Rachman

Published: February 10 2009

You might expect a general election conducted just weeks after a war to be a tense affair. But, as Israel prepares to go to the polls today, the country does not feel on edge. The joggers on Tel Aviv's beaches pound up and down in the surf, oblivious to the anarchy and violence an hour's drive away in the Gaza Strip.

Nobody seems to expect anything much to change as a result of today's vote. Israeli politicians like to talk about "existential" threats to their country, but they are still avoiding existential choices about the future of Israel. Anybody looking for something that might break the bloody deadlock between Israel and the Palestinians needs to look outside the colourful, but dysfunctional, world of Israeli politics. The best hope - slim though it may be - is the Obama administration.

It is not yet clear whether Israel's next prime minister will be Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the rightwing Likud party, or Tzipi Livni, head of the centrist Kadima party. But all the pre-election polls suggest one clear trend: a distinct move to the right. The Labour party, the traditional standard-bearer of the left, is in danger of being pushed into fourth position behind a radical, rightwing party, Yisrael Beiteinu. Meretz, the peaceniks' party, will be an also-ran.

Any government that emerges from the election - and it could take weeks to form an administration - will be a coalition with its centre of gravity to the right. So any new prime minister who took controversial steps over, for example, Israeli settlements on the West Bank, would probably see his or her coalition fall apart pretty quickly.

The result is that the next Israeli government, left to its own devices, is likely to opt for the status quo with the Palestinians - continued occupation of the West Bank, desultory peace talks, steadily expanding settlements and military force in response to Palestinian rockets or bombs. The long-term pursuit of a two-state solution will be brushed aside, with the argument that the Palestinians are too divided and dangerous to be negotiating partners.

There is also a broader reason Israel is so far from making fundamental choices about the country's relationship with the Palestinians. All sides in the election seem to agree that the nation faces an "existential" threat - but they disagree about what that threat is.

For Mr Netanyahu, the likeliest prime minister, the overwhelming issue is the danger of a nuclear Iran. He sees Hamas in Gaza as largely an extension of the Iranian threat.

The rising force on the far right, Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party, has identified another form of "existential threat": Israeli Arabs, who now form about 20 per cent of the population. The fact that some Israeli Arabs were overtly hostile to Israel's attack on Gaza has allowed Mr Lieberman to portray them as a fifth column.

The left argues that the real long-term danger is the failure to achieve a peace settlement with the Palestinians. But this argument is not getting much of a hearing at the moment. That is because there is one "existential threat" that almost all Israelis are agreed on - the threat that rockets fired from the Palestinian territories that currently reach only southern Israel might one day be able to hit Tel Aviv or Israel's international airport. As a result, support for the Gaza invasion in Israel was pretty solid, right across the political spectrum. Widespread condemnation in Europe and the Arab world is met with bewilderment and resentment in much of Israel.

Israelis have long been able to shrug off European criticism, as long as they could rely on rock-solid support from the US. That is where President Barack Obama comes in.

Although the Israeli right are trying to be scrupulously polite about the new American president, there is no doubt that they are suspicious of Mr Obama. They fear that he will prove much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than George W. Bush was. Whatever Mr Obama's bedrock beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, it is already clear that the new president regards the issue as a priority. One of his first calls to a foreign leader was to Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority. His first television interview in the White House was with the Al-Arabiya news channel. Within days of taking office, he had appointed a special envoy to the Middle East: George Mitchell.

Mr Mitchell was the author of an eponymous report in 2001 that took an unusually strong line on stopping Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories. Partly as a result, there are many in Israel who foresee a rocky relationship between the new Israeli government - particularly if it is led by Mr Netanyahu - and the Obama administration.

The Israelis are understandably nervous about the prospect of pressure from the US. But if the Obama administration does push Israel much harder to move towards a peace agreement with the Palestinians, it will in fact be doing the country a favour.

For the biggest existential threat to Israel is not Iran or Hamas - it is the prospect that Jews will eventually be outnumbered by Arabs in the combined territory of Israel and Palestine. The long-term existential choice is between three alternatives: two states; one state without a Jewish majority; or an undemocratic state, with Israel as a permanent occupying power over a voteless, violent and anarchic Palestine.

Israel's election campaign suggests the country is not yet ready to face up to that choice. So it may need the Obama administration to frame the choice for it.

From: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/152fada2-f712-11dd-8a1f-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1