With a new round of direct talks between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders having begun in September, a global audience is once again projecting its hopes and doubts onto the familiar, if surreal, spectacle of American-induced Middle East diplomacy. For die-hard proponents of the peace process, the Obama administration’s rhetorical emphasis on a resolution combined with increased regional fragility to raise the genuine possibility of a two-state breakthrough at long last. For detractors, the administration’s clumsy policy implementation, continued Palestinian intransigence, and other more pressing regional concerns have already doomed this latest effort. But for Benjamin Netanyahu, the talks are likely one of the less formidable complications in a steadily expanding labyrinth of critical challenges facing him as Israel’s prime minister.
After 20 months in office, the Americans are pressuring the prime minister to extend a West Bank settlement freeze. Israel’s settlers and their allies continue to try to limit Netanyahu’s negotiating options. The Palestinians’ masterful manipulation of world opinion has kept Israel under political siege. Iran’s nuclear program progresses apace. Netanyahu’s coalition shows signs of fragility. This multifaceted challenge raises urgent questions about the man who stands continually on the verge of a historic crisis. Yet few predicted that Netanyahu would have weathered the Obama administration’s unprecedented pressure and the skillful machinations of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas while keeping both his coalition and popular support intact. How, then, has a man long believed to be the intractable belligerent of Israeli politics managed tosurvive this gauntlet thus far?
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Benjamin Netanyahu was an anomaly in Israeli politics when he first emerged as a candidate for his country’s top job in the mid-1990s. Most of his predecessors had matured within the country’s political system. They were career military men, career politicians, party leaders, or protégés of previous prime ministers. He was none of these. Younger than any prime minister in Israel’s history, Netanyahu had no political network to speak of and could count on little respect from among those then serving in Israel’s government. He was a warrior with a talent for public speaking, and his campaign was inventive and bold. His 1996 election victory—beating Labor’s Shimon Peres just six months after Peres succeeded the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin—delivered the ultimate political shock therapy to the old guard.
But Netanyahu’s first tenure as prime minister proved deeply problematic. He basked in his surprise victory, picked too many fights with too many people—including some who had been of inestimable assistance to his campaign for high office—and tried to do everything at once. His arrogance and inexperience took their toll, while the media’s disdain for him, driven in large measure by the contempt of most journalists for his strident nationalism, which ran counter to the elite’s complacent leftism, helped sway Israeli public opinion. “The hatred for Netanyahu is becoming the most visible phenomenon of our time,” wrote Haaretz’s Ari Shavit in 1998.
While Netanyahu’s first turn as prime minister was a failure (albeit one soon put in perspective by Ehud Barak’s even more calamitous term in the two years after Netanyahu’s departure from office), its lessons have not been wasted. The differences between the Netanyahu who was Israel’s 27th prime minister of Israel and Netanyahu the 32nd are telling. A thoughtful, restrained, and prudent statesman has supplanted the amateurish, battle-prone firebrand. Netanyahu has become an insider, or maybe has honed his imitation of one. He still clearly has doubts about the peace process, the inevitability of a Palestinian state, the wisdom of withdrawing troops and settlers from the West Bank, and relocating the Israeli-Syrian border to the shores of the Galilee. But the now cautious Netanyahu has figured out that flippantly dismissing these ideas can be counterproductive. Rocking the boat can be dangerous for the captain.
That self-possession has paid off. Netanyahu’s coalition is wide and, through the course of his first year and a half in office, has also seemed stable. It was designed to include hard-core right-wingers and center-left Labor, the ultra-Orthodox and the secular. In Israel’s parliamentary system, this is the best way to balance interests and ideologies and the surest way to make all partners realize that the coalition can survive without them.
Few in Netanyahu’s coalition have threatened to resign, the traditional means by which Israeli interest groups throw the system into chaos. His coalition has overcome many obstacles thus far. It has passed necessary budget laws; calmed tensions engendered byIsrael’s uniquely religious and yet democratic character; and avoided voter anger when things went bad, as with the Obama administration’s pique over settlements in Jerusalem in March, or very bad, as in the deadly Gaza flotilla raid in May.
Most remarkably, after a year and a half of governing, it’s hard to blame Netanyahu for issuing even a single agitating remark. He deflects controversy. His defense minister, Ehud Barak, takes heat for personal deficiencies; his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is hit for his political extremism; and his interior minister, Eli Yishai of Shas, is blamed for the treatment of foreign workers and their children as well as other domestic-policy messes. Netanyahu is unscathed.
The opposition has also been relatively quiet. A broad Israeli consensus on most matters of importance prevents the leaders of Kadima, the centrist opposition party founded by Ariel Sharon five years ago, from attacking the government with any credibility. They won’t call upon Netanyahu to freeze construction in East Jerusalem, since they also support Israel’s defense of its rights in its capital. And they can hardly call on him to freeze settlements in the West Bank, since Kadima didn’t do this when it was in power. In fact, when the Netanyahu government decided to halt West Bank construction for 10 months, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni actually criticized Netanyahu from the right, not the left. She and other opposition figures had a difficult time criticizing Netanyahu over the Gaza flotilla raid and Israel’s deteriorating relations with Turkey because Israelis support the troops and are offended by Turkish belligerence. The same held true when Netanyahu ran afoul of the Obama administration, as Israelis largely do not trust Obama, who is seen as far more antagonistic toward the Jewish state than were his recent predecessors. A broad consensus also shares Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for direct talks with the Palestinian Authority.
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Maintaining good relations with his country’s only major ally is the first responsibility of any Israeli leader, and it is one that Netanyahu was thought to have botched during his first go-round. President Bill Clinton took a dim view of the man who had beaten his preferred candidate,Labor Party leader and peace-process advocate Shimon Peres, in the 1996 parliamentary election. Relations between Clinton and Netanyahu were always rocky.
President Obama’s distaste for Netanyahu’s worldview is also no secret. What’s more, Obama seems not to have noticed or cared about Netanyahu’s more pragmatic turn since his return to the prime minister’s office. Even before being elected president, Obama revealed his true feelings to voters, explaining that one can define oneself as pro-Israel without adopting a “pro-Likud approach.” His instinctive, somewhat unconsidered advocacy for taking sides in Israeli politics just at the moment when the Israeli left had almost completely collapsed placed Obama in a political time warp.
When Netanyahu was elected in February 2009, the Obama administration, populated by personalities and opinions that were formed by the perceptions of the Clinton administration, rushed to turn back the clock on American-Israeli relations by at least 15 years. Netanyahu found himself responding to the concerns of an earlier era, an era before the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000 amid a Palestinian terror war of attrition and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005—namely, settlement construction. Initially, the prime minister aroused further distaste in Washington by failing to play along and declining to utter the phrase “two-state solution” until a few months into his second term during a major speech.
The Obama-Netanyahu relationship also suffered from a less ideological factor: the Obama administration’s strategic incoherence. The George H.W. Bush White House picked a fight with the Yitzhak Shamir government in 1991 in order to drag Israel into a peace process begun at a conference in Madrid. After Bush left office, the Clinton White House fought with the first Netanyahu government to move the Oslo process forward. But nothing about the Obama team’s behavior actually seemed designed to advance its supposed goal of getting Israeli and Palestinian leaders to talk about peace and negotiate a two-state solution.
Instead, Washington brought a bunch of slogans to life without considering an overarching plan to implement strategy. There was incessant talk of settlement freezes, a two-state solution, the primacy of the Middle East peace process, the crying need for a new special envoy to the Middle East, a commitment to engagement with Iran, unhappiness with occupation, and worry about a window of opportunity for progress that was supposedly closing. Nowhere in all this was a realistic assessment of the present-day Israeli-Palestinian dynamic. The Obama administration proceeded as if nothing had happened in the Middle East since the collapse of the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000. In reality, Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005—followed by Gaza’s conversion into a Hamas-controlled terror launching pad and a subsequent Israeli military action against terror sites at the end of 2008—had made all talk of future settlement evacuation purely theoretical. Israel is unlikely to give up any territory unless it can be assured those lands once under its control will not be used as the staging area for another war. Meanwhile, the most urgent threat facing Israel shifted from Palestinian terror to the nuclear menace in Iran. None of this was sufficiently accounted for in Obama’s 1990s policy retread. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. found it could accomplish nothing with policies that ignored the facts on the ground. Talk of “pressuring” a popular Netanyahu and waiting for Israelis to come to their senses and “replace” him quickly dissipated.
For his part, Netanyahu reacted to Washington with the lessons learned from the spats and tensions of the 1990s uppermost in his mind. He avoided the temptation to criticize the Obama administration; nothing was taken, or responded to, personally. While State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described a lengthy and heated phone conversation between Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “in unusually undiplomatic terms,” according to the Washington Post, the Israeli prime minister said little about it. Contrast this with early 1998, when Netanyahu intentionally provoked President Clinton by arriving early to Washington for an official visit and paying calls on Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, no friends of Clinton, before his White House meetings. When he met with Obama in the White House more than 10 years later and was dressed down and insulted by the president, Netanyahu kept it to himself. Obviously, Netanyahu wasn’t pleased with his mistreatment at the hands of the secretary of state and the president, but with the experience of the 1990s internalized, he was determined to avoid public clashes. He also repeatedly asked his ministers to keep quiet about disagreements with American leaders (though Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman would not listen to his directives).
Though the atmospherics of the American–Israeli relationship have changed for the better since their nadir in the spring of 2010, American strategic logic is still lacking. Nine months into the 10-month freeze on Israeli settlement construction, the Palestinians arrived at the negotiating table just in time to demand that the freeze be extended. In response, Netanyahu attempted to compromise, offering to restrict construction. But he was, at least initially, adamant about not keeping the full freeze in place. He had two reasons. The first was strategic: he didn’t want to create an understanding, at the outset of “direct talks,” that every Israeli concession is merely an appetizer for another concession. The second was political: extending the freeze would have been a hard sell at home, and while Netanyahu could probably have overcome this challenge, prudence dictated that he save the energy and political capital for more important battles that would inevitably arise.
It is often said by advocates of the peace process that Israeli governments cannot survive prolonged confrontations with U.S. administrations. The two examples invoked to make this point are those of Yitzhak Shamir and young Netanyahu. “President Bush confronted Yitzhak Shamir with the withholding of loan guarantee monies, leading to the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992,” wrote Daniel Levy on the Guardian’s website in March 2010. Similarly, there is a widespread perception that the coolness of the Clinton administration contributed to Netanyahu’s defeat at the hands of Ehud Barak in 1999. Presumably, the lesson here is that no Israeli government can succeed if it is perceived as not having good relations with Washington, and therefore no prime minister can challenge Washington’s rules, even concerning settlements.
In fact, neither Shamir nor Netanyahu was ousted by an Israeli center displeased with deteriorating American-Israeli relations. In both cases, parties on the right dismantled these right-wing governments because they were unhappy with concessions made by the prime ministers to amend relations with Washington. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it is the exact opposite of the one the peace-processing left (both Israel’s and Washington’s) would have us believe: politically speaking, Netanyahu needs to keep his right-wing coalition partners happy—or at least not in a state of open revolt—first and worry about the sensibilities of those working in the White House second.
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Where does the new kinder and gentler Netanyahu go from here? For those less inclined to give the prime minister his due, the answer is effectively nowhere. He will maneuver from trial to trial, finding tactical solutions that will keep his government afloat without strategically advancing his ideological cause. Confrontations will continue to be sidestepped and decisions postponed in order to ensure political survival. After all, the new tack of playing it cool has made him an impressive and improbable political success thus far.
That analysis fails to account for Benjamin Netanyahu’s sense of purpose. He believes he is a man who can and will change history. “The people of Israel, and I as their prime minister, are prepared to walk this road and to go a long way in a short time to achieve a genuine peace,” he has publicly vowed. “I’m willing to reach a historic compromise with our neighbors.” This sentiment is reportedly echoed in Netanyahu’s private conversations with diplomats, columnists, and political supporters. He might not think peace inevitable, or even likely, but if the opportunity were to present itself, Netanyahu would like to out-Sharon Sharon and reach a historic agreement.
But ensuring a prized place in the pantheon of great Israeli leaders, or at least the list of those who advanced the cause of peace via negotiation, will prove difficult. Leaving aside the extreme improbability that the Palestinian leadership will sign a final-status peace agreement that recognizes the legitimacy of the Jewish state in the foreseeable future, the potential roadblocks at home are also formidable. The current coalition would make it very hard for the prime minister to compromise over land or to dismantle Jewish communities in the West Bank, since settlement supporters make up a considerable portion of its ranks. In particular, Avigdor Lieberman has taken to joking publicly about his desire to be “leader of the opposition”—which, even if it is not a credible threat that he will bolt, signals his unwillingness to follow Netanyahu blindly.
In the admittedly unlikely event that a peace deal becomes a realistic possibility or that Lieberman and his party decide it is time for them to move to the right of Netanyahu to prepare for a new election (which probably will not be held before 2012), Netanyahu would have to reshuffle his coalition and lure his Kadima rivals into the fold. Initially, Netanyahu had hoped that once Kadima chose not to join the government that he formed in 2009, it would collapse as a viable party, since its members lacked a core ideology and its leadership’s main goal had heretofore been a quest to hold on to political power, without which it has no raison-d’être. But contrary to his expectations, the party of former Likud and Labor members did not disintegrate. Instead, led by the ambitious Tzipi Livni, it hunkered down to wait patiently for the collapse of Netanyahu’s government. While Livni has been disappointed by Netanyahu’s staying power, she is still determined to oust him. In turn, the prime minster, who neither trusts nor likes Livni, understands that her ultimate goal is to replace him in office, not to strengthen his hand in negotiations with either the Palestinians or the Americans. Given these circumstances, any reshuffling of the coalition to replace Lieberman and other right-wingers with Kadima would be fraught with difficulties and probably signify the beginning of the end for Netanyahu’s government.
Long-term political survival is bestowed upon uninspired leaders readily enough, but it’s the ambitious ones who need it most to advance their agendas. Several modern Israeli leaders have failed to grasp this fact of political life. Ehud Barak reached for the sky in trying to end the conflict with the Palestinians in one fell swoop at Camp David without adequate political support to keep him going once Yasir Arafat turned him down. During Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, his public fights stymied any attempt at grand plans. Even Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 to great fanfare and worldwide adoration, didn’t have the patience or the political savvy to secure a majority strong enough to give his plan convincing legitimacy.
If anyone understood both the sources and uses of long-term political viability, it was Ariel Sharon. For good and for ill, in his last political incarnation as prime minister from 2001 until he was felled by a debilitating stroke in 2006, he was the master of garnering legitimacy, whether at home or abroad—hunting it down patiently and securing it at the critical moment, which he demonstrated both in his successful wooing of the Bush administration’s support for his counterattack against Palestinian terror as well as his policy of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon wasted no energy on the small game, the insignificant detractor, or the unnecessary fight.
Sharon didn’t think much of his eventual successor: “Netanyahu is pressured easily, gets into a panic, and loses his senses,” he said. “To run a country likeIsrael a leader needs to have reason and judgment and nerves of steel, two traits he does not have.” Observing today’s Netanyahu, there can be no doubt that the man himself came to the same conclusion.
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Of course, even with all the recent attention paid to the Israeli-Palestinian sphere, Netanyahu’s desire for a meaningful legacy does not necessarily translate into a wish to be the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaker. It is a distinct possibility that he sees his ultimate role as that of Israel’s protector against a nuclear-armed Iran.
In that light, his newly minted equanimity makes exquisite strategic sense. He may well be saving his pugnacity and political energy for the day that he might have to send the Israeli Air Force to take out nuclear targets in Iran. Surely making and defending that decision, and living with its consequences, will require all the mettle Netanyahu can muster. Perhaps this further explains his efforts to avoid public complaint about the Obama administration and not to spend capital on lesser issues like the dead-end talks with Mahmoud Abbas. For what isn’t a lesser issue with an existential dilemma on the horizon?
That Netanyahu faces a kaleidoscopic array of crises is widely understood. That he has found and held his center of gravity is somewhat less appreciated outside Israel. Whether, in the short term, a settlement freeze is extended or Abbas abandons talks, Netanyahu has positioned himself to move forward or stand his ground accordingly with little risk of political fallout from his own electorate. And whether, in the longer term, Iran is debilitated by international isolation or proceeds on its nuclear course unimpeded, theIsraeli prime minister is as politically grounded as he could have hoped to be when facing the prospect of a war for survival. While the lessons the older Netanyahu has learned from his younger self are political in nature, their importance transcends the realm of choreographed smiles and savvy public relations. Becoming, at last, a skilled political tactician has enabledNetanyahu to be an effective national leader.
