‘Time for the US to crack the whip’

Surprising, and pleasing, in the just-held Israeli parliamentary elections was the success of the large Palestinian community in Israel, which makes up about 20 per cent of the population, that launched a significant parliamentary bloc in the Knesset.

The bloc, officially known as the Joint Arab List, emerged as a result of a new Israeli rule raising the minimum threshold for entry into the Knesset to 3.5 per cent of the votes cast.

Even though the Arab Israeli turnout was reportedly lower than that of Jewish Israelis, it was still higher than usual, which enabled the group to get 14 seats in the 120-member Knesset.

Exit polling had placed the Joint Arab List, a bloc made up of a few small Arab factions, in third place, and made the party, according to Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “one of the election’s biggest winners”.

The re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu was a shocking surprise; his performance last week, on the eve of the elections, was disgusting by any measure.

He then announced, in a media interview that, if elected, he will oppose the creation of a Palestinian state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, underlining that Israel already is facing international calls for “the return of Israel to the 1967 borders”.

Said Netanyahu: “ I think anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,” obviously referring to Hamas, the Islamist group that dominates the Gaza Strip, which Israel attacked last year for 50 days.

This public statement regarding Palestinian statehood was in direct opposition to one the Israeli prime minister made in 2009 at Bar-Ian University, in Israel, in which he said that he supported the two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Saeb Erekat, the lead Palestinian negotiator with Israel and executive member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, said that this was not something new to the Palestinians, since “Netanyahu has done everything possible to bury the two-state solution”.

He added: “Netanyahu dared to utter his words whilst counting on full impunity from the international community. The time has come for the world to learn and understand that impunity will not bring peace, only justice will.”

He was probably referring to failure of US President Barack Obama’s administration to crack the whip after Secretary of State John Kerry spent eight months of fruitless peace negotiations last year.

Consequently, Ayman Odeh, the Arab-Israeli Joint Arab List’s charismatic leader, committed himself to working on improving the lives of Palestinian Israelis, but has vowed not to join a coalition led by either Netanyahu’s Likud Party or the Zionist Union, led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

Netanyahu’s statement prompted the influential New York Times to run a very critical editorial on Wednesday, under the headline “An Israeli election turns ugly”.

It said, in its opening paragraph, that Netanyahu’s “outright rejection of a Palestinian state and his racist rant against Arab Israeli voters on Tuesday showed that he has forfeited any claim to representing all Israelis”.

It went on: “His behaviour in the past six years — aggressively building Israeli homes on land that likely would be within the bounds of a Palestinian state and never engaging seriously in negotiations — has long convinced many people that he has no interest in a peace agreement. 

“But his statement this week laid bare his duplicity, confirmed Palestinian suspicions and will make it even harder for him to repair his poisoned relations with President Obama, who has invested heavily in pushing a two-state solution.”

Another columnist at the Times, Roger Cohen, observed: “A Netanyahu-led right-wing government will face growing international isolation, especially because of the prime minister’s open commitment to stop the emergence of a Palestine state.

“Repairing relations with President Obama would be arduous. A hardening of America’s position towards Israel at the United Nations cannot be ruled out, if West Bank settlements continue to expand …. A government of the right would more likely exacerbate than overcome that estrangement over the next couple of years.”

It is definitely time for the Obama administration, which seems close to an agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme, to crack the whip against Israel. 

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.