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At a time when moderation, pragmatism, and vision is needed, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish and ideological foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman have fully embraced the blinding ‘Iron Wall’ mentality which inflates an unrealistic conception of Israel’s national interest and promotes a view of an imagined Greater Israel; while white washing the uncomfortable realities of a changing Middle East.
This hard-line foreign policy has so far failed to reap Israel any long or short term benefits to its security. An over-reliance on the cold peace that existed since 1973 with the post-war regimes in Damascus, Cairo, and Amman gave Jerusalem a temporal sense of security. With its neighbors at bay, it did not need to seriously make peace with the Palestinians. If there was to be peace, it would be on Israel’s terms and its timing. [inset_left]The value of peace so far has never justified the cost.[/inset_left] An offensive defense was better than compromise and negotiation.
Obama’s attempts to stop settlement building, a prerequisite for peace negotiations by the PLO, were rejected by Netanyahu; leading to the Palestinians withdrawing from peace talks. Israel’s handling of the flotilla to challenge the repressive blockade of Gaza has led to the loss of its major trade partner and oldest ally, Turkey.
Catching Netanyahu off guard, Israel was deeply unprepared to deal with the unrest sweeping the Arab World when it hit the banks of the Nile in January. No peace with the Palestinians was manageable when the post-1973 security architecture guaranteed no war. But, the Arab Spring has swept its long-time ally Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt and has mortally weakened Bashar al-Assad, neither an ally nor a friend, but at least, a predictable neighbor.
Israel finds itself at the moment alone in a changed Middle East and to a large degree, its policies for over sixty years have put them in this position. By refusing to substantively address the peace process, Jerusalem has been confronted by a problem of its own making, the UN vote on Palestine’s international status, a culmination of failure for almost two decades since the Madrid Accords to obtain a Palestinian state.
While this vote largely does not change the realities on the ground for the Palestinians and a veto by the US will be a roadblock for membership, it symbolically puts Palestine in a stronger bargaining position in the long-term with Israel.
This is evident in the response by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has always viewed the UN as an entity he cannot trust and one he often flouts, now planning on flying to the UN General Assembly to argue the case against a Palestinian state. His words will have little impact, but are an admission of his own awareness of Israel’s isolated position both in the region and globally.
With the rise of new powers, China, Russia, Brazil, all voicing support for UN membership for Palestine, Israel’s current path is placing the state in a disadvantaged position for the future. Israel’s over-reliance on the US to fight its battles on the international stage may have worked during the Cold War and in the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, but now Israel faces a public diplomacy fiasco and importantly, a security crisis in the Middle East where it has no stable allies at the moment and few friends in the globe supporting it.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu has failed to recognize the fundamental challenges facing the state and lacks the vision to change his state’s position. He will unlikely alters his actions or challenge the prevailing mind set of the Likud party and its supporters. For now, alone in the region and in the world, Israel finds itself in a storm of its own making, and this storm will likely get worse.
