There really must be some explanation for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s blatant snubbing of President Obama in the days since their meeting in Washington. After all, we have been told for years that Netanyahu, perhaps even more than some of his colleagues, is deeply sensitive to the importance of America’s support of Israel. Yet, since the May 18 meeting, Netanyahu seems to have gone out of his way to distance himself from what he knows to be the views not only of America’s new president but also of the American foreign policy establishment. He has specifically rejected an end to both the “natural growth” of existing settlements and to Jewish construction in Jerusalem. He has pointedly refused to endorse a two-state solution to Israel’s continuing conflict with the Palestinians. He has apparently concluded that he can satisfy America’s opposition to the West Bank settlement program by nodding his agreement to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s umpteenth announcement that he is prepared to remove as many as two dozen illegal settlements by force, if need be. He has repeated his readiness to negotiate with Syria “without preconditions,” meaning without the sine qua non of any agreement, Israel’s stated readiness to withdraw from the Golan Heights. Similarly, he describes himself as eager to resume negotiations with President Mahmoud Abbas, this, too, without precondition. (Or maybe not: In April, he demanded that any entity with which Israel negotiates must first acknowledge Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Now that seems to have been at least temporarily set aside.) But the negotiations will be about security, about economic development, about the development of Palestinian political and governmental institutions – not about borders and boundaries, not about final status issues. In each of these respects, he is flouting America’s stated preferences.
In sum, Netanyahu is behaving essentially as if George W. Bush were still president of the United States and as if the status quo were indefinitely sustainable.
But Bush is no longer president, and Barack Obama is convinced that serious progress on the Israel-Palestine peace front is critical to calming down the volatile Middle East, even to managing the Iran problem.
Let’s be entirely clear: Netanyahu is the duly elected leader of a sovereign state, a state fully entitled to define its own policies without reference to the good opinion much less the approval of others. That’s what sovereignty means. But let’s not be naïve: Israel is not nearly as independent as it might like to be. Indeed, no nation is entirely independent, not in these globalized days, and Israel, though astonishingly accomplished in very many ways, is very far from autonomous. It needs the active political, financial and security support of the United States. It is not a vassal state, but neither is it master of its own destiny.
So, again, what can account for Netanyahu’s provocations?
There is only one plausible explanation: Netanyahu thinks he can outsmart Obama. Not, mind you, that he is smarter than Obama, but that he can play him, just as most of Netanyahu’s predecessors have done with previous occupants of the Oval Office.
Will America really go to the mat with Israel over the question of whether it is right to build additional housing so that grown children can live near their parents? Will the president risk the fury of the American Jewish community and of a consequently aroused Congress in order to fiddle with the contours of Jerusalem, in order to placate the very people who smirched the city’s sanctity back when they controlled its holy places, from 1948 to 1967? The president will fume, the secretary of state will grouse, the commentariate will mutter, but in the end, Israel will prevail.
I sometimes fear there’s a genetically inbred survival characteristic of the Jews that predisposes us to try to beat the system, to get away with things, a characteristic that came in very handy for all those many centuries during which the nerve and cleverness to beat the system enabled survival, but that has now become a dysfunctional anachronism.
Be that as it may, Netanyahu’s stance will likely turn out to be a serious miscalculation of Obama’s intentions and abilities. Obama has no intention of endangering Israel, but when it comes to outsmarting a would-be outsmarter, he is not exactly a beginner. The network that connects Israel and America is so thickly wired that there are many ways that America can pressure Israel without endangering it. And Obama seems, so far, the sort of person who, once engaged — which he surely is — will not easily let go, flit onto some other tempting challenge.
For sure, the Palestinians are not ready for peace. Neither are the Israelis. But Jordan and Syria and Saudi Arabia and Egypt may well be, and the United States, after eight years of useless dabbling, now newly alive, newly ambitious, newly strategic in its thinking, seems alert to the opportunity and responsibility that its history and its power have shaped.
Netanyahu would do well to listen to the urgent message he’s been receiving from Jewish members of Congress and from Jewish communal leaders: understand that the settlement issue will no longer be swept under the rug. The due date for the costs of the delusional escapade that has wrenched Israel so radically off course is at hand.
The Jewish settlements are illegal, as Theodore Meror, the legal counsel of Israel's foreign ministry, wrote in a memo in 1967.
The Jewish settlements in New Canaan are not illegal.
Norman - In the end, there will be a political agreement between the two sides, ending the conflict. That agreement will include borders and the fate of the settlements - and it will be regarded as final and legal. Interestingly, we hear all the time from the Palestinians (and from those who support them) that the settlements make a two-state solution impossible. Well, surely, those calling for a one-state solution on this basis have hereby defined these settlements as a permanent fact of life (and legal). It would be absurd to call for a one-state solution because of the settlements - and then to claim that they must be removed because of their illegality. The whole issue of legality is simply one of the tools of applying pressure in an ongoing conflict. For you, it is just another way of expressing hostility towards Israel.
A reminder to the "Jewish members of Congress and from Jewish communal leaders": Jews originate from middle eastener tribes from Samaria, Galilee, Judaea, Idumea (Jews are the old canaanites)... and not from Poland, Germany and Russia... In Israel "settlers" are simply resettling their historical homeland... American Jews lost the capacicity to grasp that fact, they are repeating history, as like as the Jews in Germany believed to be Germans of Mosaic faith...
The second most important books every Jew should read are the complete works of Yossef b. Matatyahu, aka Flavius Josephus... especially War of the Jews and Jewish Antiquities...
The evidence points to Obama doing exactly what Fein says he isn't going to do. Selling out Israel. Fein now has the president of his dreams. A guy who will align the US with hamas and Iran. I honestly don't know how he lives with himself.
Please, Mr. Fein, reread what you wrote:
I sometimes fear there’s a genetically inbred survival characteristic of the Jews that predisposes us to try to beat the system, to get away with things, a characteristic that came in very handy for all those many centuries during which the nerve and cleverness to beat the system enabled survival, but that has now become a dysfunctional anachronism.
I'm sorry but there are no "Jewish" genes as Jews are not a race not a blood line. They are converts of all sorts from many different places, per History Prof. Shlomo Sanz of Tel Aviv University. I don't understand how you can criticize Netanyahu and then insert such racist dribble. In fact, I think I can assert that Netanyahu is free of the East Euro psychosis that characterized a lot of the East European Jews that came to Palestine to create a Zionist state. He is not a believer in the doom and gloom hysteria that all is lost, that this is a last stand and so let's take them all with us as we go in order to amuze God (sounds like Zawahiri!!!). He knows that the future of the Middle East is based on a direct relationship between the Arab neighbors and the Israelis. First, he realizes, he has to deal with the Palestinians to produce a relationship that is very good for both parties, starting with economic integration before solving the political nation issue of two states. His real problem is how undemocratic is Israel-- like America. Both nations have degenerated, polarizing into two voter blocs that are not very different philosophically except in how they vote. This leaves the 5% and 10% parties to dictate to both, choosing the winner, because there is no winner without their vote. This means that he may fail-- given that the Russians suffering from deep East Euro psychosis are even in his cabinet. But he will give it his best shot because he has enough SABRA in him to think positively and fairly of both sides, Jews and Arabs. Alas, politics is not physics and the laws obeyed are arithmetic, not the universe's. So give him some time and a chance to swindle with right wing words until he proves to most Israelis and Palestinians that a good deal can be achieved for both. Meanwhile, you AMERICAN JEWS, safe (for now) here in the US and relatively comfortable, don't have your fun at Israel's expense with all sorts of hyperboles. Go back to trying to be like the Jews of the 60s and engage in meaningful dialogue instead of the pretended macho crap you throw at eachother...please, for the good of all!
Remember, for each of you screaming: KILL THRE ARABS, there are ten arabs ready to die for revenge for your deeds. But you get diarrhea in the face of physical response in kind to your words. BE exemplary and then you can demand it of others. The FORWARD was once the NY TIMES of Jews. People would read it to know so they could think-- logically and informed-- not to spit slander at each other.
Everyone knows that building the settlements is Israel’s plan to steal more land from the Palestinians before they get their own state. It's unacceptable. How would you like some dead beats to pitch tent in your back yard and tell you under the threat of physical violence there's nothing you can do about it. No wonder the Palestinians are fighting back. Yes, Israel is stronger than them so they react in the only way they can. How does one respond to bullying? Well finally, I hope, in Obama we have someone who can put a stop to it. To those right winged Zionists, God gave you nothing but your life and when it's time like for all of us, he'll take it. No I don't hate Jews, I'm a human being who believes in justice, equality, liberty, freedom of speech and humanity.