A hint of Washington’s impatience with Israel’s failure to spell out its intentions was already evident in President Biden’s remarks in Tel Aviv on October 18, when Biden publicly noted that wartime success “requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you’re on will achieve those objectives.” Since then, but for a vaguely worded statement by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Israel seeks “the creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip, the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip, and the creation of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel,” no clear vision for what Israel aims to achieve has been presented.

The apparent absence of an Israeli vision for how to realize its goals and the growing escalation of the conflict across the region require urgent international intervention aimed at preparing the diplomatic off-ramp that must be the end of all wars.

The off-ramp would need to contend with multiple challenges, including those underlying Israel’s own war objectives.

First, the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, which Israel has repeatedly declared to be its main objective, lacks the clarity of purpose and the certainty of its achievability. Hamas is an organization deeply embedded in Gaza’s social and civilian life, and destroying it would require not only the killing of tens of thousands of armed men affiliated with Hamas, but also dismantling its wide array of civilian mechanisms—mechanism that employ upwards of 40,000 civilians and which are essential if Gaza is to function after the war ends.

Second, even as Israel’s war objective of dismantling Hamas is probably unrealistic, it is also, paradoxically, not ambitious enough. This is because disarming Hamas would create a power vacuum into which other militant and terrorist groups would enter – principally Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but potentially also other militant groups, including Salafi-jihadist ones. These groups are no less committed to waging endless war on Israel, and their weakness relative to Hamas thus far has been due to Hamas’s ability to rein them in. If Hamas is weakened, let alone dismantled, they will likely take its place.

And finally, a war whose goal is destroying Hamas does not necessarily go in hand with securing the release of the roughly 240 Israeli hostages in Gaza. If anything, the kind of brutal and bloody fighting required to achieve the dismantling of Hamas would only endanger the lives and safety of the Israeli hostages rather than expedite or assure their release.

The fact, moreover, that third-party negotiations can bring about the release of hostages, as has already been demonstrated by the release of four hostages in two separate deals brokered by both Qatar and Egypt, underscores the availability of an alternative to the use of sheer military force.

The diplomatic off-ramp must be nothing less than a regional grand bargain—one that would address Israel’s necessary and legitimate strategic needs; strengthen the pragmatic Palestinian forces who are willing to reach a permanent agreement with Israel; avert a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip; and prevent a wider regional war.

The challenge, admittedly, is enormous and may well be beyond what regional and international diplomacy can pull off. Competing interests among some of the key regional stakeholders (such as between longtime rivals Saudi Arabia and Qatar) and powerful spoilers—notably Iran, Hamas’s chief sponsor—are bound to get in the way. Yet given the enormous stakes at hand, the effort must be made, with these two primary components at its core:

First and immediately, an “all-for-all” hostages for prisoners exchange deal between Israel and Hamas. Under such a deal, Hamas and the other Palestinian groups would release all Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip in exchange for a blanket release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, estimated at around 6,000. The Israeli hostages would include the two civilians who have been held by Hamas before October 7. Even if Hamas were to release several dozen captives in the days to come, the staggering number of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip renders any precedents to prisoner exchange deals—notably that of the 2011 deal for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, where the identity and severity of each and every prisoner’s security crimes were factored in—moot.

Second, and in the longer term, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. This should be Israel’s ultimate goal, but it is also one that only a concerted regional and international effort might be able to bring about without a full-scale ground invasion.

In practical terms, this would require the disarming of Hamas and the other Palestinian militant groups and would ideally apply to these and other militant groups in the West Bank as well. While such efforts have failed in the past, conditions this time are different. Achieving this goal, however, would depend on the creation of a coalition of regional stakeholders united by the understanding that Hamas must be eliminated—indeed, that failure to destroy Hamas would deal a major victory to their arch enemy, Iran. Such a potential coalition exists in the region, with key players being Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

Tragically, the military disarmament of Hamas and all other Palestinian factions will probably not be achieved without additional military pressure, with all the implications for the civilian population of Gaza, along with some kind of a (literally) life-saving deal for Hamas’s and PIJ’s leaderships, whoever among them survives. Historical examples for such arrangements are none too inspiring, but the 1982 evacuation of Yasser Arafat and the PLO from Beirut, Lebanon, could serve as a model.

The military disarmament of Hamas and all other Palestinian factions must also mean the readiness of the Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of the PLO (and its main faction, Fatah) to assume control over the Gaza Strip. Such a development would require considerable political and financial resources, and might necessitate the establishment of a multinational Arab peacekeeping force that would, under optimal circumstances, receive its mandate from a U.N. Security Council resolution. As for the financial component, the wealthy Arab states, principally Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and the European donor countries, would need to foot the bill.

These are only the two basic components of the regional bargain required right now. A broader deal, one that would truly redefine the regional security architecture (and also go a long way in checking Iran’s regional ambitions) might also include American defense pacts with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, Saudi-Israeli normalization, and a joint U.S. and Saudi sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a two-state solution.

The prospect for renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a two-state solution might seem extremely distant under present circumstances. Yet the trauma of October 7 and the pain engendered by the ongoing crisis may create the kind of willingness, on both sides, that has been lacking in the past 20 years. To be sure, good-faith negotiations would require new leaderships in both Jerusalem and Ramallah that enjoy broad public support. In Israel, that might possible even with the current parliamentary makeup (provided Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped down and a new coalition is formed). In Palestine, where elections in the Palestinian Authority have not taken place since 2006 and are unlikely to take place any time soon, the legitimacy would need to be achieved through internal organizational reforms as well as through major economic reconstruction and assistance by way of a Marshall Plan-like support from the outside. Meanwhile, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and the consolidation of a Palestinian polity would mean the removal of one of the main obstacles to such negotiations since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007.

There is no easy path forward, but the urgency for regional and global diplomacy cannot be overstated. Failure to create an off-ramp from this war would mean not simply more of the same, but a precipitous fall into the abyss.

The article was published on October 31 on TIME.

הפוסט The Diplomatic Off-Ramp After Israel’s Invasion of Gaza הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Indeed, while enjoying the status and perquisites of a U.S. special ally, it has pursued policies not only in variance with American strategic interests but often directly adversarial to them. And it has done so on a wide array of fronts, in the Middle East and across the globe.

The adversarial shift began with the ascendance of a specific leader: Benjamin Netanyahu. From his first rise to power in 1996 through the more than years 15 years he has held the reins—after losing an election in 1999, Netanyahu returned in 2009 and, with the exception of an 18-month hiatus between June 2021 and December 2022, has been prime minister ever since—Netanyahu has consistently and increasingly advanced foreign and security policies that, whether directly or indirectly, undercut U.S. strategic interests.

Notably, these policies pertain not only to areas in which Israel could be argued to hold overriding interests, such as the Palestinian one. Although Netanyahu’s diplomatic approach on this front has been at odds with U.S. interests for all but the Trump years, Washington should, and has been, understanding of this divergence between the two allies. The same case can be made for Netanyahu’s policy on Iran, even as he has unequivocally sabotaged and derailed American efforts on this front.

But the remarkable fact is that Netanyahu’s Israel has pursued policies at odds with American strategic interests across much of the world. Let us recount the ways.

In Europe, Netanyahu’s Israel has adopted a policy aimed at undermining the European Union and the liberal democratic order for which it stands. In fact, it has aligned itself not merely with some of Brussels’s staunchest adversaries—such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński and Mateusz Morawiecki, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, to name a few; it has openly embraced some of Europe’s most far-right parties and their populist leaders whose opposition to Brussels transcends E.U. politics and turns on an illiberal agenda with, astonishingly, neo-fascist and even neo-Nazi strains. A partial list includes the Freedom Party of Austria, founded by a former Nazi SS officer, and Germany’s extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

For Netanyahu, these relationships have been first and foremost transactional. In exchange for Israel turning a blind eye to their historical and ideological links with neo-Nazism and present-day anti-Semitism at home, these parties provided their support for Israel’s policy on the Palestinian front. Such support, moreover, has also served a wider strategic aim for Netanyahu: by undermining E.U. consensus on foreign policy toward Israel, these relationships contribute to sowing divisions within the E.U. itself and weaken Europe’s core liberal norms.

Of course, Netanyahu’s brazen diplomatic posture against the liberal democratic order—the cornerstone of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War—has been reflected most strikingly in his intimate relationship with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin. As Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu should certainly maintain cordial and constructive relations with Moscow, a major world power with a growing presence in the Middle East, including across Israel’s northern border of Syria. But the relationship Netanyahu has cultivated with Putin has gone far beyond what has been strategically necessary to safeguard Israeli interests; worse, it has often come at Washington’s expense.

The full cost to U.S. strategic interests became apparent in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although launched during Netanyahu’s brief hiatus from leadership, the relationship he had cultivated over the years with Putin has made Israel into a natural outlet for Russian capital and commodity exports. The conduct is not limited to Jewish Russian oligarchs, for whose welfare (more in the sense of their wealth than health) Israel could claim to care; enter any supermarket in Israel since Western powers imposed sanctions on Moscow, and the number and variety of products from Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea will settle any question as to where Israel truly stands.

Regardless of whether Israeli supply of arms to Ukraine would make a difference on the battleground, its blank refusal of Kyiv’s requests poked a hole in American efforts to present a unified front against Russian aggression. And although Israel has shifted its rhetoric of neutrality somewhat in favor of Ukraine and is reportedly ready to consider supplying it with some defensive weapons systems—the result, no doubt of Iranian military assistance to Russia and U.S. pressure—Netanyahu’s intimacy with Putin should be regarded as Israeli betrayal of the special relationship with the U.S.

A similar approach can be seen in Netanyahu’s policy toward China, the other global player determined to undercut American leadership. China’s rivalry with the U.S. alone should have restrained Netanyahu from forging a comprehensive partnership with it. Yet under his leadership, Israel has become a leading supplier of R&D and cutting-edge technologies and accelerated China’s transformation into becoming America’s “most serious competitor,” as President Biden has defined it.

Remarkably, Israel has also at least declared itself a a geo-strategic backer of China. At a 2017 meeting with President Xi, Netanyahu encouraged China to assume its rightful place “on the world stage,” and waxed romantic by describing the Israeli-Chinese relationship as “a marriage made in heaven.” Meanwhile here on earth, Netanyahu’s Israel has opened itself up to strategic investments by China in its infrastructure, such as the mass transit system in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, which will also run in sensitive underground locations abutting Israel’s military and defense compound, and parts of the Haifa Bay Port, which may steer the U.S. Sixth Fleet elsewhere.

Perhaps most egregiously, Netanyahu has had the temerity to meddle in American domestic politics. He has used Israel to sow divisions between Democrats and Republicans, to anathematize a sitting U.S. president (Barack Obama), and to manipulate—we are using this word advisedly—another one (Donald Trump) to withdraw from a hard-reached international agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. The withdrawal is widely recognized to have been a huge strategic mistake, not only for U.S. security interests but, ironically, also for Israeli ones.

Disagreements between allies are par for the course in international relations. Yet in the case of Netanyahu’s Israel, the kind and quality of its foreign-policy divergences with the U.S. are the stuff of an adversarial relationship, not a friendly one. That there is a certain reluctance to designate Netanyahu’s Israel an adversary of the U.S. is understandable. After all, the U.S. and Israel are bound by a special relationship. And in many ways they are. The very fact that it can contain and subsume the detrimental foreign policies of Netanyahu makes it a very special one indeed.

This article is from “TIME“, from March 23, 2023.

הפוסט Netanyahu Has Made Israel a U.S. Adversary הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

The reason lies in the unprecedented fact that, over the course of the 55-hour-long military clashes between Israel and the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hamas restrained itself from joining the fighting. In fact, not only did Hamas do everything it felt it could to avoid being dragged into this mini-war, it also exerted considerable pressure on PIJ to agree to the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire that ended it.

This non-belligerent approach by Hamas was a first. For the historic record, although Hamas refrained from actively joining a similar round between Israel and PIJ in November 2019—Israeli code-named Operation Black Belt—it launched a few rockets after a ceasefire had entered into force in a symbolic show of solidarity.

To be sure, while Hamas, which views PIJ as an ideological rival, had multiple reasons not to join the fighting, Israel proved astute and careful in denying Hamas any compelling reasons to do so. It carefully side-stepped Hamas-related targets, kept to a minimum the number of civilian casualties, and avoided targeting civilian infrastructure, etc.).

In so doing, it suspended its usual policy, stubbornly held by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that holds Hamas responsible for any violence coming out of the Gaza Strip, giving Hamas the opportunity to decide for itself if and how to respond to the fighting between PIJ and Israel.

Israel’s policy change and Hamas’s response have created a new reality—one that reflects political maturity on both sides and, however unlikely this may sound, also a new level of mutual trust.

This new reality presents an opportunity for advancing far-reaching arrangements between the two sides, first and foremost those involving the reconstruction of Gaza (as per the Egyptian initiative of 2021) and prisoner exchange. The responsibility that both Israel and Hamas demonstrated during this last round may encourage regional and international countries, including Qatar and other Gulf governments, to make good on their past pledges for this purpose. And the current Israeli prime minister, Yair Lapid, has himself championed the need for Israeli cooperation in Gaza reconstruction efforts less than a year ago.

At the same time, a prisoner swap, which the Israeli leadership have increasingly stressed is a precondition for enabling reconstruction projects, will remove a major political and psychological stumbling block to moving forward.

That said, even as Israel develops a more constructive modus vivendi with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the real battleground remains the West Bank, where both the PIJ and Hamas are increasing their efforts to strengthen their presence, especially ahead of a possible leadership challenge within the Palestinian Authority the day after the longtime presidency of Mahmoud Abbas ends.

From the Israeli standpoint, the West Bank should remain in focus not only for the security challenges it poses but for the centerpiece of an eventual agreement on a two-state solution. To this end, Israel should seek to leverage its non-violent dynamic with Hamas to advance the message that non-violence pays off and to demonstrate that point by adopting a proactive and sustained policy aimed at improving material and political conditions in the West Bank. In the context of the Abraham Accords, moreover, such actions may yield additional benefits from regional parties that have been hesitant until now to normalize relations with Israel.

Last but not least, although the caretaker government under Lapid has neither the political will nor the public mandate to renew peace negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, it should signal its aspirations of reaching an eventual peace agreement by empowering the pragmatic and Fatah-led forces in the Palestinian Authority. And it should encourage rather than undermine the U.S. and other regional and international stakeholders in doing the same.

This article is from “Newsweek“, from August 8, 2022

הפוסט Is this a turning point in Israel- Hamas relations? – opinion הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Suspicion that Israeli officials were in the know about the plot, if not outright complicit in it, surfaced almost immediately following a report reports that a Sudanese security delegation had secretly visited Israel just weeks earlier. And this suspicion seemed all but validated in light of the revelation that an Israeli delegation, which included defense and Mossad representatives, traveled to Khartoum in the aftermath of the coup for talks on unspecified topics.

While it is not known who headed the Israeli side on both these occasions, it appears that on the Sudanese side it was Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the notorious commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and a key ally of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the man responsible for the putsch.

Unfortunately, even if there are no grounds to believe that Israeli military and intelligence officials were complicit in the military takeover (a possibility about which even some Israeli journalists have openly speculated), Israel is far from an innocent bystander.

Israel is a stakeholder with vested interests, formally bound up in Sudan’s political transition in light of the Trump administration’s ill-witted decision last year to force Khartoum to agree to normalize relations with Jerusalem in exchange for a package of vital financial incentives, including Sudan’s long-awaited removal from U.S. list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.

It was a role in a quid pro quo that Israel should have refused to play, and precisely because of its genuinely strategic interests in forging a long-term relationship with a stable and functioning Sudan. Indeed, as some analysts, including myself, had warned ahead of the announcement of the deal, the heavy-handed manner in which Washington pressured Khartoum to normalize relations with Jerusalem was bound to backfire.

At a time that Sudan was governed by a fragile cohabitation arrangement between military and civilian stakeholders and undergoing a fragile process of democratization, we argued, a decision as publicly contentious as recognizing Israel risked strengthening the very elements who posed the greatest impediment to a smooth transition to civilian rule – primarily, the military, which assumed the lead in establishing contacts with Israel, and the Islamists, who opposed any such contacts.

In the event, Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, put aside Israel’s long-term interests in favor of a short-term public relations victory in the form of yet another normalization deal with a Muslim country. In so doing, he joined President Trump’s desire to score a quick victory for expedient political gains – just two weeks before the U.S. presidential elections.

The risk that such a move would add further friction to Sudan’s internal political process – a process whose derailment would not only doom the country’s chances of transitioning into a Western-oriented democracy but throw it into a prolonged political turmoil and perhaps even civil war – was blithely ignored. Sudan, after all, was a trophy, not a partner.

To be sure, turmoil in Sudan would first and foremost constitute a tragedy for the people of Sudan. But as Netanyahu must have appreciated, it would also undermine Israel’s broader strategic goals.

Absenting a functioning government, Sudan would be in no position to partner and collaborate with Israel on any number of issues, including strategic-related interests pertaining, most urgently, to Iranian regional actions directly and through its proxies – both inside Sudan and the Red Sea. And it is these very interests that appear to have guided Israel’s most recent moves against the backdrop of the military takeover in Sudan.

Certainly, from a narrowly-defined security perspective, Israel is right to be seeking assurances from Sudan’s military leadership that any preliminary understandings over security and intelligence cooperation, reached before the coup, would be upheld.

Thus, for instance, of utmost concern to Israel is that the establishment of an intelligence base on the Red Sea, presumably near the Sudan’s principal coastal city of Port Said, not be imperiled, not least given the recent unrest in the area that had seen tribal protesters blockading the seaport for several weeks.

All the same, even as it is too early to tell how the military coup in Sudan will play out, Jerusalem’s recent actions suggest it has no actual thought-out policy toward Khartoum. Israel-Sudan relations require a broader and more nuanced view, especially as the new military leadership has failed to win legitimacy from Washington and other key Western powers.

Indeed, the strong condemnation by the Biden administration, which has already suspended $700 million in financial assistance to Sudan, should cast a chill on Israel’s rapprochement with the Sudanese leadership rather than, as Jerusalem seems determined to show, stimulate it.

The very fact that Israeli officials have confirmed the report about the visit of the Israeli delegation to Khartoum last week – a report that originally appeared in a Sudanese newspaper and which Israeli officials might have easily dismissed, refused to comment on, and even ban its publication in Israel – suggests that there are those in Jerusalem who deem it useful to demonstrate that Israel is defying the consensus among its allies on how to respond to the putsch in Sudan, perhaps as a way of rewarding the Sudanese military leadership for their willingness to continue to cooperate with Israel on vital security needs.

And the possibility that Israeli actions have, at the very least, been coordinated with Washington only underscores the apparent utility in this defiance – namely, that Israel is determined to tread its own course and is willing to prove useful for its allies should they so desire.

Either way, Israel’s conduct betrays misguided diplomatic and strategic thinking.

It’s misguided, in that it feeds into Sudanese misconceptions about Jerusalem’s sway over Washington (misconceptions, often tinged with antisemitism, that are prevalent not only in the Arab and Muslim world but also in many European capitals). And misguided, in that it fails to read the regional and international map.

In contrast to the global acquiescence to the counter-revolutionary coup in Egypt that toppled the government of Mohammed Morsi, Western powers are unlikely to accept the counter-revolutionary putsch in Khartoum. It is one thing to overthrow an Islamist leadership, even if it was democratically elected; it is another thing altogether to derail a political process that holds out the promise of a Western-oriented democracy.

Rather than let narrow security interests combined with diplomatic hubris drive its policy toward Khartoum, therefore, Israel and its relatively new government have an opportunity to rethink its approach to Sudan. Such an approach, which might be called differential normalization, might also help inform and refashion its outlook toward diplomatic opportunities such as brokering ties with further former adversaries more broadly.

With respect to Sudan, Israel should curb its instincts and proceed cautiously, limiting its relations with the military leadership only to the most vital security and intelligence needs.

Israel must recall that what incentivized the Sudanese military stakeholders – first and foremost, General al-Burhan, the most conspicuous backer of the normalization agreement with Israel within the Sudanese leadership – was the generous financial package that was offered in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel. Now that key elements in the package are in jeopardy, it remains to be seen whether, and for how long, the generals will continue to embrace Israel.

And although al-Burhan continues to enjoy considerable support, including also financial, from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, their money can never entirely supplant the kind of aid that Sudan would need from the World Bank, IMF, and other international institutions.

The very need for Israel to adopt a more cautious and nuanced approach to Sudan applies also to other regional players. The gung-ho enthusiasm Jerusalem conveyed toward the first signatories of the so-called Abraham Accords last year, the UAE and Bahrain, and, at least in the case of the UAE, its reciprocity, set a standard that was difficult and perhaps impossible to reach for others.

Indeed, it is no wonder that, despite the expectations that as many as nine countries might follow the example of the UAE and Bahrain and normalize relations with Israel, only one single country in addition to Sudan did so – namely, Morocco, which took the step in return for winning American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

While the reluctance of others to join, notably Oman and Saudi Arabia, may have also had to do with a wide array of considerations, including the expectation of a change in administrations in Washington, Israel’s ham-fisted approach played a factor.

The way in which Israel bungled the direct face-to-face talks at a meeting between then-prime minister Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Neom last November is a case in point. The Israeli public’s swaggering bombast over the meeting, which was supposed to remain undisclosed, generated considerable backlash from opponents of normalization with Israel from within the Saudi royal household and quashed whatever existed for a diplomatic breakthrough during the final weeks of the Trump administration.

Having instantly established a uniform model for how normalization should look and feel, Israel is losing opportunities to make diplomatic advances with countries that might have been put off by the triumphalist terms and adulatory tones in which Israel’s accords with the UAE and Bahrain were cast. After all, no country is like another, and no relationship can, or indeed should, be like another. What suits the UAE and, with some adjustments, Bahrain, does not and cannot suit Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Djibouti.

Yet Israel’s one-size-fits-all approach did not originate with the Abraham Accords. It has shaped its attitude to allies and rivals alike since at least the 1979 signing of its peace treaty with Egypt. Indeed, it explains why Israel is so resentful of the cold peace with Egypt and impatient with the standoffish attitude of Jordan.

In Israel’s black-and-white diplomatic imagination, peace must translate into a warm and thriving relationship, with trade and tourism at their heart; anything that falls short of that feels like a snub.

It is this same attitude that hampered efforts to reach a peace agreement with Syria, especially during the final days of Hafez al Assad in 2000, when Israel’s demands for a full-blown peace deterred the ailing leader out of concern that his son and apparent successor, Bashar, would be unable to overcome the domestic opposition which the influx of Israeli goods and tourists was expected to generate. Unfortunately, his preference for a “go-slow” approach was taken by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak as a sign that Assad was not serious enough.

Finally, a policy of differential normalization might also help Israel overcome some of its ingrained resistance to making meaningful progress with the Palestinians.

Israel’s seemingly countless demands on the Palestinians at the level of their attitude to Israel – whether that they recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” or abandon their myth of the Right of Return – all bespeak the same intrinsic difficulty to fathom a peace agreement, especially one that required making supposedly painful concessions, that did not reflect amity and reconciliation. It is yet one more reason why Israel has failed to do all that it might have done to reach a final-status agreement with the PLO and, mutatis mutandis, a long-term hudna, or truce, with Hamas.

A policy of differential normalization would not only open up a world of possibilities for Israel that, as yet, remain inconceivable. And it will help Israel make peace with the peace that it has already won.

The Article was published on Haaretz, 5 November 2021

הפוסט First Saudi Arabia, Now Sudan: <br> Why Israel’s Normalization Strategy Is Imploding הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

In the days since, however, the meeting appears to have not only a flop but also a something of a disaster. For not only has the nighttime tête-à-tête between the two leaders failed to advance Saudi-Israeli normalization after Prince Mohammad had reportedly rebuffed Netanyahu’s entreaties to move forward before the Biden administration took office. Worse, the meeting also triggered considerable blowback from those within the Saudi ruling family vehemently opposed to normalizing relations with Israel outside the context of the Arab Peace Initiative.

The latest sign came this past Sunday, when a prominent member of the Saudi royal household, Prince Turki al-Faisal, lashed out at Israel in unusually harsh terms, criticizing it for a litany of crimes since its pre-state days to the present. Yet while the belligerent words by the former Saudi head of intelligence drew most of the attention, Prince Turki also made an impassioned plea to Israelis “to take the extended hand of peace” by accepting the Arab Peace Initiative. It is a plea he has made in the past directly to Israelis.

To those craving for comprehensive peace in the Middle East, these and other similar statements by senior Saudi officials should not be discouraging. On the contrary, they offer hope that Israeli quest for normalization with Saudi Arabia will drive home to Jerusalem the need to negotiate with the Palestinians. At the same time, and no less importantly, they underscore the unique opportunity that has opened up for Riyadh to reintroduce the Arab Peace Initiative and press the parties to resume talks on its basis.

Originally launched in March 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative is one of the most far-reaching Mideast peace proposals ever advanced. The brainchild of Saudi crown prince at the time, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Initiative offered Israel a quid pro quo: Withdraw from Arab territory captured in the 1967 war and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the entire Arab world would normalize relations with you. Unfortunately, the plan never got the chance to get off the ground.

The reasons are multiple, but bad timing played a crucial factor. Initiated at the time of the second intifada – the Palestinian uprising that began shortly after the collapse of the Camp David summit of July 2000 – the plan fell on deaf ears. Under terrorist attacks almost daily, Israel was in no mood to contemplate renewed peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

In fact, as bad luck had it, the Arab League summit that formally launched the initiative convened the morning after Israel had suffered the deadliest attack in its history – the Passover massacre at a seaside hotel, which claimed the lives of 30 civilians and wounded 140. Within days, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military campaign in the West Bank since the 1967 war.

The second intifada, which claimed the lives of about 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis, left Jerusalem wary of the peace process. By the time the violence had waned during 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon deflected international efforts to resume negotiations by initiating Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. There was even talk of a follow-up move in the West Bank.

The new spirit of unilateralism – under which Israel proclaimed it would act to determine its own borders – was short lived, however, as rocket fire to Israel by Gaza militants, combined with the 2006 war in Lebanon (from which Israel had pulled out six years earlier), put into question the wisdom of Israel’s territorial withdrawals.

A U.S.-led push to jumpstart peace negotiations led to convening the Annapolis Conference in November 2007. But Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, initially trod a cautious path. Eventually, Olmert’s positions would evolve, but timing again was inau8spicious, as his term was cut short by criminal indictments for personal corruption.

Meanwhile, the Arab Spring uprisings and the ensuing Syrian civil war meant that the Arab Peace Initiative no longer required, effectively if not explicitly, Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Instead, Arab leaders increasingly focused on the Palestinian front, adding the pragmatic proviso that any settlement agreed upon by the Palestinians, even if one that included land swaps to compensate for less than a full withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, would win their full support.

Yet, for the past 11 years Benjamin Netanyahu has capably rebuffed every effort to advance a two-state solution, including the headstrong push by the Obama administration during 2013-14. But even as he has proved averse to making any concessions to the Palestinians, Netanyahu has not lost sight of the promise encapsulated in the Arab Peace Initiative. On the contrary, he sought to win the prize without paying the requested price.

This is why Netanyahu has cast the diplomatic breakthroughs with the U.A.E., Bahrain, and even Sudan as such a triumph. Bracketing off the fact that the agreement required him to abandon his plans for West Bank annexation, Netanyahu has hailed the agreements as vindication for his long-held claim that Israel would eventually normalize relations with the wider Arab world irrespective of progress on the Palestinian front.

Tactically, Netanyahu has a point. But strategically, Saudi Arabia has something even better: the diplomatic leverage to steer the process in a more desirable direction. And the best way to use this leverage is to take the unprecedented step of inviting the Palestinian and Israeli leaders to Riyadh to launch bilateral negotiations, under Saudi auspices, on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative.

True, the principles of the Initiative are difficult for Israel’s current leadership to accept, but Riyadh’s leverage with Israel means that it can offer an incentive only it can: immediate steps to normalize relations in tandem with real progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track.

To judge by the euphoria with which Israelis have greeted the agreements with the UAE and Bahrain, the prospect of normalized relations with the Saudi Arabia could well untether Israel from its deeply rooted positions on what it can and cannot do in order to reach agreement with the Palestinians.

Saudi Arabia is uniquely poised to advance comprehensive peace in the Middle East. Will it pick up the mantle?

**The article was published on Modern Diplomacy, 8 December 2020

הפוסט Will Saudi Arabia Pick Up the Mantle? הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Certainly, peaceful relations between Sudan and Israel are in the long-term interests of both parties, as indeed of the US and other regional and global stakeholders.

For Israel, those interests are foremost security and geo-strategic ones. Owing to its location in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea region, Sudan has been of considerable concern to Israel from the outset. Over the decades, Israel forged covert ties with a range of Sudanese power players for a variety of purposes – from destabilizing Nasser’s regime in Egypt to training militias for the overthrow of the Khomeini regime in Iran to assisting in the evacuation of Ethiopian (Beta Israel) Jews stranded in Sudanese refugee camps. When, between 1985 and 2015, Khartoum allied itself with Tehran and began serving as a conduit for smuggled Iranian munitions to Palestinian militants, especially in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Israel staged numerous air strikes inside Sudan against suspected weapons convoys and at least one arms factory.

Since Sudan has cut its ties with Tehran in 2016 and, even more promisingly, replaced the regime of longtime strongman Omar al-Bashir with a Western-oriented transitional government in 2018, it has ceased posing a threat to Israel and once again begun offering strategic opportunities. In the context of peace, close cooperation with Sudan could extend Israel’s Red Sea maritime corridor further south and facilitate any number of military and intelligence operations.

And while normalization with Sudan is not expected to have the same dramatic impact for Israel that the recently signed Abraham Accords did, its psychological importance should not be underestimated. The site of the Arab League summit that issued the “three nos” resolution – no peace, no recognition, no negotiation – immediately following the 1967 War, “Khartoum” has been shorthand for Arab rejectionism of Israel for over 50 years. Indeed, far from signifying an obstacle, Sudan would now open a “passage to Africa,” providing Israelis friendly territorial contiguity across the African continent. For the first time ever, Israelis would have the possibility, at least in theory, to drive their car from their home all the way to the Cape of Good Hope. For a nation shaped by the mentality of an island in hostile seas, this is, literally, a breakthrough.

For Sudan, normalization with Israel promises significant material rewards. On the bilateral level, Israeli trade and technology transfer could be of huge value to the country’s agriculture sector, which employs about 80 percent of the work force and contributes around 30 percent to its annual GDP.

Yet the benefits on the multilateral level will be the real prize. The US has already announced its decision to lift Sudan from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, which is widely understood to have been a key condition for Sudan’s agreement to normalize relations with Israel. Additional benefits include a generous package of incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid and investment the US has prepared, together with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

On the face of it, the choice to normalize relations with Israel should be obvious. Yet 18 months after the ousting of the autocratic regime that had ruled Sudan for over thirty years, Sudan is going through a fragile process of democratization. Its current government, a cohabitation arrangement between military and civilian stakeholders, is fractured, and a decision as publicly contentious as recognizing Israel could strengthen the very elements who pose the greatest impediment to a smooth transition to democratic rule – primarily, the military and the Islamists.

The military has been taking the lead in establishing contacts with Israel. It was General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, chairman of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, a military-led body overseeing the civilian-led government, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Entebbe last February. In assuming responsibility for contacts with Israel, the military seeks to cast itself, both domestically and internationally, as the overriding authority for the country’s national security interests, at the expense of the civilian leadership. In so doing, it also wants to take the credit for the financial package that Sudan stands to receive for normalizing relations with Israel.

That one of the chief advocates for normalization has been al-Burhan’s deputy, Mohammad Hamdan Dagalo, underscores another facet that should be of concern to both the US and Israel. Dagalo is head of the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, which shot and and killed over 100 pro-democracy protesters last year. A decade and a half ago, he commanded the notorious Janjaweed (“Devil on Horseback”) militias, the main perpetrators of the genocide in Darfur. If normalization with Israel carries the cost of strengthening players like him, it behooves us to ask whether it is worth the benefits, not least for Sudan, but also for Israel.

On the other end of the Sudanese political divide are Islamist groups, who, too, stand to gain from a decision to recognize Israel. Once a rising political force in Sudan and – under the charismatic leadership Hassan al-Turabi – a key player in Al-Bashir’s government during the 1990s, the Islamists have seen their power decline over the past twenty years. Since the 2018 uprising, they have been waiting on the sidelines as the military and the secular liberals have been jockeying for power. Embracing Israel, a move bound to be widely unpopular given decades of official anti-Israeli hostility, could create an opportunity for the Islamists to mobilize public support, and they have already issued a fatwa against normalization of ties with Israel.

This is what is at stake for Sudan, and why the civilian leadership, led by Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok, appears to have been reluctant to accept the American offer, preferring to postpone a decision on Israel until after the first universal elections in the country, scheduled for 2022.

If the US cares for the long-term prospects of Israeli-Sudanese relations, it should refrain from bullying Khartoum into embracing Jerusalem at the present time and opt instead to encourage a gradual, step-by-step approach. For rather than heralding a thriving relationship between the two sides, the aggressive manner in which the Trump administration is forcing Sudan’s hand risks undermining the country’s delicate process to democratic rule, strengthening its military over the civilian stakeholders, enhancing the appeal of Islamist groups, and, ultimately, dooming any relationship between Israel and Sudan to a precipitous end.

The article was published by Haaretz on 20 October 2020

הפוסט Trump is bullying Sudan into embracing Israel. It won’t end well הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Moreover, framing it, as senior American and Israeli officials have done, as yet another win for Israel within the Arab and Muslim world, is a cynical spin that constitutes nothing less than diplomatic gaslighting.

Since Kosovo has declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008, it has won wide international recognition. Among those who recognized it have been the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Unfortunately, and despite Kosovar efforts to win over Israel and forge diplomatic relations with it, Israel refused to do so. Until now, that is.

Israel’s refusal to recognize Kosovo stemmed from a host of reasons, most of which reflect a deeply-seated anxiety over an imaginary parallelism between Kosovo and Palestine, including:

Fear over the dangerous precedence of unilateral declaration of independence: Jerusalem regarded Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence as a dangerous precedent, one that would undercut its own ongoing case against a similar move by the Palestinians.

Anxiety over internal Arab-Palestinian secession: Jerusalem worried that recognition of Kosovo might help establish a universally applicable precedent for unilateral secession, one that could encourage Israel’s internal Arab-Palestinian minority – especially in the Galilee – to secede. (Of course, on this Israel was not alone. Other countries that have withheld recognition from Kosovo – notably, within the European Union, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania – all share the same anxiety.)

Concern over the validity of an internationally-imposed solution: Since Kosovo’s independence was imposed on Serbia from the outside, Jerusalem was apprehensive lest a perception of success on Kosovo should bolster the resolve of the international community to try and impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Additional reasons include strategic calculations vis-à-vis Russia (Serbia’s age-old patron, which has strongly opposed Kosovo’s independence), and sheer and plain islamophobia. As Aryeh Eldad, the former right-wing member of Knesset, claimed shortly after Kosovo’s declaration in 2008, “The flag of Kosovo is that of Islamic proliferation and a source of serious anxiety to Europe.”

The fact that the Netanyahu government has now decided it was ready to recognize Kosovo is due, first and foremost, to American pressure (a desire by the White House to boast another diplomatic victory, along with the announcement that Serbia would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem). But Israel’s decision to yield to American pressure also reflects the fact that the traditional reasons that have prevented it from recognizing Kosovo until now have lost their force.

After all, the Palestinians’ standing on the global stage is at a new low point in years. Accordingly, they are in no position to declare their independence, and even if they did – as they threatened to do in response to Israeli annexation – their action would probably not win universal support.

At the same time, secessionist sentiments among Israel’s Arab-Palestinian population increasingly appear to have no real bearing on the ground. Indeed, as evidenced by the uproar created by the clause in Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan that would allow for the transfer of areas within the so-called Triangle to the future state of Palestine, Israel’s Arab-Palestinian population are more focused on enjoying full equality within Israel than in seceding from it.

Finally, concern over an internationally-imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has significantly dissipated over the past few years. The world is suffering from acute Middle East fatigue, and no such threat seems imminent under either President Trump (whose plan for solving the century-old conflict has turned out to be vehemently anti-Palestinian) or the Democratic contender, Joe Biden, should he win the November election.

Not only does Israel’s decision to recognize Kosovo come 12 years too late, therefore, it also seems motivated by the wrong reasons. Concern over the perceived parallelism with Palestine betrayed an Israeli anxiety rather than a clear-headed policy – one, moreover, that the Serbs themselves capably fueled by publicly proclaiming that “Kosovo is our Jerusalem.”

This and more, contrary to statements by the U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Israeli U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan, the breakthrough between Israel and Kosovo cannot be couched within the larger effort to bring peace between Israel and the Muslim world.

Doing so is a cynical spin that gaslights the fact it is Israel that has refused to recognize Kosovo all these years, not Kosovo that has refused to recognize Israel.

That Kosovo’s population is a majority-Muslim nation must not turn into yet another conquest for Trump or Netanyahu. Turning it into one, and hailing it “Another great day for peace [in the] Middle East,” as President Trump has done, denigrates its historical and geographical significance and undermines the very spirit that Israel’s agreement to recognize Kosovo should, at long last, usher.

The article was published on Haaretz, 6 September 2020.

הפוסט Trump and Netanyahu’s Barefaced Gaslighting on the Israel-Kosovo Deal הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Alarmist words of the kind we have heard these past few months, however, will not do, unless accompanied by the presentation of a constructive vision for an alternative path. After all, but for Jordanian King Abdullah II’s warnings over the future of the kingdom’s peace treaty with Israel – warnings that appear to have led Netanyahu to go back on earlier pronouncements that the annexation would include the Jordan Valley – the successive admonitions voiced from Cairo to Bahrain have been dismissed as no more than the obligatory Arab lip service to the Palestinian cause.

Fortunately, it is not too late to change course. The direction has already been shown by the UAE Ambassador to the United States and a former Saudi Arabian government official.

Last month, the Emirati ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, mounted something of a mini media blitz aimed directly at the Israeli public. In an opinion piece in Yediot Aharonot and a video posted online, the Emirati official hailed the progress that had been made in forging cooperation between Israel and the Gulf states. Referring specifically to Israel and the UAE, al-Otaiba argued that “expanded business and financial ties could accelerate growth and stability across the Middle East,” and asked his readers to imagine a future in which “the UAE could be an open gateway connecting Israelis to the region and the world.”

A few days later, in an opinion piece published in Ha’aretz, Nawaf Obaid, a former Saudi Arabian government advisor took a step further by recasting the future invoked by the Emirati official in the light of the Arab Peace Initiative. “For two decades now, the most important Arab states have been sending Israelis messages of hope for a better common future,” he wrote. “Astonishingly, even though Israelis claim to be interested in better relations with leading Arab nations, they have failed thus far to respond in kind.”

If Arab leaders are serious about preempting Israeli annexation and steering Jerusalem onto a more constructive path, they should follow up on these two journalistic overtures by announcing their readiness to send a high-level delegation to Jerusalem with the aim of relaunching the Arab Peace Initiative and presenting it directly to the Israeli public.

At the heart of the Arab Peace Initiative, which Arab League members first adopted in 2002 and have repeatedly ratified over the past 18 years, lies a quid pro quo:  in return for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the entire Arab world would normalize relations with it.

To be sure, Israel’s current leadership, on both its rightist and centrist wings, will not sign on to the Arab Peace Initiative next week. But the Arab League delegation will find a surprisingly open ear. After all, although officially rejected as a “non-starter” by hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when first presented in 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative has always held a certain lure for Israeli leaders. Sharon himself is said to have privately expressed an interest in exploring its potential. Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, was increasingly open to the plan, often referring to it in favorable terms, even if, unfortunately, most explicitly so only after stepping down from office.

In fact, even Netanyahu has expressed qualified support for the “general idea” of the Initiative – the “general idea” being, of course, normalizing relations with the entire Arab world, not the attendant compromises to the Palestinians. As his rushed statement last week about an Israeli-Emirati agreement on joint cooperation against Covid-19 reveals – rushed, because of its false suggestion that the agreement reflected a dramatic step toward the establishment of formal relations between the two parties – relations with the Arab world are Netanyahu’s Achilles heel.

The visit of a high-level Arab delegation to Jerusalem – perhaps at the level of Arab League foreign ministers – could be a game-changer. It would not merely scuttle Netanyahu’s annexation plans, but also mobilize forces within the new coalition government, parliament, and the public at large, to pursue an alternative way forward.

It is time for Arab leaders not merely to take a stand. It is late, but not too late for them to act.

The article was published by The Jerusalem Post on 9 July 2020

הפוסט It Is Time for the Arab League to Act Against Annexation הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

הפוסט The Trump Plan: Not the Way to Advance Israeli-Palestinian Peace הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

There are good reasons why the U.S. position on this issue has been slow to evolve. For one thing, the Israeli demand is relatively new; it was first explicitly tied to negotiations by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2007 and later adopted by Benjamin Netanyahu. Its novelty, coupled with the fact that Olmert dropped his insistence once good-faith negotiations with the Palestinians got underway during his last months in office, has made the demand seem, at best, superfluous and, at worst, like an attempt to stonewall progress.

Nevertheless, the United States took a significant step when, in a May 2011 speech, President Obama defined his vision for peace with the words “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people.” The language made clear that, whatever the Obama administration thought were Netanyahu’s motivations, it accepted that Israel’s demand could no longer be ignored.

הפוסט A new understanding for the Middle East הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Published in The Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2014

Yonatan Touval is a foreign policy analyst based in Tel Aviv. He has worked with several Israeli nongovernmental organizations dedicated to advancing final-status agreements between Israel and its neighbors.

As Secretary of State John Kerry hammers out the principles for an Israeli-Palestinian “framework agreement,” many are speculating that he has formally adopted Jerusalem’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The importance of this step — both historically and for the future of U.S. peacemaking efforts in the region — should not be underestimated.

There are good reasons why the U.S. position on this issue has been slow to evolve. For one thing, the Israeli demand is relatively new; it was first explicitly tied to negotiations by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2007 and later adopted by Benjamin Netanyahu. Its novelty, coupled with the fact that Olmert dropped his insistence once good-faith negotiations with the Palestinians got underway during his last months in office, has made the demand seem, at best, superfluous and, at worst, like an attempt to stonewall progress.

Nevertheless, the United States took a significant step when, in a May 2011 speech, President Obama defined his vision for peace with the words “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people.” The language made clear that, whatever the Obama administration thought were Netanyahu’s motivations, it accepted that Israel’s demand could no longer be ignored.

Now the matter of how that demand proceeds becomes all-important. Indeed, depending on its exact framing, the U.S. position could either lead to a major breakthrough or constitute a diplomatic blunder that would reflect profound insensitivity to the symbolic dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and risk burying the prospects for an agreement for some time to come.

Having already accorded Israel formal diplomatic recognition in 1993, the Palestinians have a strong case for objecting to the demand that they now recognize Israel’s national and cultural identity as well. Recognition of another state’s self-identity has no place in standard diplomatic practice. And for the Palestinians to extend such recognition to Israel poses a challenge beyond the usual argument that doing so would constitute a political slap in the face to the 1.6 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. For at its core, Israel’s Jewishness is a constitutive element of the Zionist national narrative — a narrative that, for historical reasons, is and perhaps forever will be incommensurable with that of the Palestinians.

Israel didn’t become Jewish by magic. It did so through a long-fought battle, waged on the diplomatic world stage as well as on the ground. Among the consequences of that battle: Some 600,000 Palestinians either fled or were expelled from the newly created state of Israel in 1948 and became refugees. In other words, Israel’s Jewish identity is inextricable from what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or the “catastrophe.”

Yet if it is wrong that, as Netanyahu has recently said, Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewishness should be the “minimal requirement for peace,” such recognition would still mark a profoundly symbolic act of reconciliation. For such reconciliation to take place, however, Israel would have to be ready to reciprocate with an equally conciliatory gesture. And there is no more fitting gesture than Israeli recognition of Palestinian suffering.

Such a recognition need not be difficult to fathom. Numerous formulations — official and unofficial — have been proposed over the years. At the Taba talks of January 2001, the Israeli team drafted a document whose operative phrase — “The State of Israel solemnly expresses its sorrow for the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees, their suffering and losses” — was considered extremely far-reaching. Since then, Israeli society has grown more at ease with competing narratives to the traditional Zionist one. A poll conducted last month, for instance, found that two-thirds of Israeli Jews would like their children to learn the “Palestinian narrative” about the conflict.

The exact language of the Israeli recognition would have to be negotiated, of course. The Palestinians may well seek to obtain an explicit apology for the consequences of Israel’s establishment, something Israel would be reluctant to offer. But Israel could acknowledge Palestinian suffering without undermining its own national narrative or — as it should be rightly wary — potentially exposing itself to legal charges in international tribunals.

The United States should encourage Israel to move in this direction by tabling its own proposal for such an acknowledgment — one that might empower the Palestinians enough to reciprocate with the recognition Israel so avowedly seeks.

הפוסט A new understanding for the Middle East הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Of course, it did not seem that way at first. After all, when Brussels issued last July new guidelines specifying that Israeli entities located beyond the Green Line would no longer be eligible to apply for EU funding under the European research program, Jerusalem reacted as if the nation’s very security was at stake.

Assuming the gravity of a leader whose country was under frontal assault, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “We shall not accept any external dictates on our borders.”

Some of his fellow cabinet ministers were far less restrained. An act of “economic terrorism,” was how the country’s economy minister termed the guidelines, while another declared that the guidelines were “reminiscent of boycotts against Jews from over 66 years ago.”

Yet if the reigning perception in Jerusalem was that the EU wished to punish Israel for its settlement policy, the political reality in Brussels suggests a radically different story.

First, and as with almost anything having to do with EU policy, the primary motivations were legal and technical in nature. In this case, given that agreements between the EU and Israel have traditionally failed to specify what constitutes the “territory of the State of Israel, the guidelines sought to fill in a lacuna that has bedeviled European policymakers for years.

The issue had taken on legal significance following a European Court of Justice ruling in February 2010 that products originating in the West Bank did not fall within the territorial scope of the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel. Since the ruling placed a legal imprimatur on the Union’s definition of the territory of the State of Israel, the new guidelines sought to ensure that European institutions were not found in contempt of court.

Certainly, the new guidelines aimed at more than just assuaging the legalistic anxieties of Brussels’ Eurocrats. But the irony is that, despite Israeli suspicions, the guidelines did not seek to toughen EU policy toward Israel its settlement policy in the West Bank as much as to uphold the viability and legitimacy of the Union’s existing agreements with Israel.

In order to recognize this point, it is necessary to appreciate the political context for the European move and the economic significance of the guidelines.

The political context is the rising power of the European Parliament relative to the EU institutions in the post-Lisbon Treaty era and the growing influence within Parliament of interest groups calling for boycotting Israel.

Given that the calls to boycott Israel draws justification from Israel’s occupation, the EU move to differentiate between the State of Israel and the occupied territories is tantamount to drawing a cordon sanitaire around Israel.

It is an act designed to uphold and defend the very health of the relationship between the EU and Israel.

As for the economic significance of the guidelines, it is virtually nil. While precise data on the volume of Israeli research financed by the EU in the occupied territories since Israel first joined the Union’s research programs in the mid 1990s is hard to come by, according to the European Commission the total number of EU-funded Israeli projects beyond the Green Line since 2001 may be no more than five.

Moreover, these five projects were all conducted by a single entity – the Ahava cosmetics company – which was awarded about 1.5 million euro, a figure that represents less than one tenth of one percent of all EU research grants awarded to Israeli entities over this same period.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the beneficiary of the European research funding goes by the name of Ahava, which is Hebrew for “love.” For despite the perception in Israel, the guidelines ultimately underscore the degree to which Brussels remains deeply committed to its relationship with the Jewish state – a relationship that it struggles to protect from the collateral damage that Israel’s settlement policy increasingly creates.

(originally published in the Jerusalem Post)

הפוסט The EU and Israel: Much ado about love הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

This assessment is not invoked lightly, let alone accusingly. Since Israel first obtained nuclear military capabilities in the late 1960s, it has proven itself to be an extremely responsible nuclear power. In fact, given the level of threat the country has faced — including the perceived threat to its very existence during the 1973 Yom Kippur War — Israel might well be deemed the most responsible nuclear power in the world.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy

הפוסט Jerusalem’s Itchy Trigger Finger הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

In fact, the problem with Chamberlain’s policy toward Hitler was less the policy and far more Hitler. To argue otherwise may prove to be politically self-serving but is, and always has been, morally and logically specious: Morally because to place so much of the blame on Chamberlain is always to a certain extent to exonerate Hitler; and logically because the 1938 Munich debacle was never so much a case study of appeasement as of its failure.

For Munich notwithstanding, appeasement can be a highly useful diplomatic tool – one that the players of power politics can wield to great strategic advantage. In fact, we all paid tribute to one of its greatest successes last week when we honored president Kennedy.

Although rarely recognized as such, Kennedy’s legacy is the appeasement he prudently employed in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Recognizing the risk that Khrushchev might well opt for a nuclear war rather than bow down to an American dictate, Kennedy secretly offered him a face-saving deal: In return for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the United States would remove its missiles stationed in Turkey.

It was a bold and pragmatic gesture, at the core of which lay a measured, strategic concession. Had the terms of the deal been made public at the time, Kennedy no doubt would have been finished off politically.

In the event, they saved the planet from nuclear catastrophe.

Unfortunately, not only has Binyamin Netanyahu been excoriating the emerging deal as appeasement, but he has been recklessly touting in its stead a politics of humiliation. As he put it in a speech before the Jewish Federations of North America the other week (and in a much-cited tweet the following day), the international sanctions regime “has brought Iran to its knees” – which is why, he went on to argue, Western powers should be able to extract from Iran a better deal than they just cut in Geneva.

This is a tragic mistake – and one that the Israeli leader should have learned not only from European history but also from Israel’s own. Simply put, Israel has never bought itself peace or security by humiliating its adversaries; the opposite is closer to the truth. The Arabs’ humiliation in the 1967 war should have rested that case forever. After all, it was only after Egypt and Syria could claim to have regained their honor in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that they were ready to offer Israel real stability – whether in the form of a formal peace treaty (as with Egypt) or in four decades of a peaceful border (as, until recently, in Syria).

For this reason, Netanyahu’s demand that Iran completely dismantle its nuclear program is wrongheaded whichever way we look at it. First, because the Iranians will never acquiesce to it; and second, because even if they did, the deal would amount to such a shameful national surrender that it could boomerang in various ways. A humiliating deal would exacerbate Iranian grievances against the West and embolden hardliners to oust President Rouhani and his relatively pragmatic coalition from power. A humiliating deal is one that Iran would more likely violate or possibly even abrogate. It is a deal that would set the stage for Iran to seek to reclaim its lost honor and pave the way for the very war that the deal was designed to preempt.

Only a measure of appeasement will give Iran a way out – and the world at large the prospects of a diplomatic triumph. Branding the deal as appeasement, therefore, is not only to fail to condemn it, but it is to hail it for the bold pragmatism that is necessary for diplomacy to win the day.

(originally published in the Jerusalem Post)

הפוסט In praise of appeasement הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

הפוסט Time to Impose a Plan הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

It is a needless diplomatic error because, contrary to what Jerusalem thinks, such recognition will not undermine its own strategic interests. In fact, it might even advance them. The source of the error lies in a misplaced anxiety that, since Kosovo is often compared to Palestine, the diplomatic standing of the former might have dangerous implications for Jerusalem on the latter. The most anxiety-inducing implications concern the following:

A Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence: The Palestinians have threatened to declare their independence, and in the past year have sought to obtain international recognition for their statehood. Jerusalem fears that the case of Kosovo makes for a dangerous precedent, and that its own recognition of the Balkan republic would undercut its case against Palestinian independence.

Internal Palestinian secession: Jerusalem worries that recognition of Kosovo might help establish a universally applicable precedent for unilateral secession, one that could encourage Israel’s internal Palestinian minority in, say, the Galilee, to secede. (On this, Jerusalem is not alone: Other countries that have withheld recognition from Kosovo – notably within the European Union: Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania – all share the same anxiety. )

The validity of an internationally imposed solution: Since Kosovo’s independence was imposed on Serbia from the outside, Jerusalem is apprehensive lest a perception of success on Kosovo bolster the resolve of the international community to try and impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this context, Israel’s recognition of Kosovo might undermine its long-held resistance to such a diplomatic initiative.

Jerusalem’s non-recognition of Kosovo, in other words, has not been a function of a simple diplomatic lapse. It reflects instead a deliberate decision, one fueled by deep anxieties of various kinds. As it happens, these anxieties are entirely misplaced.

Even Albania, whose commitment to Kosovo is rooted in a shared ethnic identity (Kosovo’s population is overwhelmingly ethnically Albanian ) and which lobbies on its behalf on the world stage, has had no qualms about coming out against the Palestinian bid. The Albanian prime minister publicly announced as much on a visit to Israel this past November. The irrelevance of the Kosovo case for the Palestinian UN bid has gone in the opposite direction as well. Some of the very powers that supported Palestine’s statehood bid remain adamantly opposed to Kosovo’s independence, not least Russia and China, the main opponents of Kosovo’s admission to the United Nations in the Security Council.

For the case of Kosovo is ultimately a moral and historical one, and Jerusalem’s failure on this score, therefore, is all the more regrettable. Arising out of one of the worst genocidal atrocities on the European continent since World War II, Kosovo’s demand for self-determination is one that Israel cannot afford to ignore. If anything, a country that never fails to invoke the Holocaust to justify its existence should have been at the forefront of the international campaign to recognize Kosovo’s independence. To mark Kosovo’s fourth anniversary, Israel has an opportunity to right a wrong and to recognize Kosovo. It is an act that Israel owes not only to Kosovo; it owes it also to the Jewish people.

(originally published in Haaretz)

הפוסט Time to Recognize Kosovo הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.