Letters From a Young Contrarian

by Ben Birnbaum, The New Republic, March 19, 2013

It was on the 16th of September, 2008, in my study at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. We were sitting there after having lunch with our staff, our assistants. I think Yanki [Olmert’s assistant] was in that lunch as well. And afterwards, we went to my study, just Abu Mazen and myself. And we went on talking for two hours. I pulled out the map, I showed him the map. I showed him how I am prepared to make the swaps (in areas which surprised him. For instance, part of it was in the north, not far from Tirat Zvi, just across from the border. Part of it was not far from Jenin. So in areas which were good areas, not just a desert part somewhere down the line near Kerem Shalom all of it. No, it was spread across the border lines evenly, more or less—partly near Jerusalem and partly near Lachish and partly in the Judean Desert and partly near Gaza. So he saw all of it). 

Without E1. E1 was supposed to remain in the State of Israel. And Ariel was supposed to stay in the State of Israel. Look, what I proposed to him was 6.3 percent of the territory that we will then keep inside Israel, and I proposed to him 5.8-percent swap, plus the free-passage [corridor between the West Bank and Gaza]. Now, how do you measure the free passage? Only as a half-percent? Maybe you can measure it by more. But I left a certain margin so that in the event that he will come to me and he will say, ‘No, I want it 5.8,’ so the swap will be 5.8 against 5.8 and the free passage will be measured less than a half-percent. So I left it for the fine-tuning process, for the last fine-tuning process. But this was more or less). He looked at it and he said, ‘This is quite serious. I have to admit this is very serious.’ He was rather surprised himself that after all these days and talks and meetings and meetings and meetings and meetings, I finally put down on the table something which was for me, it was a heartbreaking process, to offer to him that Jerusalem will be split. 

…I said to him, “Sign! Sign it! President, sign it now.” He said, ”well, you know, I have to think about it.” I said, “Don’t think about it. Sign it now. I want to tell you one thing: In the next fifty years, there will be no prime minister in Israel who will propose to you something similar to this.” If you are not going to sign it now, you are going to lose an historical opportunity and you will live to regret it. Sign it. Let’s take a decision. He said, ‘well, you know, I am not an expert in maps, so I must ask an expert on maps to look at it. So I said, ‘OK, it doesn’t have to take a long time. You know, why not tomorrow morning, my expert and your expert—together with Saeb Erekat and Shalom Turjemann [Olmert’s top aide]—they will be sitting together, and together with Saeb and the other side’s map expert and our map expert, they will go through the specific points that you may want to ask [about] and [have] explain[ed] to you, and all of this. So he said, ‘fine.’ So we called to the room Saeb Erekat and Shalom Turjemann. And we said, ‘tomorrow morning, you have to sit with the map experts and conclude this argument. It may take you a few hours, take your time, and as long as it takes, but I want you to conclude it tomorrow because I want to sign it this week.’

by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, March 18, 2013

Though he acknowledges the role Netanyahu plays in maintaining Jordanian stability, he is not optimistic about Israel’s future. King Abdullah is known as an advocate of two states for two peoples—Israel secure in its pre-1967 borders, Palestine to be established in Gaza and the West Bank—but when I asked him in January how much time he thought was left to implement this idea, his answer surprised me. “It could be too late already for the two-state solution,” he said. “I don’t know. Part of me is worried that is already past us.”

If it were too late, what would that mean?

He responded with a single word: “Isratine.” That’s a neologism popularized by the late Muammar Qaddafi to describe his vision of a joint Arab-Jewish state. If Israel doesn’t agree to a Palestinian state quickly, Abdullah said, “apartheid or democracy” will be its choice. “The practical question is, can Israel exert permanent control over Palestinians who are disenfranchised ad infinitum, or does it eventually become a South Africa, which couldn’t survive as a pariah state?”

There are some Israelis, I said, who value Israel more as a Jewish state than as a democratic state. “The only way you’re going to have a Jewish part is if you have a two-state solution. That’s the Jewish part,” he said.

I asked him whether he believed President Obama wants to work on Middle East peace. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he said. He added that John Kerry clearly does. “We have a second-term president,” Abdullah said, suggesting that only a president in his second term has the maneuverability, and the experience, to oversee an effective peace process. “This is the last moment. Can it be achieved in four years? Are we too late? After four years, it’s over.”

by Aluf Benn, Ha’aretz, March 18, 2013

The left’s claims are worn out and barely heard by the public − or they achieve the opposite of their goal. “The demographic threat” isn’t convincing − that Israel will become an Arab country with a Jewish minority once the Palestinians reach a majority between the river and the sea and demand equal voting rights. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are closed up behind walls and separation fences and don’t exist in the Israeli consciousness. There is zero chance that Hamas will ask to leave Gaza and run in the Knesset elections to change Israel’s character. Waving the demographic problem as if the increase in the number of Arabs endangered Israel only strengthens the nationalism and racism here.

The next claim − “an agreement is within reach” − doesn’t sound believable after the Palestinians rejected the peace proposals of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak. It’s hard to convince the people that the Israeli proposals weren’t generous enough. It’s even harder to convince them that the territories to be evacuated in the West Bank won’t be used as bases for launching rockets at Tel Aviv, as Gaza has been used. Even those who oppose the settlements don’t want to live under the shadow of warning sirens and explosions.

The final claim is that “the occupation corrupts and is seeping inside the Green Line.” This is true, but it only strengthens those who benefit from disproportionate rights − and want to bolster them under the guise of the slogan “sharing the burden.” If we’re the masters and the others are the servants, what’s the problem?

If the left wants to turn things around, it has to refresh its message and find a leader who will connect it to the mainstream − as the settlers found Naftali Bennett and the Rothschild Boulevard protesters raised Yair Lapid to great heights. That’s how it works in a democracy − not by false expectations for an American knight on a white horse who outflanks public opinion. And if Obama wants to strengthen his faithful in Israel, that’s what he has to tell them in his Jerusalem speech.

by Ben Birnbaum, The New Republic, March 11, 2013

When it came to the right of return, according to Olmert, Abbas said, “I can tell you one thing: We are not aspiring to change the nature of your country.” Olmert proposed a “symbolic” number of refugees: 5,000 allowed into Israel over the course of five years, while offering compensation and resettlement for the rest. (“I would’ve compromised a little,” he told me.) According to highly knowledgeable sources, Abbas signaled to Rice that he might accept something between 40,000 and 60,000.“Our reading was that there was a deal to be done on [the refugee issue],” Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, told me. Although differences remained on all the key issues, the gaps seemed surmountable.

But Abbas didn’t sign. His refusal to do so has become twinned in the Israeli public imagination with Arafat’s outright rejection of Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David. But according to senior Israeli, Palestinian, and American officials involved, the reason was more complex. Abbas feared that Olmert, who had announced that he planned to resign in order to fight corruption allegations, wouldn’t be able to deliver on his promises. Aides to then–Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who had been nominated to replace Olmert as head of the Kadima Party before the upcoming elections, had sent messages telling Abbas not to sign. “The message was, ‘Wait for me,’” Abrams recalled. “Now, I think it was a historic mistake for him not to have signed, but it’s not crazy for him not to have signed.”

According to Hadley, President Bush met Livni on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in 2008. At that point, Hadley said, Bush had concluded that an agreement between Olmert and Abbas was impossible, and he urged Livni to strike a deal with Abbas and run on it in the campaign: “The argument [was] the same for both sides: It’s, ‘Tzipi, you’ll never get to the right of Netanyahu, so you might as well run to his left with something to run on.’ And to Abbas, it’s: ‘Look, Hamas is gonna to kill you. You can’t be tougher on this process than Hamas, so you ought to do what actually the Palestinian people want you to do, which is to reach an agreement, and you each ought to run on that agreement, and if you do and show leadership and boldness, you’ll win.’” (Livni, however, was reluctant to make commitments on sensitive issues like Jerusalem before the election.)

When President Obama’s itinerary for his upcoming Israel trip was leaked to the press, it appeared to be noticeably safe. It is true that Obama will make a number of important gestures during the visit, chief among them laying wreathes in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, as well as on the graves of Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin. But over the course of his 48-hour stay, Obama will remain mostly in Jerusalem, leaving only to have coffee with Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah and to visit an Iron Dome battery. He is ignoring Tel Aviv completely. The Tuesday afternoon of his trip will be spent touring the Israel Museum, an action that is just so very predictable.

Given that this trip will be subject to immense scrutiny and meticulous talmudic dissection by media and politicos alike, Obama’s caution is understandable. He has to apportion a good deal of his time to meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu, considering the animus that has existed between the two, and the critical importance of the bilateral relationship. His people also must have had to consider his opposition back home. Short of scaling Masada under the midday sun, there probably isn’t a lot Obama can do to convince the Emergency Committee for Israel wing of American conservatism that he isn’t secretly an ally of Khaled Mashal.

Yet his people’s unimaginativeness is most disappointing, considering the work Obama has to do while he’s in Israel. His principal duty ought to be to reinvigorate the peace process toward a two-state solution, about which nothing has been done since the conclusion of the settlement freeze, in September 2010. Obama must also do more, it follows, to support those in Israel who seek peace — not exclusively the peace camp and its institutions, like Peace Now, which are on the wane, but all Israelis sympathetic to the idea that this conflict must come to a resolution.

With this in mind, the location of his planned speech, set to occur at either the Israel Museum or Jerusalem’s International Convention Center, is wholly inadequate in its tepidness. If Obama is to shatter the present impasse and break through to the Israeli public, all the while demonstrating his and America’s unequivocal commitment to that nation and to peace, he must go to Rabin Square.

Read on: http://forward.com/articles/172413/why-barack-obama-must-go-to-rabin-square/#ixzz2MrIw9Qj0

What else was she supposed to do? During the election campaign, Tzipi Livni spoke repeatedly about the need for the three main parties of the centre-left — Labor, Yesh Atid, and Hatnua — to get it together and form an opposition bloc that would do all it could to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu’s third term. Alas, not twenty-four hours after the polling stations closed, there was Yair Lapid declaring to the world and his sister that he wouldn’t form an “obstructionist bloc with Haneen Zoabi.” So much for solidarity, then.

Without the largest party, the left opposition was dead, and so in effect was Livni’s time on the other side of the aisle. As a centrist party of only six seats that underachieved on election day comparative to where the polls projected she might go, Hatnua out of government would have been wholly ineffectual. Livni could not model her party on Meretz, who also have six seats but whose raison d’être is a social democratic, ecologist, and egalitarian platform that is anathema to Likudniks. Zahava Gal-On’s principal mandate, therefore, is to oppose Netanyahu. This is not the case for Livni’s centrist movement — opposition would have been death to her party, and her political career (once more).

Thus it is to her credit that, even though she possessed few cards with which to deal, she returned from meetings with Netanyahu with much to show. Tzipi Livni will be the Justice Minister in the next government — responsible for the appointment of judges and drafting legislative texts — while one of either her number two, Amram Mitzna, or Amir Peretz will take up another ministerial post, most likely Minister for Environmental Protection. The deputy who does not receive said post will be chair of the Knesset House Committee which manages the day-to-day affairs of the chamber – Peretz and Mitzna have reportedly already fallen out over this.

More importantly, Livni will lead the Israeli government’s negotiating team responsible for peace talks with the Palestinians. She will be able to appoint the members of that team, save for Netanyahu’s point-man, Isaac Molho, and will be subordinate only to the Prime Minister. This in itself is more than just a detail, since such an arrangement ought to minimise (but certainly not eradicate) friction between her and the Foreign Ministry which will likely be kept in under Likud Beiteinu control. Livni will also be a member of a special council of ministers set up by Netanyahu to oversee the diplomatic issue, containing Livni as well as the future Foreign and Defence Ministers.

Read more: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/tzipi-livni-did-the-right-thing/

Evidently, Yachimovich has come to the dispiriting conclusion that Israelis, even in the historic peace camp, will hear no more of negotiations until enough water has flowed by and the long nights of chaos and terror have ceased. In order to restore Labor as the largest party of the centre and left, Yachimovich has abandoned talk of two states, ceding this ground to two other Zionist parties: Meretz, the party of social democracy and human rights; and Hatnua, the centrist movement led by Tzipi Livni.

As successful a gambit as this might turn out to be – the final polls projected that Labor might double its present allocation of seats – fundamentally it is an irresponsible and cowardly ploy. It is a form of deceit to suggest the one can be had without the other, that social justice is separable from political justice, that the Palestinians and the occupation can be ignored while life is made a little easier for those on the right side of the Green Line. How is it possible to organise decent housing policy when so much is spent and wasted subsiding apartments in settlements that will one day have to be dismantled? How can Israelis Arabs be better included in political and cultural life when millions of their fellow Arabs in the West Bank remain stateless and under military supervision? What use, as Amos Oz put it, is forcing ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the army when the state that is here in five or ten years’ time might not even be a Jewish one?

Read more: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/shelly-yachimovich-is-concluding-labors-historic-role/