Occupied Jerusalem
For years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a conservative, has played a double act, competing domestically with his right-wing rivals in backing the colony project all over the occupied West Bank while professing support for a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
Now, with the stinging UN Security Council resolution on Friday condemning Israeli colony construction as lacking any legal validity, Israeli politicians and analysts on the right, the left and in the political centre say Netanyahu’s game may soon be up.
The Israeli right, feeling empowered by the advent of the Trump administration, which is expected to be more sympathetic to Israeli’s current policies, is pushing Netanyahu to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, long considered the only viable solution to the conflict.
Naftali Bennett, the leader of the pro-colony Jewish Home party in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, with whom Netanyahu and his Likud Party compete for votes, is goading him to take on more extreme positions like annexing parts of the West Bank, adding to a sense in Israel that the real Netanyahu may have to stand up and decide which side he is on.
“He has to choose between the international community and Bennett,” said Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It is not an easy choice, but he has to make a choice,” Avineri said, adding, “Is Israel going to alienate itself from the whole world for the sake of colonist activity? And it is the whole world.”
For a second consecutive day on Sunday, Netanyahu denounced the departing Obama administration, publicly accusing it of having orchestrated Friday’s Security Council resolution, despite denials from Washington. The United States refrained from using its veto power, as it had done many times before to shield Israel, and abstained in the 14-0 vote.
“From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.
Referring to the US secretary of state, Netanyahu added, “As I told John Kerry on Thursday, friends don’t take friends to the Security Council,” and he said he was looking forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration when it takes office next month.
The Foreign Ministry summoned ambassadors of countries that had voted in favour of the resolution for personal meetings with ministry officials in Jerusalem, despite the Christmas holiday, which some of those countries celebrate.
In a highly unusual move, Netanyahu, who is also the foreign minister, summoned the US ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro, for a meeting on Sunday night.
Netanyahu also instructed his ministers to reduce their diplomatic activities and contacts with counterparts from the countries that had voted for the resolution for the next three weeks, until the US administration changes, and to minimise travel to those countries, according to Israeli news reports.
In an additional step, the defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, instructed Israel’s agencies to suspend contact with Palestinian Authority representatives on some unspecified civil matters, though the measure was not supposed to affect security coordination or meetings about water, agriculture and the economy.
With the Israeli occupation in its 50th year and the peace process frozen, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestine Liberation Organisation official and the Palestinians’ veteran negotiator, called on Israel “to seize the opportunity, to wake up, to stop the violence, to stop settlements [colonies], and to resume negotiations.”
