The Israeli national election on Tuesday is primarily focused on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud and his flip-flopping policies will retain full endorsement from a majority of Israelis. His strongest rival is Isaac Herzog who, along with Tzipi Livni, co-founded the Zionist Union. They are both described as a “blue-blood team”. The Zionist Union endorses a two-state solution for both Palestinians and Israelis.
The headline of an article Allison Kaplan Sommer wrote last week in Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily, read: ‘Bibi [Netanyahu] fatigue: Israelis are sick of Netanyahu, but can’t agree on his replacement.’ The strapline read: ‘The tide may be turning against Netanyahu, but it is turning in many directions and the Israeli public just can’t agree on a suitable alternative.’
Sommer’s punch line was that the Israelis want change but “whether it’s going to change for better — that bet is far less certain”.
Netanyahu received countless ovations in his address to the US Congress on March 3, primarily because the Republican Congressmen were eager to challenge President Barack Obama, who had decried the Israeli premier’s inappropriate visit three weeks before the Israeli national elections. But his anti-Iranian stance hardly earned Netanyahu additional support among Israeli voters. A popular view in Israel is that “if Netanyahu wins re-election on March 17, the [Palestinian-Israeli] peace process loses”, since the Israeli prime minister had paid “almost zero attention” to making peace with the Palestinians. “Recently,” Barak Ravid wrote last Monday in Haaretz, “most of the senior figures in Likud have taken to the airwaves to deny that Netanyahu had ever made [any] concessions — particularly the one about agreeing to conduct negotiations [with the Palestinians] based on the 1967 borders” after the Six-Day War when Israel controlled 78 per cent of Palestine.
Under the United Nations Partition Plan, Israel was awarded 55 per cent of Palestine and now militarily controls the whole country except for the Gaza Strip, which is an area of 360 square kilometres. More significantly, Netanyahu has never spelled out the final borders of Israel within Palestine, unlike the Palestinians who had agreed to retain only 22 per cent of the former British mandate.
What has been eye-catching nowadays is the large Arab community in Israel, which hopes to gain “much-needed muscle”, as described by Reuters, after next week’s parliamentary election, with four parties uniting under one banner for the first time. Surveys show the Joint Arab List could even finish third in the vote and become a factor in the coalition building that dominates Israeli politics, where no party has ever won a majority in the Knesset (parliament).
Ayman Odeh, head of the Arab Joint List, has reportedly hinted that the faction may back Herzog, whose centre-Left Zionist Union is running neck-in-neck with Netanyahu’s Right-wing Likud.
The question that still hovers around the White House nowadays is about the future of the relationship between the White House and Israel in the remaining days of the Obama administration, which will end in early 2017. What has been mind-boggling, especially in the wake of the ongoing negotiations between the P5+1 (US, Britain, France, Russia, China + Germany) — led by the US and Iran — is that Israel’s nuclear ambitions have never been disclosed publicly.
But Walter Pincus, a prominent columnist for the Washington Post, began his column last Tuesday (republished in Gulf News on Wednesday), saying: “Iran may be following the path of another country [Israel] as it seeks clandestinely to develop a capability to produce nuclear weapons.” He went on: “Was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remembering his own country’s success in hiding its nuclear weapons programme in the 1960s from US inspectors when he questioned whether inspections will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?”
Referring to a metaphor, Pincus added: “The elephant in the House chamber was that Israel blazed a trail decades ago. Its own clandestine building of nuclear weapons facilities in the Negev desert began 60 years ago and the country now has about 200 nuclear bombs and missile warheads.” Pincus’s long column ended with revelations about a 1969 meeting between president Richard Nixon and Israeli prime minister Golda Meir who “agreed that Israel would not test atomic weapons, disclose possession of them or threaten any country with them”.
In turn, Nixon would stop pressuring Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that US visits to Dimona, where the Israeli nuclear arsenal in the Negev Desert is kept, would end, and “Washington would tolerate but not acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons programme”.
He also revealed that “Israel’s own nuclear stockpile blocks serious consideration of President Obama’s proposal for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty or a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone agreement”.
He concluded that “both proposals have Iran’s verbal support and would present another route towards limiting Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon”.
It is now Netanyahu’s turn to step forward.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
