Time for America to crack the whip

What has been most surprising, and pleasing, about the just-held Israeli parliamentary elections was the success of the large Palestinian community in Israel, which numbers about 20 per cent of Israeli population, in launching a significant parliamentary bloc in the Knesset.

This bloc, officially known as the Joint Arab List, emerged as a result of a new Israeli rule raising the minimum threshold for entry into the Knesset to 3.5 per cent of the votes cast. Even though the voter turnout among Palestinians of the 1948 areas was reportedly lower than the Jewish Israeli turnout, it was still higher than usual, grabbing 14 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Exit polls had placed the Arab-Israeli Joint List, a bloc of a few smaller Arab factions, in third place, and made the party, according to Jewish Telegraphic Agency news service, “one of the election’s biggest winners”.

Though the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a shocking surprise; his performance last week on the eve of the national election was disgusting by any measure.

He then announced in a media interview that, if elected, he would oppose the creation of a Palestinian Arab state (in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip), underlining that Tel Aviv is already facing international calls for “the return of Israel to the 1967 borders”.

Netanyahu declared: “I think anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel,” obviously a reference to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that dominates Gaza, which Israel attacked last year for 50 days.

This public admission regarding Palestinian statehood was in direct opposition to a statement the Israeli prime minister made in 2009 at Bar-Ilan University in Israel that he supported a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Saeb Erekat, the lead Palestinian negotiator with Israel and executive member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, responded that this was not something new to the Palestinians, since “Netanyahu has done everything possible to bury the two-state solution”.

He added, “Netanyahu dared to utter his words whilst counting on full impunity from the international community. The time has come for the world to learn and understand that impunity will not bring peace, only justice will,” a probable reference to the failure of the Obama administration to crack the whip since Secretary of State John Kerry spent eight months fruitlessly handling the peace negotiations last year.

Consequently, Ayman Odeh, the Arab-Israeli Joint List’s charismatic leader, had committed himself to working on improving the lives of Palestinians of the 1948 areas, but has vowed not to join a coalition led by either Netanyahu’s Likud Party or the Zionist Union, led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

Netanyahu’s statement prompted the influential New York Times to run a very critical editorial last Wednesday, under the headline “An Israeli Election Turns Ugly”.

Its lead editorial said in the opening paragraph that Netanyahu’s “outright rejection of a Palestinian state and his racist rant against Israeli Arab [Palestinians of the 1948 areas] voters on Tuesday showed that he has forfeited any claim to representing all Israelis”.

It went on: “His behaviour in the past six years — aggressively building Israeli homes on land that likely would be within the bounds of a Palestinian state and never engaging seriously in negotiations — has long convinced many people that he has no interest in a peace agreement. But his statement this week laid bare his duplicity, confirmed Palestinian suspicions and will make it even harder for him to repair his poisoned relations with President Obama, who has invested heavily in pushing a two-state solution.”

Another columnist at the Times, Roger Cohen, observed: “A Netanyahu-led right-wing government will face growing international isolation, especially because of the prime minister’s open commitment to stop the emergence of a Palestine state. Repairing relations with President Obama would be arduous. A hardening of America’s position towards Israel at the United Nations cannot be ruled out, if West Bank ... [colonies] continue to expand ... A government of the right would more likely exacerbate than overcome that estrangement over the next couple of years.”

It is definitely time for the Obama administration, which seems close to an agreement with Iran over its nuclear stance, to crack the whip on Israel.

George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com