"How the mighty have fallen." Ehud Olmert to Prison

This week former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison for taking bribes from property developers in the Holyland Development scandal when he was mayor of Jerusalem before becoming prime minister. He will be the first former prime minister in Israeli history to go to prison. Olmert served for ten years as Jerusalem's mayor, from 1993 to 2003, before becoming a minister in Ariel Sharon's second government. When Sharon broke away from the Likud in late 2005 to form Kadima Olmert went with him as his number two. Sharon then suffered a massive stroke two months later in early January 2006, which put him into a coma from which he never recovered, and Olmert became head of Kadima and then prime minister following elections in March 2006. Olmert only served as Kadima leader for 2.5 years until late 2008 when he was forced to give way to Tzipi Livni, his foreign minister, because he was under indictment for corruption. Tzipi Livni failed to form a new government and elections were called for early 2009. These resulted in Kadima winning one more seat than the Likud but going into opposition because of its inability to form a coalition government. Olmert then retired from politics.

Olmert began politics as an ambitious young political activist in the Herut Party. When Shmuel Tamir challenged Begin's leadership of the party and was suspended he split off to form the Free Center party in early 1967. Olmert went with him and at age 28 was elected to the Knesset on December 31, 1973 at age 28--the youngest ever MK. He began his career as an anti-corruption campaigner. But as mayor of Jerusalem, following the 28-year tenure of internationally-renowned Mayor Teddy Kollek of Rafi/Labor, he developed a reputation as one of the more corrupt figures in Israeli politics eating in fancy restaurants, smoking expensive cigars, and wearing tailor-made suits.

Kerry Should Give Up

The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government used the Palestinian unity pact as an excuse to pull out of negotiations with the Palestinians was very predictable. In fact, Netanyahu said many times in the past that he would do so. Why is this? Palestinian unity is what Bibi fears. As long as Hamas is outside of peace talks with Israel and is reasonably strong, it will have an inhibiting factor on Palestinian negotiating positions. This will serve as a wonderful excuse for Netanyahu not to make peace--a peace that would break up his ruling coalition. In 1999 Netanyahu lost power when a limited surrender of West Bank land to the Palestinians mediated at Wye River Plantation in October 1998 by Clinton led to a collapse of his rightist coalition. When running for reelection in 2013 Netanyahu claimed that he had learned his lesson. The lesson was not, as some in Israel thought at the time, do not form a coalition with parties of the right. Rather, it was not to agree to give up territory to the Palestinians. 

Kerry, Obama, and the Middle East Peace Process

This week commentators in Israel, the Arab world, and the United States have been writing the obituaries for Secretary of State John Kerry's attempt to negotiate some sort of peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel. I was one of those commentators who wrote the obituary on the talks when they began last summer. I did this because the situation was not ripe for peace. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads a party and a coalition that still supports the idea of a Greater Israel created through the ongoing settlement of the West Bank. In 2009 he mouthed his acceptance of the two-state solution in a speech at Bar-Ilan University. But since then he has done nothing to indicate that he really believes in the necessity of such a solution or of Israeli territorial concessions in order to arrive at one. Members of his coalition such as Deputy Defense Minister Dani Danon have spoken out openly against a two-state solution with no punishment from Netanyahu. Meanwhile the Palestinians are divided between the corrupt Fatah Party ruling the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas ruling in Gaza. Hamas, and resistance within his own Fatah prevents PA President Mahmoud Abbas from making the necessary concessions on such things as a right to return to Israel for Palestinian refugees that would be necessary to reciprocate territorial concessions from an Israeli government interested in peace. Both Netanyahu and Abbas were content to rule in peace with no thought towards peace until Kerry came to disturb their tranquility.

Obama's Jerusalem Speech: Just Another Pretty Speech?

It appears that Obama's trip to Israel, Palestine, and Jordan was very carefully prepared and scripted. In Israel Obama went to all the right places to both show his support for peace and to flatter the Israelis. In his Jerusalem speech to students he said many things to both flatter and reassure Israelis as well as to challenge them. In the beginning of the speech he sounded like a typical American politician trolling for Jewish votes (something that he has had much practice in during his many years in Chicago and twice running for the presidency). Later during the end part of the speech in which he spoke about Israel's technological achievements and the economic miracle that Israel could provide to the Middle East he sounded much like President Shimon Peres. If you had an actor read the text of the final part of the speech with a Polish accent you would swear it was Peres.

The End of the Two-State Solution? Part I

Purely by coincidence, today's edition of Real Clear World has three very pessimistic articles on the Middle East peace process only about a week or two after I mailed in the manuscript for my latest book, tentatively titled Why the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Remains Unsolved: the Politics of the Two-State Solution, which will probably be published by McFarland Publishing of North Carolina sometime late next year. These three articles here, here, and here, tend to blame the Palestinians and Arabs in general rather than Israel. The first is by a noted Italian commentator on international affairs, Emanuele Ottolenghi (eight tongues); the second by The New Republic's longtime columnist Leon Wieseltier; and the last by a writer at a conservative Israeli tabloid, Yediot Aharonot (confession: this was the paper I usually read when I was a student in Israel over three decades ago because of its relatively easy Hebrew). 

The problem with the two-state solution since it was first proposed by West Bank Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals in the 1970s was that it required both sides to go way out of their comfort zones and take real risks for peace. The risks on the Israeli side--at least until Rabin's assassination by a radical religious law student in November 1995--were mainly political rather than physical; on the Palestinian side they were both. Plus these two sides had to be ready to take these risks at the same time and while the United States administration was prepared to vigorously mediate between them to reach a solution. Since the early 1990s the two sides were out of sync. First, Arafat was most desperate for a deal in 1992-93 at the start of the Oslo process when the PLO was bankrupt due to a cutoff of Gulf state contributions following Arafat's embrace of Saddam's annexation of Kuwait. But Rabin wanted to take it slow and test Arafat and develop support for a final settlement. Plus, it was not all that clear that Rabin supported the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Under Netanyahu from mid-1996 to mid-1999 Israel pursued a go-very-slow policy. By the time that Ehud Barak was ready to negotiate with the Palestinians in early 2000, Arafat was suspicious of his motives and ready to appease the Islamists and reject Israeli compromise proposals at Camp David. In October 2000 the Al-Aksa Intifada broke out with both Arafat and Arik Sharon bearing heavy responsibility for it. After that a solution was precluded until the Palestinians had a new leader. But this resulted in Sharon replacing Barak as prime minister in February 2001. A settlement now awaited a new Israeli leader as well. This did not occur until March 2006 when Kadima leader Ehud Olmert followed Sharon two months after Sharon's massive stroke.

Israel: The Siege Tightens

I have written a number of posts in which I assert that Israel is a siege democracy along with Northern Ireland. Here is an article by veteran New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent and now columnist Thomas Friedman on Israel's environment as perceived from Israel.

Israeli perceptions may seem to outsiders like paranoia--and they definitely are not the perceptions of a normal state. But Israel is not a normal state inhabited by a normal people. It is the Jewish state called for in the UN General Assembly partition resolution of November 29, 1947 (whose 64th anniversary was marked by Friedman's article).  Jews have suffered from a basic insecurity from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ACE/AD until the present day. There have been good periods of relative security and well being followed by periods of extreme insecurity. From 1881 to 1946 there was a period of extreme violence for European Jewry starting with a series of pogroms (incited massacres) in Russia and Romania and culminating in the industrial slaughter of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population in the Holocaust. Not coincidentally, this is exactly the period that saw the rise of Zionism with the first Zionist theorists on anti-semitism in Europe (Leo Pinsker in 1882, Theodore Herzl in 1895) and the first Zionist immigration to Palestine. But the perceptions are perfectly rational and normal for a people that has suffered the experiences of the Jews in recent history.

Does trauma inhibit Netanyahu?

During apartheid South Africa's real period of siege from 1974 to 1994 there were three white rulers: John Vorster (1966-1978), Pieter Willem Botha (1978-1989), and Frederick Willem de Klerk (1989-1994). South African political scientist Dan O'Meara, who chronicled the apartheid years of the ruling National Party in Forty Lost Years: The National Party in Power 19448-1994, wrote about John Vorster that division within the party during the first half of his rule inhibited him from making necessary reforms during the second half. From 1966 to 1970 the party was torn by an ideological division between conservatives--verkrampte--literally cramped--and moderates--verligte--literally enlightened. This led to the split in the party with a small portion of the verkrampte forming the Herstigte Nasionale Party--Reconstituted National Party--under the leadership of Albert Hertzog. Hertzog was the minister of mines and, ironically, the son of the first leader of the National Party who had ended his career in ignominy rejected by Afrikaner nationalists during World War II. Except for appointing a pair of commissions late in his period of rule Vorster made no attempts at domestic reforms. O'Meara contends that this was in order to avoid the trauma of another ideological battle and another possible split. The HNP did not elect a single MP until 1985 in a by-election and then this MP lost his seat in the next general election in 1987. By calling a snap election in 1970, Vorster largely destroyed the HNP as an election threat to the National Party.

Palestinian Statehood Is About Domestic Politics

There are three key players in the issue of Palestinian statehood: Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Barack Obama. All three made speeches at the UN ostensibly designed to convince and justify their actions before an international audience. But all three speeches were really aimed at domestic audiences. Abbas was presenting the Palestinian narrative and demonstrating that he can stand up to the Zionists and their American backers. Netanyahu was showing his coalition that he was not making any concessions to the Palestinians and that the lack of a solution was their fault. Obama, by adopting for the first time the Israeli narrative, was protecting himself in the 2012 general election from the charge that he was pro-Palestinian and soft on the enemies of the Jewish state. Here is a column by Jewish blogger M J Rosenburg on Obama's motives and the likely results of his speech. And here is a column by Thomas Friedman basically echoing my observation and pointing out its dangers.

Abbas was trying to defend himself from attacks by Hamas, while going around the Likud government in Israel that plays lip service to a two-state solution while opposing it with all of its might. Abbas mentioned the connections of Jesus and Mohammad to Palestine, but failed to mention Moses, Abraham or any other Jews.  Netanyahu through his pro-settlement policies was pushing the Palestinians to go for statehood before all of their territory is swallowed up by religious Zionists and right-wing settlers. And Obama was demonstrating again that his political bank account is empty--he withdrew everything to pay for the health care bill and the stimulus packages.

U.S. Veto on Palestine Statehood Returns America-Middle East Relations to the pre-Yom Kippur War Era

On Friday President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority put in an application to statehood at the UN. Normally the Security Council handles requests for membership. Washington has indicated that the U.S. representative will veto the application in the Council if it comes to a vote. The General Assembly can vote to upgrade Palestine's status from observer to non-member state. This would legally have the effect of making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a conflict between two states. On the ground nothing much will change. Israel will still remain the occupier of the West Bank with its checkpoints, by-pass roads and other signs of occupation. Hamas will still remain in charge of Gaza.

What will change is the illusion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to be resolved diplomatically anytime soon. This is because in the most blatant fashion Washington has demonstrated that American Middle East policy, or at least the policy regarding Israel and the Palestinians, is a captive of domestic politics. Obama by not engaging the Palestinians to pass a statehood resolution that protected Israel's interests, has left the Palestinians with proof that even a right-wing coalition government like the present Likud-Israel Beitenu government has more clout in Washington than does the Palestinian Authority.

Lebanese journalist Rami Khouri (look up Sat. Sep. 24) refers to this as demonstrating that "Israel-America" is "our new South Africa." Most Arab press tends to be much more based on opinion than fact--prescriptive rather than descriptive. Khouri is trying to demonstrate that Israel and America are one entity when it comes to Middle East policy and that this entity is as diplomatically isolated as Pretoria was in the 1980s under the apartheid regime. While this is demonstrably true of Israel, it is not true of Washington. Jerusalem under the present Likud coalition government has returned Israel to the diplomatic isolation that Israel suffered from before the Oslo era of the 1990s. While Washington is not there yet and probably never will be, Washington could go back to the era of the "Arab cold war" as Arabist Malcolm Kerr dubbed the period from 1964 to 1975. This was the era when the region was bitterly divided on ideological grounds between the pro-Soviet radical military dictatorships like those in Egypt, Iraq, Libya Syria, and the Yemens on one hand and the pro-American monarchies such as Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia  on the other. The Palestinians remained in the radical camp until Oslo in 1993. Egypt switched sides under Sadat in 1975. And Lebanon was convulsed by a civil war in 1975 that served as a proxy battleground for the various contenders for power in the region including Israel and lasted for fifteen years.

The Islamists have effectively replaced the fascist pro-Soviet military dictatorships as Washington's main regional opponents. If the Palestinian issue would once more become a rallying cry, as it threatened to do in late 2008 during the Gaza War, we could see proxy wars in either Lebanon or Iraq. This would have the effect of permanently derailing the Arab Spring.

While the Israeli-Palestinian issue is far from being ripe for resolution, it could be handled in such a way that would make it less attractive to would-be arsonists.

J Street's misdirected activism

On Sunday I attended a house party for the Madison chapter of J Street. There were about ten of us there to listen to the Midwest coordinator from Chicago explain J Street's strategy for the "two-state summer" to pressure the Obama administration to reengage in Middle East diplomacy on the Palestinian track. I spoke to him for about a half hour before the meeting and although we agreed on many things, we had a fundamental disagreement about American policy. I hold that the situation is fundamentally unripe for another attempt to renew Israeli-Palestinian direct talks. The Israeli government is opposed to a further settlement freeze or any substantial concessions to the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas is opposed to making any substantial concessions to the Israelis and has already committed himself to the UN route of seeking UN sanction and recognition for a declaration of Palestinian independence. Until he plays this hand out he is very unlikely to try to engage in another game with different rules in which he has always been dealt a losing hand.

Several of us at the meeting spoke of the possibility of J Street attempting to persuade the Obama administration to shape the Palestinian initiative by making UN recognition and pressure on Israel to end the occupation conditional on Palestine fulfilling certain conditions such as giving up the right of return. But apparently J Street believes that that is too dangerous a course. In other words Obama is politically healthy enough to be pressured into engaging in another high-profile round of the peace process, as in 2010, but not healthy enough to take on the UN and a unified Palestinian government. I fail to understand the logic here.

Either engaging in a peace process will cost Obama valuable political capital when he is gearing up for a reelection campaign or it won't. If it will it should be avoided. If it will not then he should spend that capital in a process that has not yet failed and has a slim chance of succeeding.

Aaron David  Miller wrote a very interesting article on how the Arab Spring has affected American Middle East calculations. Here is the link.

George Mitchell--the canary in the mineshaft

George Mitchell has given up on Middle East peace and returned to a well-deserved retirement. He was coaxed out of retirement in 1994, after a career in the Senate, by President Clinton to chair a board looking at economic ideas for Northern Ireland. He spent the next five years working on the problems of Northern Ireland as the head of a commission investigating the problem of decommissioning, then as a mediator chairing the political talks and finally in the fall of 1999 heading a review of the working of the Good Friday Agreement that came up with a temporary fix to the decommissioning problem. Clinton again called on him in late 2000 to head an investigation into the causes of the outbreak of the Al-Aksa Intifada at the start of October. President Obama, to much acclaim by Jewish liberal groups, brought him out of retirement during his transition to advise on his Middle East policy. He ended up as Obama's Middle East envoy, the position once held by Dennis Ross in the Clinton administration.

His pending retirement has been rumored for about eight months since the renewal of the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was dead on arrival. Neither side was particularly interested in incurring the political costs of peace--concessions that would endanger its domestic standing. Netanyahu refused outrageous bribes to renew a settlement freeze and Mahmoud Abbas used this as an excuse to refuse to enter into talks.

Obama was too engaged with domestic problems dealing with the economy and with managing two--now three--foreign wars to put his own political future on the line. Why should he risk his presidency when Abbas was not prepared to risk his or Netanyahu his premiership?  The next big problem for Obama will be finding someone of sufficient stature to take on this thankless task for the rest of his first term. Dennis Ross is unacceptable to the liberals even if he wanted the job. Most of those qualified to take on the job are smart enough not to want it.