What Can Joe Biden Do About Benjamin Netanyahu?
Since 1977, when Menachem Begin, a founder of the Likud party, became Prime Minister, Israeli leaders liberal enough to entertain a peace process with the Palestinians that could end the conflict have controlled the government for just eight years. But they always had a not-exactly-stealth weapon: Israelis across the spectrum feared alienating Washington—its military technology, its diplomatic shield, its annual billions in aid, and what has been loosely called its “values.” By tradition, of course, U.S. Presidents don’t (openly) interfere with the domestic policies of America’s allies, but not all allies benefit from such largesse, and Israeli Prime Ministers have all been rated on how they’ve cultivated bipartisan U.S. concern for Israel’s security. Civil-rights groups have sought to stop human-rights violations, such as in the occupied territories, by shaming expansionist governments in the U.S. media and before American élites more generally.
So, now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, led by his Likud bloc and its allies in far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, has openly menaced Israel’s democratic structures—demanding, for example, that the governing coalition be given decisive influence over the selection of judges—liberals are reflexively seeking a lifeline from Joe Biden’s Administration. And what seems increasingly clear is that President Biden is loath to throw it. “There are plenty of reasons for Americans to care” about what Netanyahu’s coalition is doing, but “there just aren’t that many reasons for the Administration to do anything,” Steven Simon, a former Middle East adviser in the Obama White House and the author of the recently published “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East,” told me. “The U.S. relationship with Israel lives or dies by domestic U.S. political dynamics,” and though thirty-eight billion dollars—the ten-year military-aid package signed under Barack Obama—“could become a lever, no Democratic Administration would want to deploy it.” There would be “noise.”
U.S. aid and diplomatic support are primarily meant to abet Israeli security, in other words, and Biden appears to think that he cannot use them for leverage without losing support among constituencies he needs to win reëlection. He did urge Netanyahu to “walk away” from his judicial assault, and has yet to invite him to the White House. But, according to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, Biden’s team has maintained contact both with members of Netanyahu’s government and with opposition leaders—who purport to represent the protest movement that has roiled Israeli streets since January and briefly paralyzed the country in late March. The Biden Administration has also conveyed its desire to see “consensus” on judicial reform, as in the talks between coalition and opposition politicians that had been taking place at the official residence of the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, in recent months.
This approach sounds conscientious, but it buys into Netanyahu’s framing—that judicial “activism” was widely distrusted—and wrongly suggests that the coalition’s drive to reform the courts is something that Netanyahu can finesse and U.S. regional policy can wait out. Most in the protest movement and a majority of the public, including many Likud voters, oppose the proposals to limit the independence of the judiciary. Leaders of the protests say that the assault on the courts only proves the urgency of enacting a constitution and a bill of rights in a country that has only impaired forms of both—and that these should be amendable only by Knesset supermajorities. In the meantime, they maintain, an independent judicial branch is the sole bulwark against governments that have been elected with slight majorities promoting theocracy and ethnic populism in Israel and apartheid in the occupied territories—an evolving “religious, nationalist, messianic autocracy,” Guy Rolnik, the founder of the business journal TheMarker, told a rally outside the President’s residence. The talks were thus a kind of off-ramp for Netanyahu following the disturbances in March, which some in the opposition were willing to allow: an emergency measure to both return the country to a nervous normal and stall a package of bills, threatening the judiciary, which seemed about to be enacted in the Knesset. At the time, nearly two-thirds of Israeli voters said that they disapproved of the job Netanyahu was doing.
Netanyahu, for his part, has used the talks, or the lull they have provided, to further his coalition’s broader political aims and to posture as a tough leader. His polls rebounded some after the government launched a military operation against Islamic Jihad in Gaza, assassinating its leaders from the air, although that strike set off five days of violence that claimed the lives of more than thirty Palestinians, including women and children, and one Israeli woman. (The operation “should be called Operation Peace for Bibi,” the Haaretz columnist B. Michael wrote.)
In its wake, Netanyahu’s settler zealot finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, designed a fiscal scheme that would disproportionately tax richer, more secular municipalities to pay for services to poorer settlements and Orthodox communities. In late May, crucially, the coalition passed a two-year budget awarding infrastructure funding for, Smotrich said, increasing the number of settlers in the West Bank to a million. Religious parties also carved out more than a quarter of a billion dollars to pay for ultra-Orthodox schools, many of which do not teach their students mathematics, science, or English, while the proportion of the budget devoted to higher education continued to decrease.
In all, the budget reserved about four billion dollars for coalition funds, which favor theocratic priorities—about ten per cent of the entire budget for 2023 and, coincidentally, roughly what Israel gets yearly from the U.S. in aid. And the judicial package has not been shelved. After the budget passed, Netanyahu said that it would “return.” His trial for various alleged corruptions (which he denies) continues, and he might still need to muscle through legislative changes to rules of good governance if he wants a plea deal that will allow him to stay in office—rules that the courts are otherwise bound to enforce. The off-ramp, increasingly, seemed an alternative route to the coalition’s destination.
Little wonder that, on Wednesday, the opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz suspended their participation in the talks, following a fraught vote in the Knesset to elect members to the Judicial Selection Committee. Under existing law, which the coalition wants to bend, the committee is composed of nine representatives, including two members of the Knesset elected by secret ballot, one of whom traditionally belongs to the government and the other to the opposition.
The coalition pressed to elect both representatives from their ranks, but Netanyahu opted for a different strategy, persuading most of his caucus to vote “no” on all candidates—effectively freezing the appointment process for a month. The maneuver partially failed: renegade coalition members helped elect one candidate from the opposition, endorsed by Lapid. But one is not enough to constitute the committee, though it is enough to signal dissension in the coalition. Lapid and Gantz saw the stalling tactic as yet more evidence of bad faith. Netanyahu, Lapid said after the vote, “put an end to the pretense of dialogue.”
Urging “consensus,” in this context, seems wistful. “When the U.S. buys into this negotiation, it allows Bibi his Dr. Jekyll, while Mr. Hyde rampages on,” Nitzan Waisberg, a leader of the protests, told me. The uncertainty and the unrest have also contributed to instability in the economy. Economic growth slowed to an annualized 2.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, down from more than five per cent last year. In the first quarter of 2022, Israel’s technology sector attracted around six billion dollars in foreign investment capital. In the first quarter of 2023, it attracted less than two billion. By June, Israeli stock indices, which have tended to track the Nasdaq in recent years, had decreased by more than two per cent, while the Nasdaq gained twenty-seven per cent by the middle of May. The low participation rate of the ultra-Orthodox in the labor force, which the budget incentivizes, will mean—according to finance-ministry officials—a cumulative G.D.P. loss of about two trillion dollars by 2060.
Biden may nevertheless feel that, while closing ranks with Netanyahu’s forces works for Republicans, joining the ranks of his liberal critics doesn’t necessarily work for Democrats. In that, he may be underestimating Netanyahu’s unpopularity in the U.S.—a Gallup poll from March shows that, for the first time, Palestinians elicit more “sympathies” from Democrats than Israelis do—but he may be right that Israeli security is still a duty no Democratic politician can seem to shirk. And he may naturally be disinclined to enter Israel’s culture war, though Netanyahu has not steered clear of America’s. The Prime Minister’s new media adviser, Gilad Zwick, had previously described Biden as “unfit” for office, and tweeted support for American election deniers. (Zwick walked back those comments after his appointment.)
Yet Israel has domestic politics, too, and Biden seems also to be underestimating his potential influence there, especially when security is invoked. “In 1975,” the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told me, “President Gerald Ford faced an Israeli government, led by Yitzhak Rabin, that refused the conditions for a pull-back of forces in the Sinai. Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, simply called for a ‘reassessment’ of U.S. Middle East policy—and Rabin’s government capitulated.” If Biden were to announce something like this, Olmert added, it “could be the game-changer.” Uzi Arad, Netanyahu’s former national-security adviser, noted that “if Israel were to reverse course and place itself squarely in the camp of Western democracies, that could lead to a closer security alliance with the United States, which Israel would probably value.”
All this implies that a clear U.S. warning that sustained security coöperation depends on Israel remaining democratic and, correspondingly, open to a peace process with Palestinians would matter. It would also be consistent with U.S. interests. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that he is working to lay the ground for U.S.-led partnerships that, among other things, would advance Israel’s integration into the region, including acceptance by Saudi Arabia, which Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited last week. There is also a proposal for a regional railway network—first discussed among some participating countries in the framework of I2U2, a partnership between India, Israel, the United States, and the U.A.E.—which could eventually turn the U.A.E. into a major transit hub for Europe-bound goods from South Asia, carried from Abu Dhabi on high-speed trains, via Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to Haifa, on the Mediterranean—bypassing both Iran, in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Suez Canal.
Yet the coalition’s routine encroachments on Jerusalem’s Muslim holy sites—such as, in April, when Israeli police entered the al-Aqsa Mosque—and its expansion of settlements make rapprochement awkward, if not impossible. Israel was reportedly excluded from discussions about the railway project between Sullivan, the Saudi Prime Minister and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the Indian and Emirati national-security advisers in Saudi Arabia last month. Blinken, during his visit to the kingdom last week, reaffirmed the goal of Israeli-Saudi normalization, but the Administration has played down the prospect of it being imminent. “Biden might like a Saudi deal to run on, and Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t care about Israeli democracy, and he may even like Bibi’s swagger,” Henrique Cymerman, the president of a regional board of trade, told me. “But M.B.S. won’t move if he sees Israeli government ministers are making claims, and making trouble, on the Haram al-Sharif.”
The more immediate challenge to American interests remains Iran, which, in spite of conflict with the Saudis in Yemen, has just renewed diplomatic relations with them. Here, too, the divisions prompted by Netanyahu’s coalition foil strategic coöperation. “Trump, at Netanyahu’s urging, walked away from the J.C.P.O.A.”—the nuclear deal that the Obama Administration negotiated—“but never had a Plan B,” the former Prime Minister Ehud Barak told me. According to Axios, Biden’s special envoy to the Middle East, Brett McGurk, secretly visited Oman in early May to carry out diplomatic outreach to Tehran regarding its nuclear program. American and Iranian delegations in Oman apparently held “indirect talks,” leading to media reports about negotiations for an interim nuclear agreement (which both governments denied earlier this week). But, in the absence of this new Plan A—presupposing it, in a way—is a threat that Iranian “breakout” (reaching the capability to prepare a nuclear weapon) could trigger an aerial attack on Iranian nuclear facilities by the U.S., possibly in coördination with the Israeli Air Force, with whom joint exercises were held in January. “All options are on the table if we conclude that they’re taking steps that are tantamount to the decision to acquire a bomb,” Rob Malley, Biden’s special envoy, told NPR, in May. But for this threat to be credible would require certainty in Washington and Jerusalem—also in Teheran—that the leaders of the U.S. and Israel are aligned. “If you are about to depart from democracy as we know it,” Uzi Arad said, of Netanyahu’s government, “this reduces moral proximity—further isolates the country from its allies and friends.”
The Biden Administration, in short, is, as Sullivan put it, committed to a “fundamental direction and trend of de-escalation” in the region. Netanyahu’s “messianic autocracy” is the wrong partner for this, yet Administration officials seem reluctant to directly say so. Biden may wish to avoid “noise” as the 2024 election approaches, but he may also want to avoid obvious dithering. “Biden can’t be expected to lie on barbed-wire for the protest in Israel,” Barak told me. “But, as the saying goes, if you don’t know what port you’re sailing to, no wind will take you there.” ♦
"about" - Google News
June 17, 2023 at 10:50PM
https://ift.tt/8eBORSl
What Can Joe Biden Do About Benjamin Netanyahu? - The New Yorker
"about" - Google News
https://ift.tt/uODwqS2
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "What Can Joe Biden Do About Benjamin Netanyahu? - The New Yorker"
Post a Comment