Every once and a while some event, always assumed to be significant, will propel the otherwise mundane Israeli-Palestinian death grapple to the front pages. Last week it was the Palestinian Authority’s long threatened application for full membership in the United Nations. The rhetorical fireworks exploded in all the customary places but, as always, the elephant in the room was ignored: Netanyahu can’t make a deal even if he wanted to, which he probably doesn’t.
Not only has Netanyahu never taken any action beyond costless platitudes to indicate that he’s willing to deal, his coalition partners would destroy him if he made settler removal part of the negotiation. And since even Barack Obama believes that at least some settler removal is a necessity for there to be a realistic Palestinian state, any deal is dead long before it even exists. Nixon may have gone to China, but Nixon was not in coalition with Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu.
So what, if anything, does the Palestinian UN move mean? The short answer is “not much”. The longer answer is that Mahmoud Abbas is saying that the window of opportunity is closing:
Abbas’s agenda was transparent. He was sending the Americans a message: grow a spine, stop appeasing Israel and launch credible negotiations – because if you don’t, my next failure will be my last. There are several problems with his approach.
For one, the so-called peace process is working precisely as designed, to give political cover to Israeli colonisation and maintain America’s diplomatic monopoly. Second, the US has become even more extreme than Israel. Obama’s speech delighted Avigdor Lieberman but was denounced by American politicians as a betrayal of Israel. Third, there is nothing to negotiate about with Israel’s current rulers, who refuse even to acknowledge the occupation, let alone commit to ending it.
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If Abbas cannot backtrack and survive, he also cannot remain still for long and remain in place. There are growing signs that Palestinians won’t tolerate Oslo for much longer. In practice this means that Abbas – or, should he prove unable or unwilling, his successor – has no choice but further initiatives towards the internationalisation of the Palestine question.
That’s the nut of the thing right there. Abbas is saying with deeds instead of words that he cannot sit on the always eroding West Bank any longer. The West Bank isn’t going anywhere, but he and the political structure he represents might be, and if that happens then Israel will truly have no one with whom to negotiate.
That may or may not be something the Israeli right would love, but it represents an international human rights situation that can no longer be concealed behind the fiction of ongoing negotiations. As long as Oslo is theoretically in place the Palestinians have a non-violent path to their own state, if it evaporates Israel loses that diplomatic cover. Once that happens, the world, even the United States,* will slowly begin turning its back on the Jewish State. With Egypt under new management and Turkey increasingly sick of being played for a chump, Israel could quickly find itself militarily secure but economically and culturally isolated. And, as the recent housing protests have shown, Israel can ill afford economic stagnation.
In the meantime, things will continue on as they have. Both sides will make noises about negotiations, but nothing can possibly come of it as long as Likud and its even more right wing allies are running the show in the Knesset. All the fulsome words and doom saying predictions in the world can’t change that math.
*Plenty of people might scoff at the idea that the United States would ever “abandon” Israel or some such nonsense. To that I’d simply reply that in the early 1980s an American abandonment of South Africa seemed equally implausible. By the end of that decade South Africa was so totally reviled that big Hollywood allowed Danny Glover and Mel Gibson to use them as the bad guys in Lethal Weapon 2. Israel has a lot more built up good will than the Afrikaners ever had, but swings in opinion can happen frightfully quickly. The only weapon Israel and its defenders have against a similar fate is charges of anti-Semitism, but that has already been seriously devalued by overuse and the more Gaza and West Bank resemble Soweto the less potent it becomes.
