Binyamin Netanyahu Has Failed. There’s A Better Way To Achieve Security For Israel

Friday 13 March 2015 05.00 EDT

Israeli voters have to choose between two radically different visions for the future of their country when they go to the polls on 17 March. The rightwing ruling Likud party faces a challenge from the Zionist Union, which was formed by a merger of the Labour party and a small centrist party. Isaac Herzog, the leader of the new party, is a moderate left-of-centre politician who prefers to focus on the socioeconomic issues that are high on the voters’ agenda. His centre-right deputy, Tzipi Livni, was the minister of justice and chief negotiator with the Palestinians in the outgoing coalition government. Their new party is committed to negotiations with the Palestinian Authority with the aim of reaching agreement on a two-state solution to the conflict. Its platform also pledges to submit an Israeli peace initiative to the Arab League.

The Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, is committed to permanent Israeli control over most of the West Bank, and this precludes the possibility of peace with the Palestinians. Roughly two-thirds of Israelis used to favour a two-state solution. But after the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000, the majority tended to believe that there was no Palestinian partner for peace. Consequently, as the polls show, on domestic issues Herzog has the edge, but on foreign policy and security Netanyahu has a larger following. And his policy is to perpetuate the status quo. Netanyahu said this week that he now regards his past commitment to a two-state solution as “simply irrelevant”.

Netanyahu’s strategic and diplomatic intransigence is underpinned by the revisionist Zionist ideology of Greater Israel. This ideology implicitly rejects any Palestinian national rights over the West Bank and explicitly asserts the right of the Jewish people to the “whole land of Israel”. It follows that, in this view, Israel’s control over the West Bank is not an occupation but the legitimate exercise of historic entitlement. In Netanyahu’s narrative, the Palestinians pose an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish citizenry; western support for Palestinian statehood only accentuates this threat; and the best way to counter it is to accelerate the building of Jewish homes and Jewish infrastructure on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

An argument repeatedly used by Netanyahu and his hawk-dominated Likud party against retreat on the West Bank is the Gaza precedent. In August 2005 a Likud-led government headed by Ariel Sharon carried out a “unilateral disengagement”, withdrawing the Israel Defense Forces and all 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip. Netanyahu led the opposition to this move from within the Likud, forcing Sharon to quit and form a breakaway party named Kadima.

more...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/13/binyamin-netanyahu-failed-security-israel