It’S not quite clear what Israel’s new Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman meant went he declared that Israel no longer has “the luxury of conducting drawn-out wars of attrition”. Did he mean that the time had come to clobber the Palestinians into submission once and for all or had the time come for a comprehensive peace agreement with them?
It’s hard to imagine that Liberman actually wants peace, not with his history of racist comments and incitement to violence. In the past he has called for the execution of Arab members of the Knesset who meet with Hamas, rejected giving amnesty to Palestinian prisoners — saying it would be better to drown them in the Dead Sea “since that’s the lowest point in the world” — and suggested the bombing of the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egyptian support for Yasser Arafat.
Israel has arguably been involved in a war of attrition against Hamas for years, the latest being last week’s rocket border skirmish. At times the battle has morphed into full-scale war, those infamous operations called Protective Edge, Operation Pillar of Defense and Operation Cast Lead. If Liberman wants to start one more war, this one decapitating the Palestinians, he should take note that while it may be true that for most of human history military victory ended wars, today’s conventional wisdom holds that conflicts are best resolved through negotiation. And for some years now the basic shape of a Palestinian-Israeli agreement concerning, essentially, borders, security, right of return, Jerusalem, and water, has been a more or less known quantity. It has been rehearsed time and time again. The two sides are only a concession or two away from a diplomatic breakthrough.
What has been missing, the sine qua non of success, is the existence of leaders on both sides who are willing and able simultaneously to deliver. That means they need to want to move beyond the status quo to a better place. Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas has arguably been willing but is not able because Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli policy hasn’t helped him. No better example can be found than on the day Liberman was given the nod to become defense minister. Standing next to Netanyahu, Liberman said he fully endorsed the prime minister’s call for an agreement leading to two states for two peoples, and in his own speech he accepted the two-state solution.
However, just the day after, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked from the religious-nationalist Jewish Home vowed there would be no such dramatic moves on her watch while the leader of the right-wing party, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, added that “everyone who is opposed to dividing Jerusalem and building a Palestinian state… don’t worry: we’re here.”
Netanyahu is not without fault himself. It is his ambitious settlement drive that ultimately toppled the peace talks more than two years ago. Every time an initiative comes Israel’s way, from the EU, the UN or the US, he essentially just says no.
As for the US, a new president in a few more months will need to understand what US interests are, how much effort and how much risk are worth pursuing, and how much presidential or secretarial capital, if any, ought to be invested. The answers to such questions need to be looked at afresh in the context of changing US interests in the region as a whole. There is no doubt that the war in Syria and the near collapse of Libya, Iraq and Yemen have taken precedence over the Palestinian issue.
Liberman’s addition to the coalition over three months ago was met with skepticism in the international community. It still does. That he ordered over 50 airstrikes on Hamas military infrastructure in Gaza over the weekend in response to one rocket may aim to do away with this slow-burning style of warfare in favor of dramatic, drastic action.
