Middle East
JERUSALEM
— Emboldened by the Republican sweep of last week’s American elections,
right-wing members of the Israeli government have called anew for the
abandonment of a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians.
“The
combination of changes in the United States, in Europe and in the
region provide Israel with a unique opportunity to reset and rethink
everything,” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education minister and the leader
of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, told a gathering of the
Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem on Monday.
Mr. Bennett, who advocates
annexing 60 percent of the occupied West Bank to Israel, exulted on the
morning after Donald J. Trump’s victory: “The era of a Palestinian
state is over.”
That
sentiment was only amplified when Jason Greenblatt, a lawyer and
co-chairman of the Trump campaign’s Israel Advisory Committee, told
Israel’s Army Radio that Mr. Trump did not consider West Bank
settlements to be an obstacle to peace, in a stark reversal of
longstanding American policy.
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Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and other rightist politicians jumped to make hay of the change.
Yoav
Kish, a Likud member of Parliament, called for the expansion of Israeli
sovereignty into the West Bank; Meir Turgeman, the chairman of
Jerusalem’s municipal planning committee, said he would now bring
long-frozen plans for thousands of Jewish homes in the fiercely
contested eastern part of the city up for approval.
Aryeh
Deri, the interior minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, hailed Mr. Trump’s
victory as a miracle, asserting it would lessen the influence of
liberal, non-Orthodox streams of Judaism popular in America. He added,
“We must truly be in Messianic times when everything will turn out
favorably for the people of Israel.”
Mr.
Netanyahu, whose previous three terms in office all coincided with
Democratic administrations in the United States, has been more cautious.
Adding
to his troubles, Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected a government
request for a seven-month delay of the demolition of an illegal West
Bank outpost built on privately owned Palestinian land. The
court-ordered demolition is slated for Dec. 25, and the government had
argued for the delay in part to temper a potentially violent settler
response.
On Sunday, a ministerial committee of rightists within the Likud party and the governing coalition approved
a contentious bill to retroactively legalize illegal settlement
privately owned on Palestinian land. Prompted by the effort to salvage
the Amona outpost, it may be a precursor of things to come.
Although
the pro-settler camp was promoting the bill long before Mr. Trump’s
victory, the decision was taken, unusually, over Mr. Netanyahu’s
vehement objections and despite his exhortations for it to be postponed.
Tzipi
Livni, a centrist former foreign minister and justice minister who now
sits in the Parliamentary opposition, denounced the settlement bill, writing
on Twitter that it constitutes “major damage to the rule of law at
home, damage to Israel abroad, and primarily conveys a message that
might makes right, when faced with a weak prime minister.”
Mr.
Netanyahu warmly welcomed Mr. Trump’s victory, calling him “a true
friend” of Israel. But Mr. Netanyahu has also since instructed his
ministers and legislators to be discreet, saying the incoming
administration should be allowed “to formulate — together with us — its
policy vis-à-vis Israel and the region through accepted and quiet
channels, and not via interviews and statements.”
Mr.
Netanyahu endorsed the principle of a Palestinian state in 2009, under
American pressure and with caveats. Since then, he has tried to balance
between world opinion and his right-wing constituency by declaring
support for a solution based on two states for two peoples without going
out of his way to advance it.
Israeli
analysts point out that the Trump campaign has spread contradictory
messages. While many here assume that he will have more pressing
priorities than the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Trump
told
The Wall Street Journal on Friday that he would like to seal an
Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, calling it the “ultimate deal.”
Mr.
Netanyahu’s critics on the right, however, assume a Trump
administration will at least give Israel a freer hand in areas like
settlement construction. They say Mr. Netanyahu will have to decide
which side he is on.
Acknowledging
that Mr. Trump’s positions are not entirely clear, Mr. Bennett, the
leader of Jewish Home, said, “We have to say what we want first.”
Amit
Segal, a political commentator for Israel’s popular Channel 2 News,
said that during the tenures of Presidents Clinton and Obama, Mr.
Netanyahu could “disguise his worldview.” The Obama administration’s
sharp condemnation of all settlement activity gave Mr. Netanyahu “the
ultimate excuse” for not building with abandon in the West Bank, Mr.
Segal said in an interview, adding, “I am not sure that the right wing,
with its appetite, will be prepared to suffer another few years of
that.”
Asked
what Mr. Netanyahu would probably be rooting for, Israelis who
generally reflect the prime minister’s thinking said he was unlikely to
forswear the two-state solution.
“Israel
has its own interest in reaching a negotiated solution with its
neighbors,” said Dore Gold, a longtime Netanyahu adviser who recently
resigned from his position as director general of Israel’s foreign
ministry. “This is not a function of pressure or arm-twisting. Prime
Minister Netanyahu has made it clear that this is his goal.”
But
Mr. Gold suggested that a Trump administration was likely to roll back
the demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 lines and support borders
that are more accommodating to Israel. “Trump’s policy paper spoke about
Israel having defensible borders, which are clearly different from the
1967 lines,” he said.
Michael
B. Oren, a deputy minister in the prime minister’s office and a former
Israeli ambassador to the United States, told Israel Radio: “We have to
ask ourselves what is in Israel’s interests. The interest of the
Israelis and, in my view, of the government, is indeed to achieve peace
with the Palestinians through direct negotiations, without
preconditions, at any time, in order to get to a solution of two states
for two peoples.”
Gilead
Sher, an Israeli former peace negotiator under the left-leaning
governments of Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, noted that although most of
the Israeli governments over the past four decades had been right-wing,
“never has one of them annexed one square inch of the West Bank.”
Mr.
Sher, now a senior research fellow at the Institute for National
Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, is also co-chairman of Blue
White Future, an Israeli group advocating a two-state solution, by
unilateral means if necessary. Of the rejoicing on the Israeli right, he
said, “Most joyful moments are provisional and temporary.”
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