4 May 2009

By Khalid Amayreh

While Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is striving to put a good face on his conspicuously extremist government, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has warned that he will bring down the government if Netanyahu gives even an inch to President Barack Obama over the two-state solution with the Palestinians and doesn't take Lieberman's views into account.

Netanyahu is due to visit Washington in the second or third week of May for crucial talks with the American president. The talks will centre on the moribund peace process as well as other issues such as the Iranian nuclear programme.

According to the Israeli media, Netanyahu will tell Obama that Israel is willing to accept "in principle" the creation of a Palestinian state on condition that details pertaining to the nature and borders of such a state remained subject to arduous negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The key phrase here is "in principle" which suggests that Israel, not international law, would have the final say as to the shape, size, borders and viability of such an entity.

This should be good enough for Lieberman and other ultra- extremist Israeli ministers who don't mind hearing ostensibly "positive statements" about peace by Netanyahu as long as these deliberately vague statements remained within the public relations sphere.

Indeed, there seems to be an unwritten agreement between Netanyahu and Lieberman to that effect, which explains the plethora of contradictory statements uttered by the various political lords of the current Israeli governments.

Hence, it is probably safe to argue that Lieberman and Netanyahu only differ over style not substance as the Israeli premier shares most, if not all, of his foreign minister's views.

For example, Netanyahu has adopted Lieberman's demands that the PA not only recognise Israel as a Jewish state but also as "the exclusive state of the Jewish people", which implies that non-Jews, specifically the 1.55 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, would have to either convert to Judaism or leave their ancestral homeland, willy nilly.

Although a veteran of Israeli politics, Lieberman has retained much of his Moldovan character trait of saying what he means and meaning what he says.

However, for homegrown Israeli politicians, particularly people like Netanyahu, a master of prevarication and verbal juggling, Lieberman's style spells naiveté and public relations disaster.

Earlier this month, Netanyahu asked Lieberman to "moderate" his style and say words that are friendly to the ears of listeners lest his statements be proven a liability to Israel's diplomatic discourse, particularly in North America and Europe.

Realising that he still has much to learn in terms of soundbites, Lieberman has hired a public relations advisor in order to be able to look good in the international arena while remaining faithful and committed to his anti-peace views. However, Lieberman seems utterly unable and visibly uncomfortable saying what the PR expert insists he should say against his convictions.

This week, the Jerusalem Post had an extensive interview with Lieberman showing he remained unchanged and that he was unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. This prompted interviewer Amir Mizroch, news editor of the JP, to remark that Netanyahu and Lieberman ought to swap portfolios because the former is more fit to be foreign minister. In the interview, Lieberman argued repeatedly that the Palestinians didn't need a state, at least for the time being, saying that luxurious things like politics and statehood were an afterthought for an impoverished people languishing under unemployment and economic stagnation and unable to feed their children.

Lieberman utterly forgot that the fundamental cause of the chronic economic depression in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was none other than the Israeli occupation, which imposes open-ended curfews on entire regions, erects ubiquitous roadblocks all over the West Bank, besieges the people, and inhibits the evolution of an environment conducive to conducting normal economic activities.

Lieberman revealed his genius when he stated that the resolution of the Palestinian plight could wait many more years. He reminded the interviewer that the Northern Ireland conflict waited for 800 years until conditions became ripe for a final settlement.

He further suggested that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could be resolved along the Cypriot model. "What was the situation in Cyprus before 1974? The same situation as in Israel. The Greeks and Turks were living together. There was a friction, bloodshed and terror and war. After 1974, they concentrated all the Greek population in the southern part of the Island and the Turkish part of the population in the northern part of the island. There is no peace agreement even today. But there is stability, prosperity and security."

Of course, one doesn't have to be a great expert in Israeli politics to discover the bottom line of Lieberman's ideas. He wants to prolong the present stalemate for as long as possible in order to enable Israel to thoroughly and completely devour the remainder of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In other words, Israel would continue, under the disguise of creating the "right conditions" for peace, to arrogate as much as possible of Palestinian geography with as little as possible of Palestinian demography. This is exactly what is meant by the phrase "two states for two peoples" from the Israeli view point, namely that 5.5 million Palestinians are packed within 20 per cent of mandatory Palestine while 5.5 million Jews, most of whom are non-native immigrants, are given 80 per cent of the Palestinians' historical homeland.

"This is not a matter of hawkish ideas promoted by a maverick politicians," said Tawfik Abu Shomer, a Palestinian expert on Israeli affairs. "There is a near unanimity in Israel that the Jewish state would have to dispose of its Palestinian citizens at one point in the future. Israel is only using Lieberman to announce and assert the old plan." Hence, it is wrong to even assume that Netanyahu is really at odds with Lieberman over the latter's racist designs against the large Arab minority in Israel.

But Netanyahu will have to encapsulate Lieberman's ideas in a slick PR package which he will present to a media-savvy American president. The prospect doesn't appear to be particularly promising for Netanyahu.

According to veteran Israeli journalist Roni Shaked, Netanyahu will sell Washington "words and words and more words. Netanyahu thinks he is smarter than Obama. He will try to convince him that economic prosperity for the Palestinians should come first and that a gradual approach ought to be adopted with regard to peace with the Palestinians."

Shaked pointed out that the Israeli prime minister was facing a real difficulty reconciling ideology with pragmatism. "He thinks that he can sway Washington with PR and sweet- sounding words. He thinks he can please Obama, Lieberman, Abbas, Mubarak and everyone with magical words."

This week, a weak but essential player in the Israeli- Palestinian theatre, Mahmoud Abbas, stressed that he won't be bamboozled by Netanyahu's trickeries and prevarications.

In a speech marking the Palestinian Prisoner's Day, Abbas said the Palestinians would never recognise Israel as a "state of the Jewish people". "I don't accept it. It is not my job to give a description of the state of Israel. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic, it is none of my business."

Abbas also warned that the PA wouldn't resume negotiations with Israel unless Israel put an end to all settlement expansion activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. "We want a state on the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, not a centimetre more, not a centimetre less. If Israel doesn't want the two-state solution, I wonder what they would accept."

Netanyahu, while telling the media and foreign dignitaries that Israel doesn't want to rule over another people, has nonetheless insisted that Israel would have to retain control over the borders, border crossings, skies, ports, telecommunications and underground waters of any prospective Palestinian entity.