To know what Bibi really thinks, listen to his father

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Tony Karon

• Last Updated: July 11. 2009 8:58PM UAE / July 11. 2009 4:58PM GMT

When a top sportsman wants to express opinions that might get him into trouble with his employers, his father often pops up in the media to reveal what his son is really thinking. In the same way, while Benjamin Netanyahu would risk incurring Washington’s wrath if he were to admit the cynicism behind his apparent embrace of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his father has no such qualms.

On Israeli TV last week, the 100-year-old historian and stalwart of the Israeli right, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was blunt when asked whether his son now supports the creation of a Palestinian state: “He does not support it. He supports such conditions that they [the Palestinians] will never accept it. That’s what I heard from him. I didn’t propose these conditions, he did. They will never accept these conditions. Not one of them.”

@body arnhem:Mr Netanyahu’s national security chief and key adviser, Uzi Arad, confirmed this view at the weekend. He argued that the conflict will not end in “the coming years” and accused the Palestinians, including President Mahmoud Abbas, of lacking a genuine interest or will to end it. “Even the moderates among them do not really want a settlement. At most, they are striving towards a settlement in order to renew the confrontation from a better position.”

A Palestinian state could emerge if the US pushed for it, he said, but it would be a hollow “event” of little consequence. “Stamps, parades, carnival. That could happen. A fragile structure, yes; an arrangement resting wholly on wobbly foundations.”

As for the fantasy that even if Bibi stalls on the Palestinian issue he may pursue an agreement with the Syrians, Mr Arad made clear that the Israeli government has no intention of relinquishing the Golan Heights, conquered in 1967. Israel needed the territory, he argued, “for strategic, military and land-settlement reasons”, adding the breathtakingly arrogant assertion that Israel won’t relinquish land from which it is obliged to withdraw by the UN Security Council because of its “needs of water, wine and view”. And without Israel quitting the Golan, there’s nothing to talk about with Syria.

The Israeli prime minister’s speech last month, in which for the first time he accepted the possibility of a Palestinian state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, was hailed by some as a milestone. Mr Netanyahu, after all, has long led Israeli opposition to a two-state solution, and those given to wishful thinking began to entertain ideas about a profound switch that would open the way to peace.

Of course, the same things were said about Ariel Sharon: that he embraced the Roadmap towards Palestinian statehood, and withdrew Israel’s settlements and military bases from Gaza. But Mr Sharon also believed no two-state solution was possible. His interpretation of the Roadmap required the Palestinians first to crush and disarm Hamas and any in Fatah still committed to resistance, and then for a stateless people to build civic institutions on a par with those of Switzerland, before Israel would dismantle a single settlement outpost.

So, Mr Sharon may have made verbal commitments that had once been unthinkable, but he put in place enough roadblocks to ensure that Israel would never have to honour those pledges. And that is now Mr Netanyahu’s game, according to his father.

Bibi’s machinations are also evident in his arm-wrestling with the Obama administration over the US demand for a complete Israeli settlement freeze. The Israeli government has flatly rejected that demand, although once again it is ostensibly moving to accommodate it by offering to accept the principle of a temporary settlement freeze – as long as it doesn’t apply to construction in occupied East Jerusalem, or to the 2,500 housing units already approved in the West Bank. And even then, the Israelis plan to make their limited settlement freeze conditional on Arab states in the region offering Israel new concessions.

The Obama administration is pressing Arab governments in the Gulf and elsewhere to offer Israel overflight rights for civilian aircraft and the opening of interest sections as an incentive to implement the settlement freeze. Naturally, the Arab governments are reluctant to offer new concessions as a price for Israel to observe, and then only partially, its Roadmap obligations. But failure to oblige will be taken by Mr Netanyahu and his supporters as confirmation of their claim that the Palestinians and the wider Arab community aren’t ready to make peace.

The settlement freeze, of course, is meant to be nothing more than a confidence building measure to help to facilitate conditions for final-status negotiations. That the freeze itself is now becoming the focus of its own exhaustive negotiation process between Israel and the US is another indicator of Mr Netanyahu’s game plan: wear down the Obama administration, which faces multiple crises abroad and growing difficulties in implementing its domestic agenda on the economy and the health-care system.

The argument used by Israel’s most hawkish partisans to discourage the Americans from taking an activist approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace is that it’s a fool’s errand: pressing for the implementation of a two-state peace, the hawks say, will only sap White House energy and credibility, and even make things in the region worse by raising expectations that cannot be met because “conditions” militate against progress. And, of course, they do their best to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having plunged into the issue with such vigour and clarity of vision, Mr Obama may not be willing to accept defeat. But staying the course will require a willingness to fight battles that most US presidents have preferred to avoid.

Tony Karon is a New York-based analyst who blogs at rootlesscosmopolitan.com

tonykaron@gmail.com