Likud’s chief asset, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, may also be said to
be its chief liability. While unchallenged as preferred prime minister in every
opinion poll 17 days before Israel’s general election, his party – the joint
Likud-Yisrael Beitenu ticket – is on a downward slide (34) from its first
47-seat rating.
Netanyahu’s secretiveness and ambiguity on security and peace, issues which
in the last reckoning determine the outcome of Israeli elections and fate of its
politicians, are leaving his party unarmed against savage opposition tactics and
dividing his own camp.
While keeping his undoubted achievements in these
fields under his hat, his mistakes and shortcomings are hard to miss.
Five
months ago, Netanyahu was perceived as suddenly backing off plans to attack
Iran’s nuclear program, after declaring for years that a nuclear-armed Iran was
the most dangerous threat facing Israel. What happened was that on Sept. 5, he
abruptly closed a meeting of the security-diplomatic cabinet on Iran without
explanation, except for throwing in their faces that no forum competent to make
policy on Iran was safe from press leaks.
For most of the country, Netanyahu
lost points by failing to go through with this long-held resolve. His cartoon
presentation of Israel’s “red lines” at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 27 did
not change that perception. He spoke of postponing until “late spring or early
summer” an action vital to Israel’s security - apparently in deference to
Washington and out of consideration for Barack Obama’s campaign for
reelection.
Then, after months of silence, on Thursday Jan. 3, the prime
minister stood up before a gathering of Israel’s envoys in world capitals to
inform them, “Iran is still our No. 1 threat. I have set out our red line and
Iran has not yet crossed it. Our commitment was and is to prevent Iran obtaining
nuclear weapons.”
Those words had the same ring as sentiments heard from the
US president. Common to both is their distance from the facts.
In recent
months, Iran has developed a strategy for sidestepping “red lines” on quantities
of 20-percent enriched uranium by periodically announcing the suspension of the
process or the diversion of stocks to “medical research.”
This
strategy passed unchallenged although it should have been for four reasons:
1. The amounts of fissile material claimed by Tehran are unverifiable by
Israeli or Western intelligence - or even the International Atomic Energy Agency
in Vienna.
2. The interminable wrangling between Iran and the world powers
over amounts of medium-grade enriched uranium deemed sufficient for a bomb is no
longer relevant because Tehran's consent to “negotiations” with world powers has
bought Iran time to acquire the knowhow for assembling nuclear weapons and
making them operational. A few kilos of enriched uranium lacking here or there
are easily obtainable, either by domestic production or foreign acquisitions.
Netanyahu’s graphic red lines, effective at the time, have been overtaken by
events.
3. And his five-month silence has persuaded Iran’s rulers that they
no longer need fear an Israeli military strike on their nuclear sites.
4.
Iran has used those months free of international harassment and Israeli thunder
for giant steps toward developing plutonium-based weapons. Netanyahu’s boast
that he placed the Iranian nuclear menace at the forefront of the world's
platform has had its downside: As the preamble to lay the ground for a proactive
military policy, it was effective; however the gap between rhetoric and inaction
has harmed Israel’s credibility and damaged its strategic deterrence.
The same credibility gap is marked on the question of Syria’s chemical
weapons and Hizballah. Prime Minister Netanyahu, his ministers and diplomats,
have repeatedly pledged Israel would take steps to prevent unconventional
weapons reaching terrorist hands, including the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah, whose
leader Hassan Nasrallah often declares his rockets can reach every corner of
Israel - “from Kiryat Shemone to Eilat!”
A year ago, in January 2012, a
number of Western and Arab sources confirmed that Syrian ruler Bashar Assad had
transferred a portion of his chemical weapons arsenal to Hizballah strongholds
in the Lebanese Beqaa Valley and Hizballah units had trained in their
use.
Last month, the Defense Ministry’s political coordinator, Amos Gilad,
firmly asserted that Syria’s chemical weapons were “under control.” But this did
not amount to a denial that those unconventional weapons had come under the
joint logistical control of Iran, Syria and Hizballah.
It is possible that
Netanyahu has opted in some to degree to follow Obama’s lead on security matters
with regard to Iran, Syria and Hizballah and Hamas. Even then, he needs to do a
better job of offering consistency to the Israeli voter. Instead, he offers
silence or, at best, hazy, general messages that perplex the voter and keeps his
own party in turmoil.
On the one hand, he incurred popular resentment for
keeping 50,000 army reservists hanging around for nothing in the November
anti-terror Gaza operation. But on the other, his government and party are not
cashing in on the credit for the weeks of total calm on the Gaza front since
Nov. 21 – the first time Hamas has honored a ceasefire in a decade.
Neither
is he coming clean on the three additional advantages gained by working with
Obama and his collaborators, Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, to negotiate that
ceasefire. They could give his party's election campaign a badly needed shot in
the arm.
One is the improvement in relations with Turkey’s Erdogan government
after years of acrimony. It came out of Israel’s consent to support the US
president's venture to combine those three nations - plus the Palestinian Hamas
- into a new pro-American Sunni Muslim axis. Netanyahu agreed to modify
Israel's attitude on Hamas in a gamble for the prizes of rapprochement with
Ankara and the stabilization of ties with Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt.
Reading this map, the Palestinian Authority, under its Fatah leader Mahmoud
Abbas, is stirring up unrest on the West Bank as a reminder to Washington and
Jerusalem of his existence.
Although when he met the ambassadors in Jerusalem, Netanyahu spoke of the
danger of Hamas seizing control of the West Bank like the Gaza Strip in 2007,
this was contradicted by his decision to step back from vanquishing Hamas in the
November operation. And last week, he opened the Gaza crossing points to
supplies of building materials for the first time in six years as well as
cash.
The prime minister has a long way to go to bring his right-of-center party
around to a policy that embraces Hamas – even though it would help stave off
opposition accusations that Israel is diplomatically isolated. Although he has
invested considerable effort in thawing the iced-over peace process with the
Palestinians, he is constrained from placing this squarely on the party platform
because it would not gain a consensus.
All the opinion polls, show that,
contrary to left-of-center opposition rhetoric, a majority of Israelis don't
trust the Palestinians, including Mahmoud Abbas, as partners for negotiations or
for peaceful coexistence. Neither do most Israelis subscribe to the
international condemnation of Netanyahu’s policy of strengthening Jerusalem and
the settlement blocs on the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.
The Israeli
voter tends to judge every step taken by the government in terms of his and his
family's personal and financial security.
By keeping the voter in the dark,
he is hurting the electoral prospects of hiss Likud-Israel Beitenu as a party.
And by aligning too closely with Obama on Iran and the Middle East, he is
causing the more extreme factions of his party to cross the lines to the
religious nationalist Habayit Hayehudi and its new leader, Naftali Bennett.
There, they find a clearly-articulated platform calling for independent Israeli
stances on the core issues of security, peace with the Palestinians, borders and
Jewish settlements.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the left-of-center
opposition parties accuse Netanyahu and Lieberman of extreme right-wing pro-war
policies that threaten the country with disaster. Their campaign is turning
increasingly savage and personalized rather than issue-oriented. Even though the
Likud-Yisrael Beitenu alliance is declining in the Polls (down ten seats to 34
in the 120-member Knesset since November), its rivals are battering their heads
against the solid support Binyamin Netanyahu enjoys (43+ percent) as favorite
for prime minister.
The contrast between the declining popularity of
Netanyahu’s party and his leadership rating is striking.
The Likud bloc is
followed by Shelly Yacimovitch’s Labor (16 seats), Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi
(14), ultra-religious Shas and the new Yesh Atid (Future) – 11 each; Hatenua
founded by former foreign minister Tzipi Livni come next with 10
seats.
Friday night, Jan. 4, Livni publicly exhorted Labor and Future leaders
to join forces for building a front to prevent Netanyahu from forming the next
government after the Jan. 22 election. Pundits estimate that if Hatnua, Labor
and Future leaders do manage to forge a common platform, they can count on
around 40 Knesset seats compared with the right-of-center bloc’s 51. However,
the multiplicity of Israeli parties means that no single grouping has ever
achieved a parliamentary majority without coalition partners. This situation
makes for extreme mobility between the various blocs when the time comes to
build a government.
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