A sandcastle built on dunes: Amnon Lord
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=44169
Even if a serious discussion about Israel’s relations with the increasingly ‘Palestinized’ Jordan could take place without causing a major international crisis, Israel might conclude that it shouldn’t lean too heavily on the shaky Hashemite kingdom.
For 24 hours earlier this week, Jordan was holding the Israeli Embassy and its staff hostage. There is no other way of describing the situation. All the thanks and smiles can’t hide the reality. The message from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conversation with respected Ambassador to Jordan Einat Schlein and the security guard who shot two Jordanians after he was attacked, known in the Israeli press only by his first name, Ziv, when they returned to Israel via the Allenby Crossing was clear: We can breathe easy.
It’s lucky that during the fog of tensions that knocked many people off kilter, Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah were allies. Jared Kushner, son-in-law and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, led them though a diplomatic minefield.
Abdullah made a mistake at the beginning. When there was still a media blackout in Israel about the embassy shooting, the king should have allowed Israel to extract the guard from Jordanian territory and bring him home. Once again, it was clear that any conflict with a Muslim official comes close to blowing up. The Muslims don’t like to see Jews using force and killing those who attack them. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sheikh Raed Salah of the outlaw Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and the Jordanians don’t like to witness scenarios like that — a Jew defending himself though force. But Abdullah’s mistake stemmed from the fact that he first had to pacify his own intelligence and security services, so that his guard dogs wouldn’t turn on him “in error.” And there are also the Bedouin tribes of Jordan, who pose a much greater danger to the Hashemite kingdom than the Palestinians who make up the vast majority of its population.
Only a few weeks ago, a Jordanian army officer was sentenced to death for murdering three members of the U.S. “special forces” (the CIA, apparently). The incident took place in November 2016 on a U.S. air force base in Jordan and apparently provided the background for this week’s incident involving the embassy guard shooting the furniture delivery guy.
Some of the Bedouin tribes have been in a state of semi-rebellion against King Abdullah for quite a while. The man who murdered the three Americans belonged to one of them. They demanded his release. The Islamic State brainwashing is taking root over there, as it has among certain sectors of the Israeli Arab public. Kushner and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt were doubtlessly well-briefed by the CIA on the affair before they helped Netanyahu and Abdullah out of the minefield that stretched between Amman and the Temple Mount. The incident needed to come to a quick end before it snowballed into a Benghazi-like mess.
King Abdullah has been “Abbas-ized.” He spends a lot of time outside his kingdom. He no longer has any strong men in the Jordanian government though whom he can govern. His government is becoming more and more western and Palestinian, made up of individuals who know how to curry favor with Washington and Brussels, but not the Bedouin at home.
People like to hold serious “discussions” with officials about important issues. But how could a serious discussion on the future of Israeli-Jordanian relations take place without it being leaked, turned into headlines, and causing a major crisis? If such a consultation were to take place, it might result in the conclusion that Israel’s alliance with Sunni Arab countries, Jordan in particular, is a sandcastle built on shifting dunes. It would be better not to invest too much in it. Some two months ago, after Trump paid a visit to Israel and the Middle East as a whole, an official on the inside track told me that there were no signs of a new start for Israel and the Saudis. The mini-intifada that has erupted since the murder of Border Policewoman Hadas Malka is proof of that.
Illogical thinking
The series of murders this past month has been educational. When the crisis with Jordan was at its height, the opposition factions, led by the Zionist Union, submitted a no-confidence motion against Netanyahu.
“The prime minister is leading both peoples to a needless round of bloodshed,” said MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Joint Arab List). Touma-Sliman was also voicing the opinions of Avi Gabbay and Amir Peretz of Labor, and the Meretz party. Meanwhile, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s position, as expressed in an interview at the beginning of the week, was the opposite: “We need to understand that Abu Mazen [Abbas] is no partner. He doesn’t seek peace, he’s looking to wear us down, make us crumble from the inside, attack Israel and its standing in international circles.”
Only a month and a half ago, Abbas was the main draw at a left-wing demonstration to mark “50 Years of Occupation.” His peace letter was read out loud, in a trembling voice, and the crowd cheered. Now he has embraced the killer of the Salomon family. He is unveiled as part of the Islamist consensus that supports terrorism. His supporters in Israel are calling the Islamist rioting about the Temple Mount “the submarines intifada.” On Saturday, after the Halamish slaughter, they gathered for their usual protest against Attorney-General Avichai Mendelblit as if nothing else had happened.
Lieberman’s position is a total departure from the late Shimon Peres’ deceptive vision of Abbas and PLO founder Yasser Arafat as men of peace. Whether Israel’s decision to install metal detectors at the Temple Mount after two policemen were murdered there on July 14 was right or wrong, it was an error of judgment that can be excused. In dealing with the Islamist public, you can always wind up being accidentally run over by some driver whose foot just happened to get stuck on the gas pedal, not that it’s his fault. But mistakes are allowed, if we understand that they’re mistakes and that our policy must change. For years, Israel didn’t take the Palestinians seriously.
We never considered that they might become a dangerous enemy. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said more than once that the Palestinians were not our enemies, and Peres certainly thought the same. To them, the major dangers Israel faced were Iraq and Iran. When Rabin was deliberating between negotiating with Syria and negotiating with the Palestinians, he deemed it less dangerous to put his money on Arafat. I followed him during the last month of the 1992 election. Rabin spoke openly about reaching an agreement on Palestinian autonomy within nine months, and said Syria would wait until later. He took the Palestinians less seriously and thought that the Oslo Accords were reversible.
The big historic mistake was not the Oslo Accords, but that we failed to adopt a new track on the Palestinians after a reality of terrorist attacks started knocking on our door. Then, like now, factors of irrationality, agents of putting reason aside, were at work. The fact that potential murderers can pop up from any part of the Palestinian community requires us to reach certain conclusions. The Palestinians are, after all, an enemy, one that must be deterred and made aware that nothing will come from its grass-roots murder movement. We need to change the rules.
Maybe that’s happened in the past two weeks. The homes of terrorists can be demolished within 24 hours of an attack. Let the families petition the High Court of Justice after bulldozers have already leveled the territory. Terrorist leaders and inciters can be deported, and we can compile a list of targets that will allow us to take swift retributive action. We can revoke the citizenship of actors like Salah and keep them in prison, but it would be better to deport them. The IDF’s old thinking, which rests mainly on keeping things quiet, follows an illogical path.
There is a bill before the U.S. Congress called the Taylor Force Act, after the American soldier who was killed in a terrorist attack here. The bill calls to stop the transfer of money from the U.S. to the PA, a sum that amounts to about 250 million shekels ($70 million) per year, some of which the PA uses to pay terrorists. There was a stage at which irrationality thought said it was better that the money keep flowing to the PA, so it doesn’t collapse. The Commanders for Israel’s Security lobby and the Israeli establishment as a whole are trying to block the legislation from passing. Given recent developments, the bill should get a green light. The policy of “managing” the conflict has stopped working to our benefit.
Chiefs of staff being demoted
Food for thought: Cpl. (res.) Avigdor Lieberman was chosen as defense minister over former IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon. The prime minister (who topped out at the rank of captain) decided, against the opinion of the former defense minister and the Defense Ministry’s team of experts, that Israel needed three new submarines. Maj. (res.) Naftali Bennett exhibited more original thought on the Hamas attack tunnels than then-Defense Minister Ya’alon did.
We can say that since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, a political leader who thinks for himself can conclude that he cannot depend on the assessments from the defense establishment and its positions. Take the security fence on the Sinai border, for example. We’ve forgotten it’s there; it was built without regard for the opinions of former Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
Israel is waging an internal war of Gog and Magog in which former IDF chiefs, great military men, are being demoted. We can see this in how the Temple Mount, the embassy crisis, and the submarines scandal are being handled. There is no longer any military official who is known as “Mr. Security” whose leadership in the government takes precedence over all other decision makers. The era of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the first time in the history of the state when foreign policy was more important than defense policy.
All this leads to the question of Netanyahu’s leadership. For eight years, he was on the defense against his toughest opponent, former U.S. President Barak Obama, who did Israel a lot of damage. Obama was the strategist and executor of “soft force.”
Soft force refers to all the power that can be exerted without actually pulling the trigger. It encompasses personal esteem, trends in music and fashion, and U.N. resolutions. Obama achieved some of the targets he set for himself, and the peoples of the Arab world, Israel, and American society itself are paying a heavy price.
Even in the face of the former U.S. administration’s ceaseless propaganda onslaught, Netanyahu managed to promote his own agenda. Just try and image the two weeks since the police officers were murdered on the Temple Mount being handled by Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. It would have included condemnations of the violence on both sides, symmetry between Israel and the Palestinians, and talk about the need to end the occupation and Palestinian rights.
If Netanyahu didn’t have a plan for several years ahead, his leadership would have collapsed under the pressure of his opponents at home and abroad, and the investigations against him. There would be no reason for him to remain in power. There are plenty of people, including former Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, who are sick of all this.
If Netanyahu spent long days or weeks vacationing abroad or on islands with billionaires, like Obama and King Abdullah, the claims about alleged illicit gifts might register. But a prime minister who devotes 20, if not 24, hours a day to public affairs, seven days a week, is not corrupt. I’m not going to count his cigars.
Netanyahu has created room for Israel to maneuver that it never had in the past. And he did so while on the defense against Obama’s campaign of delegitimization. Now he has a rare opportunity to lead his diplomatic policy in a world that is changing and unstable, especially the parts that are close to Israel. Netanyahu, unlike others who aspire to lead the country, holds a key position with both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as between India and the U.S.
Fostering the relations between Israel, the U.S., and India, so as to create a sort of “alliance of democracies,” is the main goal. This is the agenda of Netanyahu and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and it goes beyond defense and economic deals. The leftist security school of thought, which rejects Netanyahu, sees the Arab problem through the Palestinian filter, and would let the U.S. direct its foreign policy.
The other two major issues of Netanyahu’s agenda are turning Israel’s maritime zone into a strategic-economic asset, and removing the Palestinian issue from ordinary policy patterns. The maritime issue includes the navy acquisitions that are currently under investigation, as well as the framework natural gas agreement. The leftist security approach wants to bring down the vision of energy independence and strategic sea power by using any means necessary to get rid of Netanyahu. We know that water polo is one of the most violent sports there is. Underneath the surface, players hit and kick the most sensitive places.
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