Netanyahu Hits An Iceberg

My friend, who has been to at least a dozen AIPAC conferences, said that this year's reminded him of the scene in Titanic where the first class passengers chipped pieces off the iceberg to make their drink.  Then he corrected himself.  "The ship isn't going to sink.  The conference was more like those people outside the Capitol screaming 'kill the bill' after everyone knew Obama had the votes."

I know what he meant.  AIPAC is like a closed community where everyone believes pretty much the same thing and never guesses what is happening outside.  I was like that in 1984 when Ronald Reagan carried 49 states against former Vice President Walter Mondale:  "How could that happen when I don't know a single person who voted for Reagan?" I wondered.

Inside AIPAC, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu brought the audience to its feet repeatedly as he said the very things that brought US-Israel relations to the lowest point in decades.

This is the part of the speech that received the greatest cheers and guaranteed that the White House would give Netanyahu the coldest reception ever given an Israeli prime minister the next day.

"Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital...All these neighborhoods are within a five-minute drive from the Knesset... Everyone knows that these neighborhoods will be part of Israel in any peace settlement. Therefore, building in them in no way precludes the possibility of a two-state solution."

The administration understands how utterly ridiculous Netanyahu's statement is.  It has never implied that Jerusalem is a settlement. Its position is that the final status of Jerusalem must be decided in negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, just like every other piece of land added to Israel after the 1967 war.

As for Netanyahu's "everyone knows" formulation, it is bogus.   After all, "everyone knows" that Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah and dozens of other West Bank cities will be inside the Palestinian state after negotiations.  Can they just annex them now? (see this great article from Foreign Policy on the subject)

"Everyone knows", including Netanyahu and every one of his predecessors since Yitzhak Rabin, that totally Palestinian areas of Jerusalem will almost surely not be part of Israel after negotiations are completed, largely because Israel doesn't want them and the Palestinians do. 

The only way Netanyahu can get away with declarations like that at AIPAC is because he knows that his audience knows very little about Jerusalem, including the fact that Israel unilaterally tripled its size after the 1967 war to add entirely Arab areas to the city.  One of the reasons it annexed these territories was so that it could give them up in the context of negotiations and say, "hey, we even gave up parts of Jerusalem."

But Netanyahu is saying that even these Arab neighborhoods are off the table.

Not so fast. Neither the Obama administration - nor any government in the world outside of Israel - accepts Netanyahu's argument. Not one.   

Nor do the Palestinians, naturally enough.  They argue, quite legitimately, that they will not negotiate until Netanyahu stops building on the lands they are negotiating over. Then they will negotiate over everything.

There is no way Netanyahu can win this argument (Including with his own people - according to the latest polls more than 40% favor a settlement freeze in East Jerusalem).

Knowing how specious this argument is, Netanyahu has decided he could do better by focusing on Palestinian "incitement."  He, like his U.S. supporters, is pointing to a square that was just dedicated in Ramallah to honor a terrorist who killed 38 Israelis in 1978.  That is appalling.  The square should be renamed immediately.

And the grave shrine in Hebron that honors Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli who slaughtered 29 Palestinians while at prayer in a mosque in 1994, should be covered over with dirt.  I've been to Goldstein's grave.  It's a shrine, which is just as bad as or worse than a square.

Click here to see a video of Israelis in Jerusalem singing songs commemorating mass murderer Goldstein just last month.

It's time for Netanyahu to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee. President Barack Obama and his team are determined to ensure Israel's security by getting negotiations started.  The President intends to be an "honest broker" not "Israel's lawyer."  And he cares about Palestinians, too.

Netanyahu can accept this and implement a freeze or he can do what he did this week: run to AIPAC and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) to save him from peace.  Lots of luck with that, Prime Minister.  It was one thing when you thought you were dealing with Jimmy Carter. It now looks like you are dealing with Reagan or LBJ.

ADDENDUM: The reference above to Presidents Johnson and Reagan referred only to the general perception of them as forceful, even uncompromising, presidents.  I was not referring to their stances on the Middle East where Reagan, only once or twice, stood up to the lobby and LBJ never did. On matters relating to the Middle East, the toughest president by far - and the one who saved tens of thousands of Israeli and Egyptian lives by his forceful leadership that produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty - was President Jimmy Carter.