Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have returned from the UN General Assembly, where he was fighting a rear-guard action against the Palestinian bid for statehood, in bullish mood and showing little inclination to compromise.  His hardline stance will have been boosted by the latest opinion poll which shows that if an election were to be held today, Netanyahu’s Likud Party would remain the largest party in the Knesset with 32 seats.  However, Labour would move into second place on 26 seats, ahead of Kadima (18 seats) and Yisrael Beiteinu (10 seats).

At the United Nations last Friday (23 September), the European Union presented a proposal for Israel and the Palestinian authority to resume direct talks within a month and for both sides to present proposals on borders and security within three months.  The aim would be to achieve a final settlement by the end of 2012.  But the messages coming out of Jerusalem suggest this is completely unrealistic.  On 29 September, Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon said that negotiations could not succeed “with this Palestinian leadership”, mostly because they would not recognize Israel as a Jewish state or drop the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees.

Netanyahu agrees that there should be direct negotiations, but he too has reiterated the view since returning from New York that this cannot happen as things stand because the Palestinians “don’t want to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people, to give up on the refugees, and to give us the security conditions necessary for the defence of Israel”.  Netanyahu has also said, point blank, that he would not consider a settlement freeze.  Speaking to local media on 29 September, Netanyahu said that the settlements could be discussed during negotiations but the Palestinians should not “cherry-pick one of the final core issues and put it up front as a pre-condition”.

Netanyahu’s line is that he gave the Palestinians nearly a year of settlement-freeze before but that didn’t get them to the negotiating table, so he won’t do it again.  By coming back to this issue again and again, says Netanyahu, the Palestinians are indicating “that they don’t really want to negotiate”.

On the eve of a new Jewish year, Netanyahu has made it clear that his priorities are to continue to develop the State of Israel (infrastructure, society, education, defences), not peace negotiation.  He said: “The message I have for the coming year [is that] we have to continue to fortify the state of Israel.  That is the best guarantor of the future and ultimately the best guarantor of peace.  You don’t make peace with the weak; you make peace with the strong.”

These new year’s eve comments are very much in line with the predictions we have been making since the outset of the Arab Spring, namely that Israel – facing the prospect of a hostile Egypt for the first time since 1973, along with an increasingly hostile Turkey – will be in no mood to compromise on territory.  In his comments quoted above Netanyahu said that the Palestinians weren’t prepared to give Israel “the security conditions necessary for the defence of Israel”.  But that gift is not the Palestinians’ to give.  The key to Israeli security lies in Cairo, Ankara, and Tehran, not in Ramallah - and developments in those capitals are all moving in the wrong direction for Israel.