Insights on Peace from Avigdor Lieberman. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 6, 2014.
Tobin:
Since
he returned to his post as Israel’s foreign minister after a break to fend off
failed attempts to prosecute him on corruption charges, Avigdor Lieberman has
been treated with the same disdain by the international media and many of
Israel’s foreign friends as he got before he was finally acquitted after a
decade-long prosecution. Even in Israel’s roughhouse political scene, Lieberman
is the proverbial bull in a china shop. The general assumption is that
Lieberman, who does not speak fluent English and has a tough-guy political
fixer image dating back to his origins in the former Soviet Union, can’t be
trusted to deal with nuanced issues. Prime Minister Netanyahu stripped him of
any responsibility for relations with the United States as well as the peace
process with the Palestinians since he first assumed this crucial Cabinet post.
But though Lieberman’s significance has more to do with domestic Israeli
politics, occasionally he utters statements that show us he has a better grasp
of the situation than the wise guys who often put him down as being out of his
depth.
That
happened yesterday when Lieberman addressed a conference of Israeli diplomats
in Jerusalem and said something that you wouldn’t have expected from someone
associated (at least in the view of many of his country’s critics) with
something quite so sensible. As Barak Ravid wrote in Haaretz:
Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday that Israel must accept U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal for a framework agreement with the
Palestinians since “any other proposal from the international community won’t
be as good.”
Though
that is not what much of the Israeli right—with whose views he is usually
associated and for whose votes he will be seeking in the next election when his
Yisrael Beitenu Party competes against Netanyahu’s Likud rather than running as
its partner as it did in the last two Knesset elections—wants to hear,
Lieberman is correct. This does not mean, however, that he is drifting to the
left. The minister also noted that although he supports Kerry’s efforts to
achieve a comprehensive peace, he and his party will never support an agreement
that does not involve an Israeli surrender of territory inside the 1967 lines
where Arabs predominate, a position that has been called racist by his
opponents. But rather than dismissing this as a poison pill that will, like the
Palestinian claim to the “right of return” for the descendants of the 1948
refugees, ensure that peace will never be achieved, Lieberman’s critics should
listen closely to what he says.
Lieberman
has repeatedly dismissed the Palestinian Authority and its leadership as not
being a peace partner, yet he praised the secretary of state for his work in
trying to get them to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—a formulation that is
synonymous with accepting the end of the conflict. Kerry’s pursuit of an
agreement is a mistake at this point because of the division between the
Fatah-controlled West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza. It’s also foolish to
think that any group of Palestinian leaders can sell their people on genuine
peace on any terms in the absence of a sea change in opinion that will enable
them to let go of an existential conflict that is integral to their identity as
a people. Nor should Israelis regard the Obama administration’s clear tilt
toward the Palestinians on the issues of territory and Jerusalem with
complacency.
Peace
process enthusiasts who prefer to ignore the truth about the Palestinians
consider such views intemperate. Yet Lieberman is correct when he notes that
Kerry’s acceptance of Israel’s demand that the PA accept Israel as a Jewish
state—something that its leader Mahmoud Abbas has sworn he will never do—is a
victory of sorts. That is something Israel cannot expect to hear, as Lieberman
notes, from anyone else in the international community.
Yet it
is likely that Lieberman’s resurrection of his party’s proposal for trading the
“triangle” of Arab towns adjacent to the “green line” in Israel’s central
region will cause his usual detractors to dismiss him as someone seeking to
sabotage chances for peace. But while it is difficult to imagine this ever
happening, it is possible that this seemingly radical idea may not be as
unreasonable as some think.
After
all, if it is a given that peace requires some Israelis to be turned out of
their homes in communities in the West Bank and that other such settlements in
blocs close to the pre-1967 lines should be incorporated into the Jewish state
in exchange for other Israeli territory, why should that swap involve areas
where people who now call themselves Palestinians rather than “Israeli Arabs”
predominate?
There
are two reasons that explain why the Palestinians refuse even to consider, must
less to discuss this proposal.
One is
that their notion of swaps—a concept specifically endorsed by President
Obama—is so minimal as to be insignificant. Even if one assumes that the PA is
serious about wanting peace—something that its ongoing policy of honoring
terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians and fomenting hatred against
Israel and Jews renders not credible—it has shown little willingness to accept
a map based more on demographic reality than a rigid insistence on the 1967
lines.
The
other is that their goal is not to have two states for two peoples—the concept
that Obama, Kerry, and the Israelis have discussed—but a Jew-free Palestinian
Arab state on one side of the border and a mixed Jewish-Arab nation on the
other whose balance would be altered by an influx of millions of Arabs, vastly
overwhelming the Jewish majority and, in the bargain, expunging the explicitly
Jewish state the United Nations voted to establish in 1947. While some Israelis
have spoken of accepting a token number of these so-called refugees, Lieberman
is right to refuse a single one, a stance justified by the international
community’s unwillingness to recognize the fact that an equal number of Jewish
refugees from the Arab and Muslim world lost their homes after 1948.
Of
course, it is understandable that the Arab citizens of the triangle would
prefer to stay inside Israel where, despite their complaints and alienation
from the Jewish state, they enjoy its democracy and equal rights that no
Palestinian enjoys under the rule of either Fatah or Hamas. But the very fact
that Arabs would prefer to live in a majority Jewish state than to be
incorporated into the putative Palestinian one tells us a lot about what kind
of country that would be.
No one
should expect Netanyahu, let alone Kerry, to start listening to Lieberman. But
rather than dismissing him, perhaps the secretary should be listening closely
to the foreign minister’s insights. Until he can convince the Palestinians to
recognize Israel as a Jewish state and negotiate a deal that would truly be a
solution of two states for two peoples, Kerry’s peace efforts will remain a
fool’s errand.
