Reality and rhetoric

“A Sophisticated rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” Disraeli’s famous description of his opponent Gladstone, on July 27, 1878, has been justly applied to leaders who imagine that their skills in oratory can conceal the bankruptcy of their policies.

No one cares to recall today President Barack Obama’s speech at Cairo, on June 4, 2009, addressed to the Arab and Muslim world with its promise, now proven false, of “a new beginning”.

Much less was expected of President Obama’s recent three-day visit to Israel and expectations were not raised one bit by his oratorical efforts either. A careful reading of the texts of his speeches suggests that the main purpose of the trip was to repair US-Israeli relations and to strengthen his own political base at home.

Iran and Syria received far greater attention. A determined attempt to promote the peace process in Palestine was farthest from his mind. He knew that, in his hosts, he had no partner in such an exercise.

General elections were held in Israel in January 2013. But, thanks to the country’s strange electoral system, the “real election” takes place with frantic biddings only after the results are out. A coalition was drummed up on March 14 and took office only a couple of days before the US president arrived.

Five factions comprising 68 of parliament’s 120 members will govern the country. Benjamin Netanyahu remains prime minister with allies who are divided on the peace process. The far right Jewish Home party is led by Naftali Bennett who had promised the electorate to annex 60 per cent of the West Bank and to rule out a Palestinian state.

With 12 members, he will strengthen Netanyahu’s Likud party which has, besides, the rabid Avigdor Lieberman as ally who is himself a West Bank settler. Not much store, therefore, can be set by the exclusion of ultra-orthodox parties at the insistence of Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party. He is a former TV broadcaster and columnist, and won 19 seats on a plank of domestic reforms.

In charge of the peace process will be Tzipi Livni, a former foreign minister, whose newly formed Hatnua party has a mere six seats. The crucial defence ministry will be held by a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a former chief of Israel’s military, Moshe Ya’alon.

The net result was well summed up by Shalom Yerushalmi in the Israeli daily Maariv. There “will in fact be two governments”. The socio-economic one will be led by Yair Lapid. But the foreign policy regime will be run by Netanyahu. It will be afflicted with policy paralysis. Yair Lapid will be left free “to influence health and welfare policies” and Tzipi Livni will be free to talk peace. But Netanyahu will continue to change the situation on the ground so as virtually to extinguish the two-state option. This government is not a partner in the peace process. It is a wrecker.

Prof Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, writing in The New York Times, described how far this baleful exercise of expanding settlements has proceeded and its effect on the two-state option.

Particularly ominous is the construction of housing for Jewish settlers in E1, an area of the West Bank to the east of Jerusalem. It will seal the gap between Arab East Jerusalem and Israel’s longest settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, further to the east.

His comment bears quotation in extenso: “That gap is the last remaining link for Palestinians between the northern and southern parts of the West Bank; it also occupies the interface among and between the Palestinian communities of Ramallah, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem — which, apart from being the cultural, religious, social and economic focal point of Palestinian life, is also one day supposed to be the capital of Palestine.

“In moving forward with long-threatened plans to develop E1, Israel will be breaking the back of the West Bank and isolating the capital of the prospective Palestinian state from its hinterland. In so doing, it will be terminating once and for all the very prospect of that state — and with it, by definition, any lingering possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

There were 250,000 settlers on the West Bank at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Twenty years later there are twice as many. In 2009 President Obama called for a freeze on the settlements and was snubbed by Netanyahu. On March 21, during his visit to the West Bank city of Ramallah, he voiced his opposition to settlements but pressed the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to make a freeze on the settlement constructions a precondition to negotiations on other issues. “If we solve those problems, the settlement issue will be solved.”

As for the stand-off between him and Netanyahu, Obama dismissed it in his speech, on March 21, as just “a drama between me and my friend Bibi”. The idiom and the rhetoric he deployed were designed to emphasise the emotional bonds between two “eternal” allies. “African Americans and Jewish Americans marched together at Selma and Montgomery, with rabbis carrying the Torah as they walked. They boarded buses for freedom rides together. They bled together. They gave their lives together.”

Palestinians were “the other”. They received sympathies. Israelis were exhorted to “put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes”. Palestinians received no more than mere sympathies.

Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Central Council, denounced the White House for looking on “when the process of assassinating the two-state solution is going on in front of our eyes”. This is a crime which will exact a price. It would lead either to a one-state solution in which Arabs will be equal citizens in a democratic Israel, denuding it of its Jewishness, or second-class citizens in a Jewish state shorn of its pretensions to democratic values.

The writer is an author and a lawyer.