The great unravelling

Israel may soon abandon its diplomatic achievements because Yair Lapid and most of his partners in the new coalition want to erase Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s achievements.

By  Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM        06-11-2021 07:27

(Left to right) Bahrain Foreign Affairs Minister Sheikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former US President Donald Trump and UAE Foreign Affairs Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan sign the Abraham Accords at the White House on Sept. 15, 2020 | File photo: EPA

Over the past decade, for the first time in its history, Israel developed a strong diplomatic posture in the region and worldwide. Israel developed strategic ties with Arab states, and the states of the eastern Mediterranean. It has built close ties with the EU’s Visegrád Group of central European states Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic as well as Austria and Italy. Israel upgraded its diplomatic and trade relations with the states of Africa and Central and South America, as well as with India, Japan and South Korea.

Unfortunately, it is likely that what Israel achieved through painstaking effort may be lost after the new governing coalition led by Yair Lapid takes power next week. This is the case for three reasons.

First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the author of Israel’s diplomatic triumphs. They are predicated on his foreign policy vision that diplomatic ties are built on common interests even more than ideology and that Israel has much to offer the nations of the world.

There are many things that divide the members of the incoming governing coalition. But they agree on one thing – they all hate Netanyahu. So, the first reason Israel may soon abandon its diplomatic achievement is because Lapid and most of his partners in the coalition want to erase Netanyahu’s achievements.

The second reason Israel’s diplomatic position is likely to soon crash is because Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz along with most of their partners do not share Netanyahu’s diplomatic vision. Lapid is set to become foreign minister. Like most members of Israel’s elite class, which includes the political left, the media, the senior brass of the security establishment and the senior leadership of the foreign and justice ministries, Lapid and Gantz believe Israel’s diplomatic position is exclusively a function of its relations with the Beltway establishment. The closer Israel is to the American ruling class, the stronger it is internationally. The weaker Israel’s relations with the American elite, the weaker its international posture.

The third reason Israel’s decade of diplomatic achievements is likely to end in short order is because America-obsessed Lapid, Gantz and their ilk don’t understand the importance or potential of Netanyahu has accomplished. They will not dedicate the necessary resources to maintain the ties he forged with the likes of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz or Brazil’s President Javier Bolsonaro, because they don’t value those ties. So the ties will wither.

This then brings us to Washington, the only place that matters for the incoming cabinet ministers.

On Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before House and Senate committees. His remarks showed that just as Lapid and his colleagues are set to tear down Netanyahu’s legacy, US President Joe Biden, Blinken and their advisors have taken an industrial-sized eraser to Donald Trump’s policies and achievements in the Middle East.

Take the Golan Heights. In 2019, Trump recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the strategic enclave along its borders with Syria and Jordan. When asked whether the Biden administration also recognizes Israel’s sovereignty, Blinken responded, “As a practical matter, Israel has control of the Golan Heights, irrespective of its legal status, and that will have to remain unless and until things get to a point where Syria and everything operating out of Syria no longer poses a threat to Israel, and we are not anywhere near that.”

Or the shorter answer: No.

Then there’s Iran. Democrat senators on Monday joined their Republican colleagues in demanding clarifications about the administration’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran. The 2015 nuclear deal, to which the administration is committed placed temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities and in exchange, gave Iran an open road to a military nuclear capability by 2030 and $150 billion in sanctions relief. Trump abandoned the deal in 2018 because Iran was breaching the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear actions and reinstated US economic sanctions that the Obama administration lifted.

The Democrat and Republican lawmakers asked how cancelling US economic sanctions on Iran would achieve the goal of limiting Iran’s nuclear activities given that Tehran had been breaching the deal’s limitations on its nuclear activities all along. They wanted to understand why Iran would agree to longer and stronger restrictions on its nuclear work in the future if the 2015 deal gives them an open path to the bomb. And they wanted to know if Blinken could guarantee that money from sanctions relief wouldn’t end up in the coffers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Blinken responded to all of the questions with a non-sequitur.

“Its [Iran’s nuclear] program is galloping forward…The longer this goes on, the more the breakout time gets down…It’s now down, by public reports, to a few months at best. And if this continues, it will get down to a matter of weeks.”

Blinken’s alarmist view wasn’t a preamble to a call for military strikes against Iran’s nuclear installations or even for an announcement of a new strategy of maximum economic pressure aimed at collapsing the regime.

To the contrary, Blinken said that in light of the dimensions and urgency of the threat, the US needs to immediately return to the 2015 deal, that is, give Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief, to “put the nuclear problem in a box.”

In plain English, Blinken said that the senators’ concerns were irrelevant. The administration’s policy goal is not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power and a regional hegemon. The administration’s goal is to be Iran’s friend.

Just days before Blinken renounced US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and said the goal of US policy towards Iran is to be the ayatollahs’ friend even if that means letting Iran become a nuclear armed regional hegemon, he met his “friend” Benny Gantz at the State Department. Clearly the meeting made no impression on Blinken. If Gantz had hoped that “good chemistry” with the Biden crowd would make it possible for him to influence them, he was doubtlessly disappointed.

Recognizing that Obama and his team – which is now Biden’s team – had no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear armed hegemonic power, over the past eight years Netanyahu developed an interest-based alliance with the Arab Gulf states.

The administration is so hostile to this alliance that it opened an offensive against Saudi Arabia immediately after it came into office. The administration refuses to call the Abraham Accords by their name. And during Hamas’ recent mini-war against Israel, the administration reportedly pressured Abraham Accords member states the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to condemn Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas’s missile capabilities. There is no doubt that Netanyahu spent long hours working to ensure that no such condemnations were made.

In the face of the administration’s visceral hostility to Israel’s ties with the Sunni Arab states, Lapid, Gantz and their colleagues be far less likely to move heaven and earth to maintain them.

Then there’s Jerusalem. On Monday, 16 Republican senators signed a letter to President Joe Biden expressing their opposition to the administration’s plan to open a consulate in Jerusalem for the Palestinian Authority and to reopen the PLO’s representative office in Washington. Trump closed the consulate as required by the Jerusalem Embassy Act. He closed the PLO office in DC because it operated in breach of the Promoting Justice and Security for Victims of Terrorism Act, otherwise known as the Taylor Force act. Opening a consulate in Jerusalem and reopening the PLO office in Washington would both be contrary to US law, they noted.

While the senators were doubtlessly right, the administration is committed to following through on their plan. The only way that they might change course is if their efforts are beset with trenchant opposition.

It won’t get any from Lapid’s coalition. Labor leader and incoming transportation minister Merav Michaeli said this week she intends to cancel 1.5 billion shekels ($462 million) now budgeted for improving roads in Judea and Samaria. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas is ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. He might even attend the opening of a U. diplomatic mission in Israel’s capital that is dedicated to serving Israel’s Palestinian enemies.

One of Israel’s greatest diplomatic assets in recent years has been the close ties it cultivated with EU member states led by nationalist leaders. Time after time, these leaders blocked efforts by the EU leadership in Brussels to condemn Israel.

The leader who has done the most to block EU condemnations of Israel has been Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The most outspoken critic of ties between Jerusalem and Budapest has been Lapid. When Orbán came to Israel on an official visit, Lapid referred to event as a “national disgrace,” because Orbán has expressed admiration for Hungary’s wartime leader and Nazi collaborator Admiral Horthy. Like the heads of the US Jewish community with whom he is closely allied, Lapid is deeply hostile to European nationalist leaders despite their enthusiastic support for Israel. As foreign minister, Lapid is likely to harpoon Israel’s ties to the Visegrád Group and so destroy Israel’s ability to prevent EU condemnations of Israel.

What about Naftali Bennett? Where will the prime minister designate be in all of this? Even in the unlikely event that Bennett will want to maintain Netanyahu’s policies, he won’t have the power to do so. Although in theory the government is supposed to give equal weight to its right and left wing members, it is hard to see how this will manifest itself in practice. Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party is still considered a right-wing party. But Lieberman has adopted the left’s positions on nearly every issue. It is hard to imagine that he would side with Bennett on anything controversial, particularly if it involves maintaining Netanyahu’s legacy. And even if Liberman sides with Bennett, they won’t have the power to force Lapid to do anything he doesn’t want to do. At best, they will be able to block him from doing some things that they don’t want him to do.

If Bennett decides to act independently as prime minister on behalf of Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights, or blocking Iran from getting the bomb or anything at all that Lapid and the Left oppose, he will find himself raked over the coals by his coalition partners and the media. Without a political base, Bennett – like his fellow right-winger New Hope Party leader Gideon Sa’ar – will quickly be presented with two options. He can either adopt the ideological positions of the left, as Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Ariel Sharon did before him, or he can bring down the government and leave public life.

It has taken the Biden administration less than six months to unravel Trump’s achievements in Israel and the wider Middle East. We can expect the incoming government to unravel Israel’s diplomatic position on their first day in power.