Palestine

Benjamin Netanyahu is to tight corners as Harry Houdini was to handcuffs. Only a fool or an expert foreign analyst would write off Netanyahu simply because Likud didn’t come first in Tuesday’s elections. There’s about as much chance of him throwing in the towel after coming a close second to Blue & White as there is of him ending up in Houdini’s bracelets because of corruption charges. Consider the blue-rinsed Machiavelli’s previous electoral failures. In 2009, Likud won 27 mandates, second to the 28 seats of Tzipi Livni and her new centrist party, Kadima. Netanyahu formed a majority coalition government, Kadima dissolved after the 2015 elections, and Livni, a politician without a public, retired from politics in 2019.

As we know, President Trump often governs by tweet – he literally can’t help himself – but from time to time he also loves to have a secret plan. During the 2016 campaign, there was a secret ‘absolutely foolproof’ plan to defeat Isis. Much to his surprise, he ended up in the Oval Office and was pressed to say what was in this secret plan. He revealed that it was a plan to come up with a plan. He gave the US military 30 days to provide a ‘comprehensive strategy’ against the so-called Islamic State. This turned out to be to ‘bomb the shit out of Isis…just bomb those suckers’ – Trump’s words – something that both he and the generals could heartily agree upon. It worked, eventually, though they are still digging the bodies of civilians out of the rubble in Raqqa.

Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar should have been allowed to enter Israel, even if they hate it, and deny its right to exist. Even if they agitate for its destruction which, given the neighborhood, means agitating for the mass murder of Jewish civilians because they are Jewish. Even if, though of course this is simply unthinkable in both cases, they hate Jews in general. And even though, instead of joining last week’s 72-strong bipartisan congressional delegation, which bipartisanned its way optimistically around meetings with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders of various parties, they instead set up their own visit with the globally renowned and seriously named Humpty Dumpty Institute, so they could malign Israel as much as they possibly could.

Jared Kushner’s two-day ‘Peace to Prosperity’ workshop in Bahrain, the administration claims, was the first step in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians sent delegations. The roll-out of the strategy paper that preceded it was met with near silence. America’s regional partners provided only lukewarm support to Kushner’s efforts and, not least, the workshop was amateurishly misnamed. Kushner believes it’s actually ‘prosperity to peace’ — not the other way around. The workshop’s results, or lack of them, were predictable. But criticism among those who have been down this road before has been muted, partly because of Kushner’s quiet but focused effort to solicit their views.

The problem of resolving the tangle of conflict in the Middle East is one that has defeated generations of the world’s most experienced statesmen, and resisted the blandishments of its greatest orators. So who better now to step in than a well-groomed thirtysomething New York property developer, offering the 'deal of the century'? There were some hiccups to start with, sure. Jared Kushner launched his 'Peace to Prosperity' workshop in Bahrain with a cocktail party – alcohol not being traditionally the thing with Muslims. And it was boycotted from the off by the Palestinian Authority. Still, he had a bash.

It is with a heavy heart and a nice calming feeling that I find myself agreeing with Rashida Tlaib. Tlaib claims to get a ‘calming feeling’ every time she thinks about how the Arabs of British-controlled Palestine gave Jews a ‘safe haven’ after World War Two. This remark has elicited accusations of anti-Semitism and disbelief from President Trump, prominent House Republicans Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney, and a host of reality-based historians. But Tlaib is right, in this if little else, to protest that her words were not anti-Semitic.

On the late afternoon of September 29, 2000 (nearly 20 years ago now), I took a cab from Jerusalem into Bethlehem to visit with an old friend and his family, the owners of a well-known Bethlehem hotel. The streets were bustling; buses filled with tourists roared up the main Jerusalem-to-Bethlehem road towards the Church of the Nativity (the reputed birthplace of Jesus), and the city’s gift shops were jammed. My plan was to stay the night, but my friend (a Palestinian Christian who’d moved to Bethlehem from Philadelphia), shook his head: ‘No room at the inn,’ he said, and smiled at his joke. ‘In fact, you won’t find a room anywhere in the city.’ I was surprised. In all of my years traveling to the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, I’d never had trouble finding a place to stay.

In the digital world, you are what you like. So why was Rashida Tlaib’s official Instagram page following an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist with links to a mosque notorious for its terrorist connections? The account, ‘Free.Palestine.1948’, belongs to a British Muslim who is an accomplished promoter of extremism. Photos of Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler are juxtaposed, and a rat superimposed on the Israeli flag.

Imagine a long list of leaders that liberal pundits love to hate. It starts with Donald Trump, followed by Vladimir Putin and a series of nationalist and populist politicians, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu stuck in between Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the Polish and Czech leaders. One of the reasons for the deep animosity towards the Israeli Likud Party chief, especially among many liberal American Jews and European lefties, has been the perceived love affair between the Donald and Bibi and the belief that if these two BFFs would only disappear from the political universe, we will finally have peace in our time in the Holy Land.

Over his last decade in power, Benjamin Netanyahu has easily seen off all challengers. The Labour Party has gone through four leaders during this period, whose main achievement has been to transform the party which founded Israel 70 years ago in to an irrelevant relic. ‘Centrist’ leaders who tried to enter the vacuum left by Labour had their brief moments but failed to threaten Netanyahu’s primacy. Netanyahu has had three key elements working for him. His own personal standing as ‘Mr Security,’ Israel’s only remaining responsible grown-up, with the experience of navigating the country through treacherous geopolitical waters. The base of his Likud party which has held together, despite the growing national fatigue from his overbearing presence.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Largely because of the big concrete wall that divides you from Jerusalem, and prevents Islamists from Hebron from blowing up Jewish civilians in the holy city. Such are the facts on the ground, and such is the world in which we live, and the chasm between religious aspirations and political realities. I was reminded of these facts on Saturday night when, as I flailed through the chords at our neighborhood carol-singing party, Phillips Brooks’s lyric of 1868 shot past my eyes. Now, some Jews complain about Christmas.