Who is Binyamin Netanyahu? Peace Depends on the Answer

by Richard H. Curtiss

Recently, after I finished interviewing a diplomat assigned to a liaison office that was supposed to become an Israeli embassy in an Arab country, he said, “Now I’d like to ask you a question. Why do you speak tolerantly about Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, but angrily about Binyamin Netanyahu? Do you really think he’s so different?”

I answered that Netanyahu’s bad treatment of the Palestinians would end Israeli normalization with the Arabs, and “your embassy won’t be opening after all.” On that I was right. But I didn’t answer his real question, and still can’t, although I’ve reflected ever since on all of the leaders involved in an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

Yasser Arafat is a complicated person, but what compelled him to sign the Oslo accords is simple to understand. It started with his catastrophic choice, against the advice of his aides, not to condemn the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussain’s forces. At one stroke he lost the funding for the PLO, virtually all of which had come from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, other Arab oil-producing countries of the Gulf, and from the Palestinians working there. His decision also made the Palestinians in those countries suspect, so that most of those who left during the Gulf war were not allowed to return. He also lost the credibility he had been building up in the United States since 1988, for whatever that was worth.

Recalling the plane crash he survived in the Libyan desert, some of Arafat’s followers may believe now that he was spared to lead his people back to Palestine. At the time, however, they speculated that injuries he sustained might have aggravated the personality trait that seemed to drive him to frenetic activity without apparent long-term goals. In short, Yasser Arafat seemed washed up as the leader of the Palestinians until the possibility of reaching even an ambiguous agreement at Oslo gave him a new, last-chance opportunity.

So, as he entered Hebron on Jan. 19 for the first time since 1965, he seemed at the top of his form. He will go down in history as the father of his country if the Oslo accords lead to control by a sovereign Palestinian state of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—or the Benedict Arnold of the Palestinians if the accords do not.

Shimon Peres also seems complex, but his dream that Israel could outgrow its pariah status and integrate itself economically into the Middle East was not. He concluded that by making peace with all of its Arab neighbors, Israel could shed its image in the West as a permanent mendicant state, and in the Middle East as the last vestige of Western colonialism and ride the free-market wave into a secure niche in the Middle East economy.

That was the straightforward part of his dream. The unknown part was whether he really intended to give back to the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians all of the land seized by Israel in 1967 and since, or gradually clutter the West Bank and Golan Heights with so many settlements, territorial adjustments, and land, water, and sovereignty restrictions that Israel’s neighbors would have gained a meaningless peace. Nor was it clear whether or not Peres would convert “normalization” with the Arabs into a blatant attempt to impose Israel as the Middle East’s mandatory “middleman,” pulling the financial and political strings linking the oil producing Arabs to their customer/suppliers in Europe, Asia and North America.

When Peres spoke at the White House signing ceremonies for the Oslo accord in 1993, he brought tears to the eyes of his listeners. But the same “dreamer” was capable of remarking to guests at a diplomatic function in Tel Aviv that “we screwed the Palestinians” in negotiating the 1995 Oslo II agreement. Because his own people didn’t trust him enough to elect him in 1996, the world may never learn the true nature of the dreams he was pursuing.

Yitzhak Rabin seemed a less complicated personality. Israeli voters concluded that in this straightforward soldier turned politician, what they saw was what they got. Upon his election in 1992, he set out to end the Palestinian intifada by force and to repair frayed relations with Israel’s only remaining supporter, the United States. His followers, therefore, were stunned when Rabin suddenly bought into the Peres dream of normalization with the Arabs.

But which scenario did Rabin really envision as the price of normalization? Was it all of the land for real peace with a sovereign Palestine, or a sham “autonomy” in which Palestinian collaborators would be allowed to collect taxes and garbage, and little else? We’ll never know because, with his assassination by a Jewish fundamentalist, Rabin took his intentions, if he understood them himself, to his grave.

So what kind of leader is the much younger Binyamin Netanyahu, devoted son of an ideologue from the Revisionist movement, from which the Likud Party is directly descended? The Revisionists were dedicated to a “Greater Israel” extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and beyond into Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and perhaps parts of Egypt and Iraq. Likud’s first two elected prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom had been active terrorists in the Jewish underground during Israel’s independence struggle, never renounced that dream.

Netanyahu, who spent many years in the U.S. as a child, as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, has mastered many of the tricks of American politics. It was he who forced Likud to select its party leader by a vote of the membership, not the leaders. And it was he who put Likud’s support behind the selection of Israel’s prime minister by popular vote, like a U.S. president, rather than by a parliamentary vote. Netanyahu campaigned on a Likud platform opposing land-for-peace, but he was elected by a thin majority of Israeli voters who, polls showed, considered security even more important than land. Further, the polls that now show Israelis favor the Oslo accords by a bigger margin than they favor Netanyahu must be of concern to him.

In dealing with Hebron, both Arafat and Netanyahu have set precedents. Although initially he refused to do it, Arafat has, in effect, renegotiated some of the terms to which the Israeli Labor government already had agreed in the Oslo II agreement.

Netanyahu, in turn, has put his signature on an Israeli withdrawal from four-fifths of Hebron and agreed to a delayed timetable for further Israeli withdrawals. Such withdrawals, specified in treaties signed by Israel’s Labor government, were therefore obligatory for Netanyahu’s government. But his followers nevertheless complain that he has violated his campaign pledge that there would be no more land for peace, only “peace for peace.”

So where do things go from here? By signing the original Oslo accords, in practical terms Arafat relinquished the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. He therefore has nothing important left to give up for peace.

Future Arab-Israeli war or peace therefore depends upon Netanyahu’s willingness to pay the price for Arafat’s concessions.

Is Netanyahu an Arafat, prepared to make whatever deal circumstances force upon him? If so, there will be peace.

Or is he a Peres, with ever-changing, unpredictable dreams? If Netanyahu’s dream is to provide his people the security he has promised them, he must know that real Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories is the only way Israel can achieve both security and economic integration into the Middle East. But if his dream is to “screw the Palestinians,” he will try to limit further withdrawals while finding Palestinian quislings and deceiving his American supporters with clever soundbites.

Or will Netanyahu be another methodical and inscrutable Rabin, stepping off the platform upon which he was elected to turn in a new and as yet undiscernible direction to prepare the ground for his own re-election and a clearer popular mandate?

His choice may depend solely upon his personal instincts, or more likely upon the conflicting pressures laid on him by the Israeli electorate, Israel’s American backers, and the increasingly unified Arabs. Whatever Netanyahu chooses will profoundly affect them all.