In their eight years working together since 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have called each other names, dismissed, opposed, lectured, and undermined each other by working with the respective political opponents.
The last episode of this Obama-Netanyahu failed marriage was displayed on the international arena Friday, with the U.S. not vetoing the Settlements resolution and allowing a loud unanimous (14-0) rebuke of the Israeli government from the world’s highest international body.
Experts that spoke to “Arab News” agree that Resolution 2334 is a slap to Israel, for being the first legal text in 36 years to consider settlements constructed in areas occupied after the 1967 war and include East Jerusalem, with “no legal validity.” Though, the impact of the UNSC on the conflict could be minimal and it may push Obama’s successor Donald Trump toward a more pro-Israel stance after he takes office.
“Parting gift” and “tough love”
While the White House has gone out of its way in insisting that Washington’s abstention is not a personal vendetta from Obama to Netanyahu 25 days before the U.S. President leaves office, the frayed relationship between the two has its fingerprints around the whole 3 months process.
Hussein Ibish, a Senior Resident Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, sees the non-veto by Obama as critically “bound up with the bad blood between him and Netanyahu.” “It could be seen as a ‘parting gift’ for Bibi from Barack” after years of trading “chicken-shit” and “cowardice” jabs.
Robert Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. and Quartet official who worked on the Palestinian-Israeli issue until 2010 interprets the U.S. abstention as consistent with Obama’s approach. “The UN vote is a microcosm of the past eight years with the Obama administration” he says, “once again trying to send a tough love message which Israelis largely perceive as a sign of hostility.” This messaging was more prevalent in Obama’s first term and early attempts at a settlement freeze, later blocked by Netanyahu, to reset the Peace Process.
Impact on Peace and Trump
The vast support for the vote at the UNSC is a sign of “a more isolated Israel on the international stage” says Yousef Munayyer, the Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. The process, with Egypt sponsoring then withdrawing submission of the resolution only to be resubmitted by Senegal and New Zealand, “may have left some embarrassed friends among Arab regimes”.
Munayyer, however, sees little impact for the new resolution on the realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “President Obama has given us the autopsy, but the cause of death is clear; Israeli settlement building.” The expert writes off the two-state-solution that the resolution is trying to salvage, as “long dead”, with a need to “move forward toward a new framework, where the international community will have to demand that Israel accept responsibility for affording Palestinians their rights even if that means doing so in a single state.”
One area, however, where the UN resolution could immediately backfire is in drawing Netanyahu and Trump closer together. Hussein Ibish expects that “it will probably help push them together and prompt more Israeli settlement activity with less US opposition” contending that “it's hard to see a positive outcome on the ground as a consequence.”
Danin goes further in interpreting the U.S. abstention as “a gift to a Trump administration that wishes to take a distinctly more friendly relationship with Netanyahu and Israel” and in distinguishing itself from the Obama approach.
Less than an hour after the vote, Trump tweeted “things will be different after Jan. 20th”, the date he takes office. But how different?
While some expect Trump to expedite his campaign promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Ibish casts “doubts that the embassy issue will be affected”, adding “it will likely be driven by other considerations, especially how far Trump wants to go in upending decades of bipartisan US policy on many fronts.”
Munayyer says that when “Donald Trump becomes President next month the international community will receive the death certificate for the two-state solution.” The abstention could have been an attempt by Obama “for a legacy that was better on the Israel-Palestinian issue” but he will be remembered according to Munayyer “for providing Israel with weapons ($38 billion in military aid) and cover as it accelerated settlement building for most of his tenure.”
