I WAS invited to an engagement party a few weeks ago at the home of Egyptian friends. When the intended bride opened the door, I thought I was at the wrong address. Instead of the effervescent, feisty tomboy I know well here was a demure, traditionally attired, soft-spoken young woman, who, although she didn’t approve of her would-be groom, decided to play the part for the sake of her disciplinarian father. As it happened, the engagement was broken off days later over such materialistic concerns as which family would fork out the wedding expenses and which would buy furniture for the dining room. My young friend couldn’t have been more delighted. While listening to the speech of the usually hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, I couldn’t help but notice a parallel.
In this case, the unwilling bride is Netanyahu, who has never desired any kind of marriage with Palestinians. That is until his “father” US President Barack Obama grabbed a big stick and told him to toe the line with the implication that if he refused there would be consequences. The groom, of course, is the Palestinians along with the entire Arab world. I further suspect that this “engagement” of sorts will have the same outcome as that of my reluctant friend. When it comes to the nitty-gritty there will be no agreement over the dismantling of illegal Jewish settlements, a right of return for exiled Palestinians and, most importantly, Jerusalem as the capital of a state called Palestine.
Just as my friend adopted an unfamiliar role for a period in time to please her family, Netanyahu has decided upon sheep’s clothing rather than face-off against his country’s mighty protector and benefactor. Although Daddy Obama has referred to the speech as “an important step forward”, the difference is the Arab “groom” knows that the “bride” has temporarily adopted a pretty façade and isn’t falling for it. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak zoned in on Netanyahu’s precondition that Arabs must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which he says, “scuppers the possibilities for peace.” No one will support this appeal in Egypt or elsewhere, he said.
So just what is this Israeli hawk temporarily-turned-sparrow really saying?
He spoke about his people’s ardent desire for peace and their shared vision with former Israeli and Egyptian peacemakers Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, which doesn’t ring true at all in today’s hostile climate. Let’s face it. If Israelis truly wanted peace, they wouldn’t have voted for Netanyahu. He also massaged Gulf countries, saying the region’s initiatives have amazed the entire world. He called to the “talented entrepreneurs of the Arab world to come and invest here, to assist the Palestinians and us, to give the economy a jump-start. “Together we can develop industrial zones; we can create thousands of jobs and foster tourism that will draw millions...” Nice sentiments, but hang on, what about a Palestinian state?
The fluff aside, his first priority was banging the drum on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program, a message that has been reinforced by the Iranian vote awarding a further four years in office to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has sworn never to relinquish his country’s right to enrich uranium.
Then came the part everyone was breathlessly awaiting. Would he indeed utter the words “Palestinian state”? He did, but this came with the unacceptable tag “demilitarized”. This means no Palestinian army, no Palestinian control over its own airspace and no rights to make treaties with “countries like Iran, or Hezbollah”. “Without this, sooner or later, we will have another Hamastan,” he said. So, Netanyahu’s vision of a Palestinian state is one that is not able to protect itself — a toothless entity over which Israel would still have virtual control even if it were labeled independent on paper.
As President Mubarak rightly said, the Israeli leader put the kibosh on a lasting peace with his insistence that before anything Palestinians must recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Moreover, he made it crystal clear that there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees who must be settled elsewhere.
Reading between the lines it appears, too, that the return of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas, is yet another precondition. After erecting such barriers, one can only wonder at his chutzpah. “I appeal to you our Palestinian neighbors...let us begin peace negotiations immediately without prior conditions”. Eh!
Occupying the bulk of his address was the one state he was keen to talk about Eretz Yisrael. He cited Theodor Herzl’s Zionist vision and moaned about Arabs who “refused any Jewish state whatsoever, with any borders whatsoever.”
“This is not a foreign land, this is the land of our forefathers,” he announced to huge applause. “The connection of the Jewish people to this land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years.” Predictably, he further supported his Biblical citations with the Jewish people’s need for a “protective state” due to “persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels and murders, which reached their climax with the Holocaust. He complained about “fedayin attacks upon Israel, which “reached their climax in 1967 on the eve of the Six-Day War, with an attempt to strangle Israel.” As for the Palestinians, “the closer we get to a peace agreement with them, the more they are distancing themselves from peace...a great many people are telling us that withdrawal is the key to peace with the Palestinians, but the fact is that all our withdrawals were met with huge waves of suicide bombers,” he said. Such cherry-picking dredging up of the past only goes to show that Netanyahu is incapable of seeing the problem other than through a narrow, self-interested prism. The fact is Israel has made no attempts at peace since the year 2000 when Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister. And as for the so-called withdrawals he cites, they never happened. Israelis may have physically pulled out of Gaza but they still loom over this large open-air prison, and, as we saw earlier this year, they feel entitled to walk in or shower it with bombs any time they like.
Try as he might, Netanyahu cannot rebrand himself into an acceptable Palestinian partner. Every time he opens his mouth his innate hatred of all things Arab is never far from his lips. No wardrobe change or softened demeanor can make him a thing of beauty, so I believe, just like my young friend’s, this engagement is doomed to failure. The Palestinians are better off waiting for Israel to produce another, more willing, bride.
