|
|
|
Jewish World Review Nov. 7, 2008 / 9 Mar-Cheshvan 5769 Livni's Obama strategy By Caroline B. Glick
Whatever the incoming Obama administration's position on Israel may be, it
will not be more supportive of the country than the Bush administration has
been. And over the past year, the supportive Bush administration has decided
not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and not to support an
Israeli effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
If Israel's next prime minister intends to prevent Iran from acquiring the
means to implement its stated aim of destroying Israel, he or she must be
prepared to stand up to America. Indeed, the greatest diplomatic challenge
he or she will likely face will be standing up to a popular new President
Obama, supported by large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress
and the overwhelming majority of American Jewish voters.
Over the past few days, the two contenders for premiership — Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni and Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu — have demonstrated
their starkly contrasting views of how to deal with a potentially hostile
administration in Washington. Reacting to Obama's electoral victory on
Wednesday, Livni made clear that from her perspective, the best way to deal
with an unfriendly White House is to preemptively surrender Israel's
national interests.
In her words, Israel's election results "must reflect the country's interest
in advancing the peace process, otherwise the international community,
headed by the US, will try and push us in this direction."
For their part, Netanyahu and Likud have shown that if defending Israel's
national interests requires a confrontation with Washington, they will not
shy away from it. Last week, Netanyahu's surrogate MK Yuval Steinitz
informed both US presidential campaigns that in the event that outgoing
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledges to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria,
a Likud-led government will not respect his pledge.
Livni understands that she cannot win the election by preaching preemptive
surrender. And so she and her colleagues are ardently seeking to change the
subject. They recognize that for Livni to win, she must persuade the public
that she is not the hard-core leftist she has governed as for the past five
years, but a centrist. She has been doing two things to accomplish this
goal. She is seeking to distinguish herself from Labor and Meretz while
still maintaining her leftist support base. And she is trying to convince
voters that Likud is not a credible alternative.
Distinguishing herself from Labor and Meretz while keeping faith with the
Left, has been tricky for Livni, because it requires her to constantly
contradict herself. She must make clear that she supports an Israeli retreat
to the 1949 armistice lines and abdicates responsibility for preventing Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons to the US and Europe, while appearing to
reject the 1949 armistice lines and accepting that given the stakes, Israel
is ultimately responsible for preventing Iran from going nuclear.
Unable to renounce policies she herself has advanced and indeed invented,
Livni has opted simply to refuse to disclose her positions to the public.
She refuses to tell us what she has offered the Palestinians in her
negotiations with Ahmed Qurei, or how she intends to deal with Syria and
Iran, claiming unconvincingly that telling us what she stands for will
damage Israel's national interests.
Much to Livni's dismay, the public is already certain that she is a leftist.
Consequently, her greatest challenge is convincing centrists who lean Right
that they cannot support Likud. To persuade them that Likud is unworthy, she
seeks to define Likud as a party of extremists, hell-bent on destroying
Israel's reputation in Europe and the US and killing all hope of peace.
To demonize Likud, Livni and her colleagues operate on two tracks
simultaneously. First and most importantly, they have instigated violent
confrontations with the hardcore fringe of the ideological Right. These
confrontations serve to convince the public that the far-right fringe
constitutes a threat to the state. Second, they seek to create a public
perception of Likud as the sponsor of the hardcore fringe. By accomplishing
this they will persuade the public that Likud itself is a threat to the
country.
On October 25 the government ordered the police and the IDF to carry out a
surprise, middle-of-the-night expulsion of well-known right-wing hardliner
Noam Federman and his family from their home in Kiryat Arba and with
demolishing their house. According to eyewitness accounts, the police used
excessive violence against the surprised family and their nine children.
As could have been anticipated, the Federmans and their hot-headed, radical
friends were enraged by the unprovoked onslaught against them. And as
expected, Federman's supporters reacted by making offensive statements about
the police and the IDF.
The government pounced on these statements in a bid to castigate the far
right, (of which Federman and his supporters comprise a small faction), as
the greatest threat facing the country. Cabinet ministers were warned that
these hard-line activists may try to assassinate them, attack IDF forces, or
commit terror attacks against Arabs. Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced
he will enact draconian measures against the far right in a bid to strip its
activists of their civil rights and demoralize their followers. (In the
meantime, the torching of a yeshiva in Acre and a synagogue in Ramle by
Israeli Arabs went unnoted by the cabinet.)
Presenting Federman and his colleagues as a strategic threat to the country
will not suffice to bring victory to Livni. She must also link Likud and its
leader to these far-right "enemies of the people." To this end, Livni and
her colleagues accuse Likud of rejecting "peace." Likud's extremism, Livni
argues, is demonstrated by the fact that "extremists" like former science
minister Benny Begin and former housing minister Effi Eitam are joining its
ranks.
Livni's strategy of projecting herself as a moderate by criminalizing the
Right and claiming that there is no distinction between Likud and far-right
activists is a reenactment of Olmert's strategy for winning the 2006 general
elections. In February 2006 Olmert sought to define the Right in general and
Likud specifically as a coalition of extremists by provoking violence
between security forces and the far-right when he ordered the destruction of
a number of homes in Amona. Hundreds of policemen and border guards were
deployed to Amona where they essentially carried out a pogrom against
hundreds of children and teenagers who were at the scene to defend the homes
from destruction.
Initially, the events at Amona were misrepresented to the public as an
example of right-wing fanaticism and violence against security forces. Due
to the media's open collusion with Olmert, it was only after the elections
that the public learned the full extent of the police's premeditated
brutality. In the meantime, Olmert invented a convenient right-wing bogeyman
with which to scare the public and demonize Likud.
Olmert's Amona strategy, which Livni seeks to implement today, advances the
political fortunes of the Left in three ways. First, it directly promotes
the fiction that Israel's chief enemy is the Right and so induces the public
to feel uncomfortable supporting Likud.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the Amona strategy deflects public
attention from Israel's real enemies -- Iran and its Palestinian, Lebanese
and Syria proxies -- against which Kadima has taken no effective action. In
2006, the government's pogrom at Amona removed Hamas's electoral victory in
the January 2006 PA elections from the top of the news coverage. Hamas's
electoral triumph had laid bare the folly of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza
the previous summer and demonstrated that Kadima's entire electoral
platform, based on repeating that withdrawal in Judea and Samaria, was a
recipe for disaster and war.
Today, with banner headlines decrying the right-wing menace filling the
front pages of the papers, news of Hamas's transformation of Gaza into a new
Hizbullah-stan, replete with concrete bunkers built with concrete supplied
by Israel, is relegated to the back pages.
In 2006, Likud was in no position to counter the Amona strategy. It had just
sustained a near-mortal blow when Ariel Sharon bolted Likud to form Kadima.
But now the tables have turned. Today it is Kadima that is in shambles.
Sharon has been forgotten. Olmert resigned in disgrace. Livni failed to form
a government.
Today Likud can discredit Livni's self-characterizations as a moderate by
pointing to her far-left record as Foreign Minister. Netanyahu can reject
her characterization of Likud as a far-right party by showcasing leftists
like Uzi Dayan, Dan Meridor and Assaf Hefetz who are flocking to the party
together with rightists like Benny Begin and Effi Eitam. Likud, he can say
credibly, is not a fringe party - but a big-tent center-right governing
party which welcomes all patriotic Israelis.
If Livni's Amona strategy fails her, she will be forced to discuss her plans
to preemptively surrender to the US, the Palestinians, Syria and Iran. And
for Livni, a debate about her actual plans and current policies is a recipe
for defeat.
In certain respects, Livni's embrace of Olmert's Amona strategy towards the
Right and her attempt to hide her far-left policies while presenting herself
as a new sort of clean politician and engine of political renewal, echoes
the strategy that Obama employed with such success in his bid for the White
House. Like Obama, Livni wishes to convince the public to support her by not
telling us who she is and what she intends to do, sufficing instead with her
claim to be different from the other guys.
It is far from clear that Livni will be able to pull off an Obama-like
victory. She lacks Obama's charisma. Unlike Obama, she has a public record
of far-left governance and policy failure going into the election. And
unlike Senator John McCain, Israelis trust Netanyahu more than they trust
Livni to protect the country's economy.
Moreover, Obama benefited from the public support that the Democratic Party
enjoyed after eight years of Republican control of the White House. In
contrast, between its failed leadership in the war with Hizbullah and the
corruption probes and criminal convictions of its leaders, Livni's Kadima is
the discredited incumbent party. But still, all is not lost for Livni.
Like Obama, she enjoys the full support of the media in her bid to power. In
the past, media collusion has repeatedly sufficed to bring leftists posing
as centrists to power.
With all that is at stake in these elections, it must be hoped that Livni's
Amona strategy will fail her. Facing Iran on the one hand and a potentially
hostile Obama administration on the other, Israel requires a leader like
Netanyahu who understands that if preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons means bucking heads with Obama, so be it.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
| ||||||||||
