Ed Rettig, Acting Director, AJC Israel Office

March 16, 2010 

Media frenzies often divert attention away from substance.  So it was last week when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel and Palestinian Authority. His well-publicized mission was to raise confidence between the parties and launch proximity talks, and to reassure Israel of America’s firm commitment to its security. But the PA and Israel have urgent preoccupations elsewhere.  The PA, facing fierce competition from Hamas, is obsessed with political survival. The Israelis’ top priority, meanwhile, is the Iranian peril. The Biden mission’s challenge, then, was formidable.  

The low point of the visit was certainly the announcement by the Israeli Interior Ministry that it was planning 1,600 housing units in the North Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, across the 1949 ceasefire lines.  Secretary of State Clinton described it as “insulting.” Columnist Tom Friedman described Israeli conduct as “drunken driving.” My colleague, AJC’s Kenneth Bandler, wrote eloquently about “taking America for granted.”

Less obviously, the visit also revealed serious flaws in the comportment of the Palestinians and Americans. Not to be outdone as provocateurs, the Palestinians, right after Biden’s departure, named a square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi.  Ms. Mughrabi led the infamous 1978 coastal road massacre of 38 Israeli civilians (including 13 children and the niece of a United States Senator), and the wounding of another 71.  Inexplicably, the American Administration has so far made no public response.

U.S. planning for the visit, which focused heavily on a series of demonstrations of U.S.-Israel affinity and solidarity, appeared to skirt a key reality looming over the prospective resumption of peace talks: hard-earned Israeli skepticism. Palestinian rejection of three peace plans (“Camp David” in 2000, “Taba” in 2001, and “Olmert” in 2008) drives Israelis and many others to suspect that the Palestinians do not seek an acceptable compromise, which, if true, calls into question the rationale of the peace process. Biden’s visit did not – and perhaps could not – alleviate this fundamental challenge to Israeli-Palestinian trust.

Second, as time passes and tempers cool, U.S. officials may come to question their prolonged and strident response to Interior Minister Yishai’s provocation – a response that, itself, may adversely affect Washington’s ambitious effort to restart the peace process. Repeated references over the course of four or five days to the administration’s “condemnation” of the housing announcement, suggestions by the State Department spokesman that Israel’s response to the incident could alter the course of U.S.-Israel relations, a senior White House aide’s reference to the Israeli “insult” that had been dealt the Vice President – these and various anonymous comments from Washington reinforced an Israeli impression that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s explanation and apology had fallen on deaf ears, and that the trust Vice President had hoped to bolster was receding. This could boomerang – as did last year’s presidential insistence on a total settlement freeze. Considering that Yishai’s embarrassing and unwise announcement about the housing units broke no new ground, either in terms of actual construction or Israeli policy, it is hard to see how the Palestinians will not internalize the U.S. response as an Administration spoiling for a fight with Israel, dig in even deeper, and wait for Washington to bring Jerusalem to heel. 

Third, the Administration may wish to rethink its characterization of Ramat Shlomo as a “settlement.” There are critical geographic and semantic distinctions here – intrinsic to the Israeli experience, but apparently untranslatable to many abroad; in fact, the Vice President’s description of the announced new housing development echoed an earlier, similarly inapt, reference by President Obama to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Even taking into account the unacceptability of the Yishai provocation, the use of the term “settlement” has a specific meaning to Israelis, and its application in the case of Ramat Shlomo doesn’t fit the perceived facts. East Jerusalem Jews are not settlers.  Under Israeli law, they are not entitled to the incentives bestowed on genuine West Bank settlers. Close to 200,000 Israeli Jews (40 percent of the city’s Jewish population) live over the pre-1967 lines in Jerusalem. Their political behavior is quite distinct from that of the West Bank Jews, and it makes no sense to drive them into the pro-settler camp.

A seat in the Knesset represents about 25,000 valid ballots, and most elections are decided by terribly narrow margins.  Ariel Sharon showed us, in the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, that we need to isolate the hard-core settlers and their supporters. Failing to differentiate between settlers and Jewish East Jerusalemites could drive the two groups into a political alliance. Indeed, while of course it would have been better had Yishai kept quiet last week, it did “smoke out” an ongoing, dramatic Administration misreading of how to promote support for peacemaking in Jerusalem.  Bluntly put, unless the U.S. sees itself bulldozing those neighborhoods and driving out their 200,000 Jews, it needs to give greater consideration to the language it uses to describe them.

Mr. Netanyahu was the biggest loser from this visit. The evident disarray in his government demonstrated by Yishai’s announcement embarrassed him as much as any purposeful act of foolishness, leaving him weakened. Netanyahu needs to answer two sets of questions.

First, why didn’t the Prime Minister’s Office staff, which handles the nuts and bolts of daily government life, not learn of and prevent the fiasco, and what can he do—almost a year into his term—to ensure that similar mistakes do not happen again?  

And second, what is the future of his ruling coalition? Yishai’s Shas party is detached from the big picture and overly focused on its own Orthodox constituency. (Indeed, there are good grounds to think that the crisis was generated by his tunnel vision, seeing only the housing needs of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, and, with spectacular incompetence, ignoring the international ramifications.) Last week showed how dangerous this can be when coupled with a pivotal position of power in the coalition.