Liberal critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were quick to seize on the results of the recent Knesset election that the Israeli people had rendered a negative verdict on his stands on the peace process. Left-wing parties that blamed Netanyahu and his government may have fared poorly in the vote and even the Labor Party abandoned a peace platform in the hope of winning back centrist voters who have understandably given up on the Palestinians. Yet that hasn’t stopped some talking heads from jumping to the conclusion that Netanyahu’s showing was proof that Israelis were actually voting for a renewed emphasis on negotiations and would approve of foreign pressure on their government to make concessions.
But the latest statement by the man whose party was the big winner in the election makes it clear that any idea that Israelis cast their ballot on other issues. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party was the runner up in the vote as the former journalists new faction came out of nowhere to win 19 Knesset seats and made him the lynchpin of any future coalition headed by Netanyahu. Yet despite the hopes of some Americans that he represents a different point of view about peace, yesterday he told a gathering of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations that his views were very much in line with those of Netanyahu. As Haaretz reports, the only criticism about Israel’s negotiating stance that he uttered was of Netanyahu’s predecessor for offering to give away too much:
Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid opposes any division of Jerusalem as part of negotiations with the Palestinians, he said on Tuesday evening.
“Ehud Olmert’s government went too far” in its talks with the Palestinians, Lapid said. “It was wrong when it began discussing issues that bore waiting on, such as Jerusalem and the right of return. I oppose any withdrawal in Jerusalem, which isn’t only a place, but an idea as well.”
This places Lapid very much on the same page with Netanyahu and in clear opposition to the terms that many American liberals and President Obama has endorsed. In 2008, Olmert offered Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas an independent Palestinian state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and a large share of Jerusalem. Abbas fled the talks rather than formally turn the deal down. But Lapid, along with most Israelis, believes Jerusalem shouldn’t be divided.
President Obama has treated Netanyahu’s decision to build homes in existing Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem as an insult to the U.S. but Lapid agrees with the prime minister that cutting up the country’s capital is unthinkable. Since, like Lapid, Netanyahu has reaffirmed his support for a two state solution, there likely will be very little tension on peace issues between the two men in the next government.
Lapid’s rise reflects the way the overwhelming majority of Israelis have moved on from their prior obsession with the peace process. Since the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected peace and used Israeli withdrawals to create terror enclaves like Gaza, there is a consensus that until a sea change occurs among Arabs, more such concessions are unthinkable. Lapid and Netanyahu may have their disagreements over the economic issues that helped propel Yesh Atid to second place in the vote. But they appear willing to work together along with Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party (which is to the right of the Likud on peace issues) to craft new legislation that would end the ultra-Orthodox draft exemptions that anger the rest of the country.
The next Israeli government may not be as stable as its predecessor due to the outsized personalities and egos of its predecessor. But as Lapid’s statement indicates, any American expectation that Yesh Atid will change Netanyahu’s negotiating position has no basis in fact.
Notice how the same people who believe that Netanyahu was rebuffed by the narrowness of his victory are often the same folks who believe that Obama is stronger because he was just re-elected with a smaller majority than he had 4 years ago.
Lapid's in it for Lapid. He and Bennett could pull the rug out from Bibi anytime down the road but for sure prolly not on building homes in Jerusalem or the major settement blocks–but he's also a check against Bennett colluding w/nationalist block allies in the Likud backbenches to push for unilateral annexation when Bibi thinks imprudent. Some of people backing Bennett's plan for annexation are naive, some are credulous, some are fanatic fascists, but Bibi needs all the wiggle room he can get in countering charismatic demogoguery, Wonder how Shas will do.
Liberals, in America, Europe and elsewhere greatly misunderstand (there is a surprise) what drives and animates Yesh Atid. Far more than some mythical and nonsensical left-wing "there must be a return to the negotiating table", Yesh Atid approaches the problem from a nationalistic Israeli point of view. It wants a solution once and for all, so the people and state of Israel can concentrate on its own affairs. But in that any solution, including annexation and, possible deportation, of Arab settlers from all of land of Israel would be acceptable. nTrue, that is not the only solution that would be acceptable to Yesh Atid, and it would accept the surrender of additional lands west of Jordan river, either to the Palestinian State of Jordan, or another Palestinian entity. Yesh Atid represents a growing constituency in Israel to "get it done" once and for all. And in that Yesh Atid is a perfect partner for Bayit Yehudi.
Arab settlers? They may be newcomers in the grand sweep of things but they've been in and around the Mandatory era since before your grandparents were born. And Arabs were in Jerusalem 600 years before Columbus sailed to the New World. Let me guess, they're an imaginary people. And what makes you think Yesh Atid wants some kind of magical solution "once and for all"? What Lapid wants "once and for all" is to be a top dog. Beyond that, like water, he'll seek a politically viable consensus.
Arabs have been expanding their presence in Yehuda and Shomron at a greater rate than Jews. And many of the current Arab families came to the region only after Jewish cultivation in the 19th and early 20th century created agrigulture, jobs and sanitation in what had been desert and malarial swamp.
fine. ahadhaamorastim an examination of the legal Mandatory status and the fine points of the legitimacy or lack therof of colonial controls on immigration and their impact on parallel Jewish and Arab residency is fine–and a complicated subject. And certainly the mythos, the fantasy of a coherent and contiguous and chronologically consistent Palestinian nationhood stretching back to Lord knows when, is contested by these data. n nI am vigorously protesting the mindless use of abstractions to "prove" that since the Arab population came into Mandatory Palestine in modern times at this or that level that they are an "imaginary" population of transients who may morally be expelled in their entirety. n nI do not believe that my grandparents and my mother and father raised me to be a Jew who truckles after Jews or gentiles who wallow in this conceptual rotgut.
"…Arabs were in Jerusalem 600 years before Columbus sailed to the New World…" And Jews were in Guangzhou (Canton) 600 years before Mohammed emerged from a cave in drunken stupor. What of it?
sez who? everybody dreams of being kiing for a day. Oh these people aren't real, let's expel them. Let's have a reference on those Cantonese 200 AD Jews. But the point, backtracking before the numbskull stupidity of your initial remark (no Lapid isn't going to expel anybody) and the toughguy wannabee swagger of the children's crusade here calling for Islamic blood-the Arabs in and around Palestine are an indigneous people with a history and a culure. n nNobody has time to teach a rock to whistle or a rottweiler to do sums so you either accept that there are no Jewish norms and no international norms for expelling the Arab populatoin of Israel or you don't. n nIf you don't you don't. Some people like tats. Some don't. n nBut don't kid yourself that these first person shooter daydreams of the ritalin set here are going to become Israel state policy in the foreseeable future.
lol n nif it wasn;t drink, something sure rotted whatever brain you may have had
the western liberals so very, very much wanted Lapid as Foreign Minister instead of Liberman that it did not matter that Lapid was on the record about an undivided Jerusalem, as long as he looked like George Clooney instead of a Russian bear. n nHope Mr. Tobin does another proofread on this. n n
if he does, let's hope he corrects the spelling of "linch pin" (2nd graf), which now has a y in it.
there were not 25 starving mendicants in the British Mandate w/out considering family and clan relations w/Transjordan throughout the former Ottoman Empire. albeit Jewish development was concentrated in productive centers and not generally dispersed in a landholding feudal society it also ramped up from a low baseline n nand that makes the population transients? n nyou have half a million Mandatory Arabs in the 1920's which is a century ago. n nWhen the grandparents and great grandparents of those proposing transfer were in their prime. n nHow many Jews were in the United States before 1905? n nSo?
you should not be posting when you have been drinking n nyou are barely coherent n nbelligerent, hostile, arrogant and incoherent
this is what happens. I make a reasonable comment, such as that 500,000 population of Arabs in Mandatory Palestine by 1920's is hardly an argument that were only pockets of starving Arabs and that this half-million population 100 years ago is no argument for expelling the entire Arab population of Israel and the West Bank as is being argued by some here. n nWhen confronted by reasonable facts pointing away from the reflex to absolutist final solutions for lifes problems that are out of sync with thousands of years of teaches of the sages you inevitably revert to type. n nYou go of the rails in some total non-sequittur of personal remark. n nWell fine. n nMaking allowances for you inability to connect the dots of analogies–content-free and contextess arguments from ex cathedra abstraction for expelling the Arab population of Israel and the West Bank when (analogicaly) applied to the United States would justify the expulsion of the American Jewish population as transient "settlers". n nWe have to fil in the colors apparently in the charleston coloring book. n nAs I said, at the fundamentals, for all your ability to cut and paste and make links charleston you are a clown. a pseudo, and a semi-literate asshole. n nSo are your friends. n nSo now we are on that same hostile belligerent page. n nGood. n nEnjoy.