Israel Wonders How Long Netanyahu Can Back Settlements and Two-State Solution - New York Times
“He has to choose between the international community and Bennett,” said Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It is not an easy choice, but he has to make a choice,” Professor Avineri said, adding: “Is Israel going to alienate itself from the whole world for the sake of settlement activity? And it is the whole world. Is this what Zionism is about?”
For a second consecutive day on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu denounced the departing Obama administration, publicly accusing it of having orchestrated Friday’s Security Council resolution, despite denials from Washington. The United States refrained from using its veto power, as it had done many times before to shield Israel, and abstained in the 14-to-0 vote.
“From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.
Referring to the American secretary of state, Mr. Netanyahu added, “As I told John Kerry on Thursday, friends don’t take friends to the Security Council,” and he said he was looking forward to working with President-elect Donald J. Trump's administration when it takes office next month.
The Foreign Ministry summoned ambassadors of countries that had voted in favor of the resolution for personal meetings with ministry officials in Jerusalem, despite the Christmas holiday, which some of those countries celebrate.
In a highly unusual move, Mr. Netanyahu, who is also the foreign minister, summoned the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro, for a meeting on Sunday night.
Mr. Netanyahu also instructed his ministers to reduce their diplomatic activities and contacts with counterparts from the countries that had voted for the resolution for the next three weeks, until the American administration changes, and to minimize travel to those countries, according to Israeli news reports.
In an additional step, the defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, instructed Israel’s agencies to suspend contact with Palestinian Authority representatives on some unspecified civil matters, though the measure was not supposed to affect security coordination or meetings about water, agriculture and the economy.
With the Israeli occupation in its 50th year and the peace process frozen, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official and the Palestinians’ veteran negotiator, called on Israel “to seize the opportunity, to wake up, to stop the violence, to stop settlements and to resume negotiations.” Mr. Netanyahu says he is ready for negotiations anytime, but with no preconditions.
The Security Council vote seemed to have caught Israel off guard.
“I hope for Netanyahu’s sake (and also for ours) that he knows the truth at least deep in his heart — it was the chronicle of a failure foretold,” Ben Caspit, a political commentator, wrote in the Maariv newspaper on Sunday.
Many commentators said the Security Council vote partly reflected a history of conflict between Mr. Netanyahu and President Obama over the settlements and Mr. Netanyahu’s anger over the Iranian nuclear deal. They also pointed to Mr. Netanyahu’s increasingly vocal backing of the settler cause. That includes his advancement of highly contentious legislation, known as the Regulation Bill, that would retroactively legalize settler outposts and homes built on privately owned Palestinian land and force the owners to accept compensation.
Mr. Netanyahu and his attorney general had warned that the bill, which recently passed a first reading in Parliament, contravenes international law and could land Israeli officials in the defendant dock of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“After he said it, he rushed to vote in favor of the bill. Why?” Mr. Caspit wrote. “Because of Bennett. The fear of the possibility that he would not be able to siphon seats from Bennett next time on Election Day caused him to act like a small-time grocery owner, instead of a national leader.”
Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister and a leader of the center-left Zionist Union, wrote on Facebook after the Security Council vote, “The Security Council decision is bad for Israel and it is the result of Netanyahu’s surrender to the extreme right.”
Even Haggai Segal, a prominent settler and the editor in chief of a right-wing newspaper, Makor Rishon, wrote in recent months that the Regulation Bill had “no chance” because it would be invalidated by Israel’s Supreme Court and would be used by the International Criminal Court “to incriminate Israel for war crimes.”
Mr. Segal, who served jail time as a member of the Jewish Underground that maimed and killed Palestinians in the 1980s, wrote this summer, “The wise thing now is to make do with what it is possible to do, and not lose it all by insisting on impossible goals.”
Mr. Bennett did not seem deterred. In a statement to reporters on Sunday at the Western Wall in the Old City in East Jerusalem, Mr. Bennett said, “It’s time to decide between two alternatives: surrendering our land or sovereignty.” He added that steps would be taken in the near future to try to apply Israeli law in Judea and Samaria, the biblical terms for the West Bank.
But some Israelis were skeptical that Mr. Netanyahu, in his third consecutive term in office, and fourth over all, would choose one side over the other.
“Bennett knows that Netanyahu is not going to make a decision,” said Shmuel Sandler, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. “He may say he will go with both. So far, it worked. It is easier for Bennett because he is not the prime minister. Netanyahu wants to enjoy both of the worlds.”
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