Netanyahu has urged the Palestinians to "get a grip" and accept the Israeli offer of talks without precondition. Not surprisingly the first reaction from the Arab side was to quote the most often employed word by Soviet diplomats--particularly at the UN, "Nyet!"
When reality rings--in the middle of the night or any other time for that matter--it is tough to answer the phone. To her direct credit--some of which must splash back on the President--Ms Clinton has picked up the phone and responded correctly to the call.
It is a hoary tradition in the law that hard cases make bad law. The hardest cases are those where equal measures of justice accrue to each side.
In the Mideast, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, equal measures of justice can be said to reside on both sides of the great divide. This makes for a hard diplomatic case.
Right now the stalling point is the matter of the Israeli "settlements." It can be argued without injustice that the Israeli government did wage a successful war of aggression under the plausible cover of a preemptive defense back in June 1967. The pretext used by the Israelis to cover the war was threadbare but believable enough given the past record of Arab aggression.
When the dust of battle settled, the Israelis had occupied the entire West Bank of Jordan. This was a long delayed ambition. Initially, the Israelis had hoped to get the area as part of the Wars of Independence but were forestalled by an agreement with Jordan's King Abullah I. When the Jordanian King Hussein ignored the warnings to stay out of the war due to both internal and external pressures, the IDF rolled over the defenders of the West Bank.
The same dynamic past and present applied to the Old City of Jerusalem. When the Jordanian army resisted, the IDF chewed them up. And, the Israeli flag flew over the ancient City of David.
The IDF also successfully gained the Golan Heights from Syria. This action was justified at the time by the use of the commanding heights for indiscriminate bombardment of civilian centers in Israel by the Syrians.
The occupation of the Sinai was the last of the three territorial acquisitions of the IDF. It was also the only territory which was intended from the beginning to be used by Israel as a bargaining chip--exchanging land for peace.
Despite UN resolutions and American disapproval, the government of Israel set about creating what were known then and now as "facts on the ground. One fact was legal first and material later--the absorbing of the Old City of Jerusalem into Israel proper. The other fact(s) existed in the material world rather than the demimonde of law. This was the building of "settlements" in the West Bank.
Now, forty years after there are some half million Israelis living in the "settlements." That is a lot of facts on the ground. Anyone who really, really believes that the half million either will be abandoned to the tender mercies of the Palestinian Authority or evacuated to pre-1967 Israel has a poor grip on reality.
The Netanyahu government did not bend to the will of President Obama as if anyone actually thought it would. It did, however, grant an important symbolic concession of slowing the continued development of the "settlements." This is what Secretary Clinton acknowledged.
In essence she was bowing to the political reality that the Netanyahu government could not do more and survive with any capacity to make deals with the Palestinians in the future. While this may perturb many J Street adherents, there is no widespread support within Israel for more.
It has been recommended by one (small) school of Israeli opinion that the Obama administration take a more, much more, hardball approach to Israel. Leaving aside the probable political implications of such a move, one question remains: To what avail?
Militating against the effectiveness of taking a harder line with Israel is the nature of Palestinian politics as well as the wider context of Arab/Muslim interests in play. An even greater bar to effective US pressure on Israel to give up more in return for vague promises of something later from the Palestinians and Arab governments is the consequences of Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
The Israelis exchanged land for the promise of peace. Or, failing that, the promise of international support and understanding if the Gaza Strip became the launching pad for terror attacks.
Not only was there no peace, the "international community" stood by with folded hands as the Islamist jihadists of Hamas took over Gaza and promptly started a multi-year campaign of terror. Worse, the same "international community" or at least a large segment of it excoriated Israel for Operation Cast Lead.
The same members of the "international community" have embraced the condemnations of Israel contained in the Goldstone Report. This wanton rejection of the justice on Israel's side of the case continues even as Hamas officials publicly confirmed their full support and assistance for all terror actions by all terror exponents in the Strip.
With this experience there is no real probability that this Israeli government or any for that matter will do more than the Netanyahu one has done to date. The spineless way in which the major countries of the world as well as the UN observed the fall of Hamas rockets and mortars with total passivity as well as the embrace of the Goldstone Report assure that Israel looks to itself and to no one else for its security.
This greatly limits the American leverage. Secretary Clinton's burst of laudatory candor implicitly recognizes the current state of affairs.
In a way it is a simple--if unjust--equation. The more the Palestinians and the Arab states generally remain both intransigent and willing to accept and even encourage terror attacks under the rubric of "resistance," the more unwilling to do more than palaver the Israelis will be. The June War of 1967 may have been a barely disguised war of conquest. Its territorial adjustments may have occurred against the will of the UN. But, the facts on the ground are now there and will not change.
The Arabs have done their own cause great harm on numerous occasions since the 1930s. In one diplomatic forum after another the ambitions and intransigence of the Arab side has led to their own diplomatic defeat. Or, their propensity for terror tactics has reversed the progress made or being made at the bargaining table.
Whether the Palestinians or their supporters like the idea or not, the Israelis are in the catbird seat. They control the pace and to a significant extent, the outcome of the peace conversations. That is as much of a fact on the ground as the aggregate of the "settlements."
The Palestinians may have much justice on their side, but the world of diplomacy has little, if anything, to do with justice in the abstract. Power, the sources of power, and political will count for infinitely more than justice when the affairs of nations are in play. In these areas Israel holds the best cards, the highest hand, and the greatest potential of either allowing a relatively equatable endgame or, in effect, settling the matter on their own terms.
That is another reality on which the Palestinians had best get a grip for it is clear the Israelis already well understand it.
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