Israel Matzav

What the agenda fights are about

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I posted about US Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell's frustration with the manner in which Prime Minister Netanyahu is handling the 'proximity talks.' The post talked about an alleged lack of 'seriousness' on Israel's part, and about how the United States wanted Israel to move faster on conceding its strategic advantages. Mitchell was also disappointed with what was termed Israel's unwillingness to discuss the 'core issues' of Jerusalem, borders, 'Palestinian refugees' and security.

Evelyn Gordon explains that what's at issue in the play over what comes first is that without knowing what security guarantees it will receive, Israel cannot make a coherent proposal on borders. Surprisingly, Gordon shows that Mitchell doesn't get it but quartet envoy Tony Blair does.

But the truth is that Netanyahu genuinely doesn’t know how much territory he might be willing to cede — and cannot know until he receives the answer to another critical question: what security arrangements will be put in place in the vacated territory? The more robust these arrangements are, the more territory Israel could concede without endangering itself.

That is precisely why Netanyahu urged that security arrangements be one of the first two items discussed in the indirect talks Mitchell is mediating (he proposed water as the other). Mitchell, however, wanted borders to come first, in the bizarre belief that borders should have nothing to do with security arrangements. In his view, the latter is a secondary issue that can be dealt with later.

But having seen what happened when his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, did exactly that, Netanyahu is rightly wary of falling into this trap. Olmert, trusting in his strong relationship with former president George W. Bush, made generous territorial concessions up front, offering the Palestinians some 93 percent of the territories with 1:1 swaps to compensate for the rest. But when he then presented the extensive security arrangements that he deemed necessary to mitigate the risks of these concessions, he discovered that not only did the Palestinians reject them but so did Washington. And the Obama administration is not likely to be more supportive of Israel’s security concerns than Bush was.

If only Netanyahu could be trusted not to knuckle under to American pressure....

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:31 AM