Rhetoric of Global Leadership about are 1994

The leaders of the Israeli right and of the settler movement have been wearing their Cheshire Cat grins since the United States announced its pullback from negotiations to extend a limited Israeli moratorium on settlement construction. Israel's right have taken to vilifying America's current president with a birther-like enthusiasm and are celebrating what they consider to be another victory against U.S. peace efforts. Settlement construction itself is booming, with over 1600 units having been started in the ten weeks since the partial moratorium expired on September 26 (in truth, the construction never stopped anyway).

The official Israeli government line is more measured, insisting that Israeli-U.S. close coordination and mutual appreciation is just hunky dory. That interpretation is one which U.S. officials have been eager to echo, at least in part one imagines for political reasons. As a depiction of reality, it is something of a stretch.

Contrary to appearances, the collapse of this latest effort actually strengthens the ability of the Palestinians to shape the next moves and to stamp their imprint on where this now goes. There are still three potential game-changers in the mix: Israel, the United States and the Palestinians. Israel, though, seems ever more intent on postponing and avoiding a moment of choice, and its officials now act in a way that make their own policies the single most proximate cause of their country's increasing (self)delegitimization.

Netanyahu constantly reminds his American and other interlocutors that his domestic politics on peace, territory and settlements are terribly tricky and that he should not be expected to squander political capital until the real moment of truth arrives. Yet he does everything to make sure that moment will never come, and it appears now to be structurally endemic to the Israeli system that procrastination will invariably prevail and that Israel will not end the occupation of its own volition. Nothing Netanyahu has done in his second term as prime minister suggests otherwise.

The only steps Netanyahu seems willing or able to deliver are in areas decidedly tangential to what it will take to get a two-state solution. Palestinian economic development or improved local governance (areas which he encourages) are as relevant to a one-state outcome or a maintenance of limited Palestinian autonomy as they are to a post-occupation two-state deal.

Netanyahu's rhetorical embrace of the two-state mantra in a speech at Bar Ilan University last June has not been matched by his actions nor was he challenged to translate this into a formal and binding decision of his Likud movement. We well remember that when the PLO declared it was abandoning terror and recognizing Israel, the demand was made that in order for these steps to be taken seriously they would have to be formally voted on in the institutions of the PLO and its charter would have to be amended (which indeed happened, twice). Not surprisingly but tellingly, no American official (or other official I am aware of) has suggested or requested, let alone demanded, that Netanyahu's Likud ...