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FOR the first time in many years, an Israeli government is scared stiff that an American administration may squeeze it until its pips squeak. That is surely a good thing, if it makes the Israelis more amenable to giving the Palestinians the fair deal—in essence, a proper state of their own—that might bring peace to the two peoples and to the wider region of the Middle East. So when Barack Obama meets Binyamin Netanyahu in the White House on May 18th, he must be tough with him.
Mr Netanyahu refuses publicly to accept the notion of two states. He seems to want to continue to squeeze the Gaza Strip until its elected government, run by the Islamist movement, Hamas, is toppled. He says he will not give Syria back the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in 1967. He now adds a demand that the Palestinians should not just recognise Israel as a country but as a specifically Jewish state. He refuses to freeze the growth of Jewish settlements that continue to bite into what is left of a barely contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank. And, most pressingly, he seeks to link peace with the Palestinians to a prior deal between the West and Iran to ensure that the Islamic Republic is prevented from having a nuclear bomb. His stance on these issues makes him appear an unpromising partner in negotiation; but much the same was said of Menachem Begin, whom the Americans persuaded to make peace with Egypt 30 years ago, so it’s certainly worth Mr Obama’s while to put some political capital into budging him.
Mr Obama must tell Mr Netanyahu that he is flat wrong on all those counts. No more settlements can be built or expanded—on pain of a reduction in American aid. On Iran, Mr Netanyahu’s logic is back-to-front. For sure, sensible leaders the world over, including Arab ones, want Iran to forgo the bomb. But how much easier it would be to persuade the Iranians to drop their ambitions if they were unable to invoke the unresolved conflict over Israel as part of a holy nuclear cause.
It is not just for the Palestinians’ sake that Mr Obama needs to take a tough line. Being too kind to the Israelis, as American administrations have been in the past, does them no favour in the long run either. Israel’s long-term security can be ensured only by America cajoling and even threatening its leaders in the hope that they will accept that the Israeli state’s safety depends overwhelmingly on the viability of a Palestinian one.
Mr Netanyahu does, however, have one good question to pose to the American administration. Who would govern the Palestinian state the world wants him to create in the West Bank and Gaza? Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party run the West Bank under Israeli supervision but are chronically weak. Hamas is strong. Both movements say that Israel must withdraw from every inch of land occupied in 1967 and accept back to what is now the Jewish state all the Arab refugees who fled more than 60 years ago. But unlike Fatah, which has explicitly accepted the idea of two states, Hamas, while groping towards a de facto acceptance of Israel, has yet to renounce its desire eventually to liberate all of Palestine from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
So far Mr Obama has held his cards to his chest. But if he is to push Israel into concessions he needs to answer the Hamas conundrum. Unlike George Bush’s team, Mr Obama’s has endorsed the idea of a Palestinian government that would include Hamas and so talk with more authority to the Israelis, making any agreement more likely to stick. The snag is that the two halves of the Palestinian movement are at daggers’ drawn and have fluffed repeated opportunities to reconcile.
The chances are that Mr Netanyahu’s rendezvous at the White House will not end in a public fracas. The Israeli leader is too clever for that, and shouting in public is not Mr Obama’s style. More likely, the pair will frankly acknowledge differences. Mr Netanyahu is a practised opportunist—and may indeed edge towards an acceptance of the two-state idea over time. After all, he says he accepts Mr Bush’s “road map” that led nowhere but clearly affirmed a two-state solution.
Still, if the meeting does end in a stalemate, it will not be enough merely for Mr Obama to mutter doleful thoughts about reassessing America’s special relations with Israel—and then back off. Former administrations told the Israelis and Palestinians that, in the end, it was for the two sides to negotiate peace. It is now plain that this approach does not work. America too needs to be deeply involved from start to finish.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, reasserting the Arab peace initiative of 2002, has boldly called for all Muslim governments to state clearly that they would accept Israel. They must make Hamas do so too. Next month Mr Obama goes to Egypt on his first presidential visit to an Arab country. That would be the perfect moment to unveil his detailed plan for peace, along with a promise that under his administration America intends at last to implement the two-state vision, not just talk about it. The Economist
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