Nothing New from Netanyahu

BEIRUT -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech Sunday outlining his views on Arab-Israeli peace-making offered nothing new, which is why it is an important challenge for the Arab world, which deserves more than perfunctory rejection. Netanyahu reiterated core, hardline Zionist positions that most of the world finds unreasonable, and that most of the Arab world finds racist -- giving Israeli Jews greater primacy or rights over Palestinian-Arab Christians and Muslims.

In demanding that the Arabs guarantee a priori that the state of Israel is Jewish, secure, and militarily more powerful than its neighbors, Netanyahu has given a speech couched in biblical criteria and dimensions. He wants Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa to guarantee for the Jewish-Israelis today what God promised the ancient Hebrews in the biblical books of Deuteronomy, Exodus and Numbers: eternal, exclusive, pure, powerful, secure statehood in a land owned by others that will be miraculously ethnically cleansed with Divine mandate and legitimacy, to make room for a Jewish state.

Netanyahu's speech was aimed at two primary and two secondary audiences: primarily, US President Barack Obama and Netanyahu's own right-wing coalition government partners, and, secondarily, public opinion in the Arab world and Israel. The two important battles he faces are to hold together his rightwing coalition in Israel and to maintain the close US-Israeli strategic relationship. He outlined positions that he thinks will achieve this goal, and he has probably correctly read the pressures on him in both cases. He also totally ignored the rest of Arab and Israeli public opinion, in the best manner practiced by both professional politicians who care only for their incumbency, and arrogant nationalist-supremacists who view their people's rights as being superior to other people's rights.

Netanyahu did not offer plausible peace conditions, but merely offered to enter into a protracted negotiating process that he knows will not go anywhere due to his very harsh opening position. The idea that his "acceptance" of a Palestinian state is a breakthrough or a major step forward, as many in the West have described it, combines insult and ignominy. The imbalance in national and individual rights Netanyahu ascribes to Israel and the hypothetical Palestinian "state" is so severe in Israel's favor that talk of a "two-state" solution becomes comical, and should be more accurately described as "slave statehood."

Netanyahu would like us to spend years discussing what Israel means when it says it will live with a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes Israel, a priori, as a Jewish state, accepts continued growth of Zionist colonies, and does not insist on the 1948 Palestinian refugees having their right of return recognized. These are not new positions. Previous Israeli governments have negotiated on the basis of two states being the outcome of the negotiations.

Netanyahu now wants the Arabs and the world to accept Israel's preconditions as the starting point for talks, and he will use the American insistence on freezing all settlement activity as a key negotiating card to win concessions on other issues, especially refugees. He will also try to get us to engage in an endless round of talks that will either repeat the fruitless cycle we have experienced from the Madrid talks in 1992 until today, or wear down the Arab side until we surrender.

Neither of these options will happen, which is why the Netanyahu speech is important. It clarifies the official Israeli position, which is at great odds with the Palestinian-Arab position, and at some odds with the American position as articulated by Obama. Much faster than was expected, within just five months of Obama's inauguration we witness important potential turning points in the Middle East. US-Israeli positions are diverging on some issues, like settlements, as Washington seems serious about renewing its role as a mediator in order to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, permanently and comprehensively.

If the US and Israeli positions are more clear, the Arab position is not. As long as the Arab world merely rejects Israeli positions, calls on the United States to do more, and sits around waiting for others to rescue us from our own diplomatic incompetence, we should not be surprised to hear the kinds of things we heard from Netanyahu last Sunday. The Americans have declared their intent to re-engage. The Israelis have declared their intent to dig in and cement their supremacist and colonial ways. The Arabs have declared nothing other than repeating old positions that have impressed and moved nobody.

The combination of the new American posture in the Middle East and the reaffirmation of hardline Israeli positions should be an opportunity for the Arab world to work more seriously than before in generating momentum for progress towards a negotiated peace, in a manner more eloquent and effective than merely rejecting Zionism's colonial ways.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.