Elections have consequences, Israel edition
Bibi Netanyahu won a fourth term after a pretty nasty end to his campaign. Now we're going to see who will reap the whirlwind.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, left, looks on as President Obama speaks at the White House on March 3. Based on the relative warmth of their relationship, you could probably freeze any food placed between them. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Benjamin Netanyahu won a clean victory in Israeli elections. Why he won will remain a matter of some dispute. Given the piss-poor accuracy of Israeli polls, we’ll never know for sure whether Netanyahu stormed back from a deficit or not. Nonetheless, Netanyahu’s last-minute rhetoric left a bad taste in some observer’s mouths. Some conservatives question the significance of that rhetoric. But as The Washington Post’s Steven Mufson noted:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumph in Tuesday’s parliamentary elections keeps in place an Israeli prime minister who has declared his intention to resist Obama on both of these fronts, guaranteeing two more years of difficult diplomacy between leaders who barely conceal their personal distaste for each other.The Israeli election results also suggest that most voters there support Netanyahu’s tough stance on U.S.-led negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program and his vow on Monday that there would be no independent Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.
The key question, to quote Joss Whedon, is: Where do we go from here?
The short-term answer seems pretty damn clear. One of President Obama’s favorite aphorisms is “elections have consequences.” By late Wednesday, the administration had signaled those consequences to three press outlets.
First up: Foreign Policy’s John Hudson and Colum Lynch:
After years of blocking U.N. efforts to pressure Israelis and Palestinians into accepting a lasting two-state solution, the United States is edging closer toward supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution that would call for the resumption of political talks to conclude a final peace settlement, according to Western diplomats….“The more the new government veers to the right the more likely you will see something in New York,” said a Western diplomat.
And then there’s Politico’s Michael Crowley, with quotes from senior administration officials:
The positions taken by the prime minister in the last days of the campaign have raised very significant substantive questions that go far beyond just optics,” said a senior administration official, adding that recent Israeli government actions were in keeping with Netanyahu’s rhetoric.While saying it was “premature” to discuss Washington’s policy response, the official wouldn’t rule out a modified American posture at the United Nations, where the U.S. has long fended off resolutions criticizing Israeli settlement activity and demanding its withdrawal from Palestinian territories.“We are signaling that if the Israeli government’s position is no longer to pursue a Palestinian state, we’re going to have to broaden the spectrum of options we pursue going forward,” the official said.
And finally, the New York Times’ Helene Cooper and Michael D. Shear, have a “senior White House official” quote:
Such a Security Council resolution would be anathema to Mr. Netanyahu. Although the principles are United States policy, until now officials would never have endorsed them in the United Nations because the action would have been seen as too antagonistic to Israel.“The premise of our position internationally has been to support direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” a senior White House official said. “We are now in a reality where the Israeli government no longer supports direct negotiations. Therefore we clearly have to factor that into our decisions going forward.”
Yeah, as signals go, this one seems pretty clear: Elections have consequences, and those consequences will be uncomfortable for Benjamin Netanyahu.
So, is this simply a fit of administration pique, or is there a larger strategic purpose in mind? Or, to put it more plainly, if there is a strategic purpose, does the strategy make sense?
There are three ways to look at this. The first, as FP’s Hudson and Lynch note, is that the administration will accede to action at the UN Security Council, “as an alternative to the Palestinian effort to hold Israel accountable at the [International Criminal Court.]” So ,really, the administration is playing defense at the UN to save Israel a worse outcome.
This strikes me as too charitable an interpretation, especially given this (from Cooper and Shear):
In strikingly strong criticism, the White House called Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign rhetoric, in which he railed against Israeli Arabs because they went out to vote, an attempt to “marginalize Arab-Israeli citizens” and inconsistent with the values that bind Israel and the United States. The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters traveling with Mr. Obama on Air Force One on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s statement was “deeply concerning and it is divisive and I can tell you that these are views the administration intends to communicate directly to the Israelis.”
A second possibility is that the administration is trying to influence the nature of Netanyahu’s coalition. By signaling possible repercussions now, the administration hopes that the eventual Netanyahu cabinet will prove more amenable to negotiations with the Palestinians than the campaign rhetoric suggested. As the Monkey Cage’s Nadav Shelef notes, the narrow win set of the emergent right-wing coalition government will put Netanyahu in a tight corner:
Netanyahu is therefore likely to face a choice between somehow engaging in negotiations – and thereby destabilizing his government – or refusing to do so at the cost of increasing Israel’s isolation in the world; isolation that, if combined with increasing E.U. sanctions, would drastically impact Israel’s economy and shrink the pie available for redistribution. This scenario would only exacerbate the looming political fight over Israel’s budget.In either case, we can expect Israel to face new elections in the not-too-distant future.
There is one last bank-shot possibility that’s worth considering — that the intended audience for these signals isn’t Israel but Iran. Netanyahu’s victory, combined with the Senate letter from last week, provide ammunition to Iranian hard-liners who do not want to see a nuclear deal with the P5+1. They’d argue that Obama is weak and therefore cannot be trusted to carry out any nuclear deal.
One of the ways that leaders can signal intentions to adversaries is to take costly actions that separate them from leaders who would otherwise be bluffing. The administration’s huffing and puffing on Israel will certainly generate some political costs:
So maybe Obama’s throat-clearing exercise is designed to tell his Iranian counterparts that he’s still committed to implementing any nuclear deal.
These possible explanations are not mutually exclusive. But I do hope the administration really does have one of these in mind, because otherwise this looks like a fit of pique against a difficult but longstanding ally. And pique is not the right way to run the foreign policy railroad.
