Washington is also deeply involved in the tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) in the West Bank. When P.A. president Mahmoud Abbas asked the U.N. General Assembly to accord Palestine observer status, Israel publicly denounced any such U.N. resolution. The Obama administration wanted to offer a far softer resolution of its own with Israeli approval. The Israelis gave in and sent a top official to Washington to negotiate the language.
In the end, the U.S. had no success; the stronger resolution passed overwhelmingly. Israel promptly retaliated by announcing that it would build 3,000 additional housing units in various settlements on the West Bank. To make the response stronger, the Israeli government indicated that it would also make "preliminary zoning and planning preparations" for new Israeli settlements in the most contentious area of the West Bank, known as E1. Settlements there would virtually bisect the West Bank and complete a Jewish encirclement of Jerusalem, ending any hope for a two-state solution.
Washington Can Lay Down the Law
There is a history of the Israeli government publicly announcing settlement expansions for symbolic political effect, and then, under U.S. pressure, pursuing only limited construction or none at all. Some observers suspect Netanyahu is now playing the same game.
As the New York Times reported, "For years, American and European officials have told the Israelis that E1 is a red line. The leaked, somewhat vague, announcement" is a potent threat that may well, in the end, not be carried out because the Israeli government worries about its consequences." Prominent Israeli columnist Shimon Shiffer was more certain. "Netanyahu," he wrote, "does not plan to change the policies of his predecessors, who assured the Americans Israel would not build even one house in problematic areas" like E1.
Maybe that's why Netanyahu sounded so tentative on the subject in an interview: "What we've advanced so far is only planning [in E1], and we will have to see. We shall act further based on what the Palestinians do." Israeli officials admitted to the New York Times that the move on E1 was "symbolism against symbolism."
But several European nations took the E1 threat seriously and responded with unusually sharp criticism. Some Israeli insiders claimed that Obama's hidden hand was at work here, too. The American president, they speculated, gave the Europeans "the green light to respond with extreme measures... The European move is essentially an American move." If so, it was all done in private, of course. (The White House publicly denied the claim.)
However Peter Beinart, editor of the Open Zion page at the Daily Beast and author of The Crisis of Zionism, claims administration officials have told him that such behind-the-scenes maneuvering is Obama's new strategy. Publicly, Washington will "stand back and let the rest of the world do the confronting. Once the U.S. stops trying to save Israel from the consequences of its actions, the logic goes, and once Israel feels the full brunt of its mounting international isolation, its leaders will be scared into changing course."
As Beinart suggests, international isolation is what worries Israelis most. A cut-off of U.S. military aid would be troubling indeed but in itself hardly fatal, since Israel already has the strongest military in the Middle East and a sizeable military-industrial-high-tech complex of its own.
What Israel needs, above all, from the U.S. is diplomatic support to protect it from international rejection, economic boycotts, and a diplomatic tsunami that could turn Israel into a pariah state. Political analysts have long assumed that any Israeli leader who loses the protection of the U.S. would pay the price at the polls.
That's why some insiders, like Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, think Obama can "lay down the law" to Israel on E1 -- behind closed doors, of course. The influential Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer puts the situation in the simplest of terms: "It is clear who is boss."
Obama's New Diplomatic Weapon
The rules of Israel's political game, however, may also be changing. And that's a key to understanding why 2013 could be the year of confrontation between the leaderships of the two countries. Netanyahu has allied his Likud party with the strongest party to its right, Yisrael Beitenu. To seal his victory in the upcoming election on January 22nd, he's put his political fate in the hands (or talons) of his country's hawks.
If he wins (which everyone assumes he will), he'll have to satisfy those hawks -- and they don't care about shrewd secret bargaining or holding on to allies. What they want, above all, are public displays of unilateral strength made with much fanfare, exactly like the recent settlement-expansion announcement and the accompanying threat to turn E1 into an Israeli suburb. Many observers have suggested that the primary audience was Netanyahu's new, ever-more-right-wing partners. Plenty of them still don't trust him, especially after the ceasefire in Gaza under pressure from Washington.
Most analysts saw the Israeli announcement as a public punishment of the Palestinians for their success at the U.N. The BBC's Kevin Connolly had a different interpretation: Israeli hawks felt that letting the U.N. vote pass without some strong response "would be seen as a sign of weakness."
Israeli political life has always been haunted by a fear of weakness and a conviction that Jews are condemned to vulnerability in a world full of anti-Semites eager to destroy them. The hawks' worldview is built upon this myth of insecurity. It demands instant retaliation so that Jews can show the world -- but more importantly themselves -- that they are strong enough to resist every real or (more often) imagined threat.
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