No Free Lunch: Israel Bracing To ‘Pay Price’ For U.S. Embassy Relocation
Trump administration reportedly expects the Netanyahu government to make quid pro quo concessions to the Palestinians within the context of the peace process
As anticipation builds for the May 14 relocation of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Saturday night raised the prospect of the White House exacting a price from the Israeli government for the move. “There is no free lunch,” he explained in an interview with local television, before qualifying that Israel is open to a quid pro quo paradigm when it serves to further “the national ambition and the realization of a vision.”
Indeed, President Donald Trump has publicly implied that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will be expected to make concessions to the Palestinians as part of a year-in-the-making American peace push, with a formal plan purportedly set to be unveiled shortly after the mission’s transfer. In this respect, Liberman reportedly was presented with parts of the proposal during his trip to Washington last month, including an alleged U.S. demand that four Arab neighborhoods in the eastern section of Jerusalem—which Israel has vowed to maintain united—be ear-marked for the capital of a future Palestinian state.
But the issue may anyways be moot given that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas imposed a boycott on the White House following its recognition in December of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and has since repeatedly reiterated his refusal to engage in any U.S.-led peace initiative. Instead, Abbas has been lobbying foreign powers to devise an international mechanism for jump-starting negotiations, a model that Israel disapproves of.
Dr. Yossi Beilin, an architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords signed between then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and former Palestinian chief Yassir Arafat, believes it is a mistake to attribute negative connotations to concessions made to the Palestinians because, in his estimation, any such reasonable action benefits Israel. “It is land-for-democracy even before land-for-peace,” he stressed to The Media Line, “as Israel is doomed in the near future unless it defines a border between itself and the Palestinians. So this is not something that the nation has to ‘pay’ for, but what is badly needed in order to ensure it retains a Jewish majority.”
As regards the prospect of Abbas pulling a U-turn and agreeing to play ball with President Trump, Dr. Beilin contends that this will require the American administration “to do something within a global context in order to make it easier on [the Palestinian leader] to walk back his position. If this does not occur,” he concluded, “while the Palestinians may be viewed as ‘naysayers,’ which will be [construed by the right as] a victory for Netanyahu, it will be a loss for Israel as it offers no solution.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in fact, edging towards intractability, according to Dr. Oded Eran, head of Israel’s peace negotiating team from 1999-2000 and currently a Senior Researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “Following numerous attempts [over twenty-five years] to reach a comprehensive solution it may be that this formula under any circumstances cannot succeed, and given the current political realities on both sides, it is even less likely.
“The Palestinians prefer to seek international recognition rather than negotiate with Israel, whose governing coalition rejects [on principle] Palestinian statehood,” he elaborated to The Media Line. “As such, I do not see much possibility for a final deal, only interim agreements that could eventually lead to the two-state solution.”
Whereas many analysts agree that President Trump’s chances of success are minimal, others suggest that a significant change in the regional dynamics could lead to a breakthrough. To this end, there has been a rapprochement between Sunni Muslim countries and the Jewish state based on the shared desire to curb Shiite Tehran’s potential nuclearization and expansionism, an effort that would be significantly boosted if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were finally to be resolved.
“If not now, when?,” asks the age-old Talmudic adage, and it may be that this confluence of interests will induce the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to finally make do with whatever Washington proposes. Otherwise, should peace talks again fail to materialize, the answer to the maxim increasingly risks becoming “never.”
