by John Lyons
As the correspondent for The Australian, I’d had extraordinary access to Israel’s military and political elite. When Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, decided to have a rare media briefing, I was one of 10 foreign journalists invited. At one dinner I was asked to commence proceedings: a daunting task, given there was a former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, sitting opposite me. We’d gathered in the Jerusalem home of a leading lawyer. There were 20 Israelis – lawyers and politicians – and four foreign journalists present.
‘Now that you’ve been here four years, tell us how you see Israel’s future,’ the host asked.
‘To me Israel is like a train,’ I began. ‘It’s one of the best trains I’ve been on. It’s not just the fastest train, but also the quietest. It showcases Israeli technology. Every carriage has wi-fi and each seat has its own TV. The buffet car has magnificent food and wine. But there’s one problem: in two hours this train is going to have a head-on collision, and a lot of people are going to be killed. The collision is going to be with the occupation of the Palestinians. In my opinion no society can keep another people under occupation for 50 years. Unless there’s real change I think this will end in tragedy.’
I stopped.
There was silence. Finally, a woman said: ‘John, I think every person in this room agrees with everything you just said.’
Ehud Olmert then told us how close he’d come to achieving peace with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Olmert stunned Abbas when he walked in with a map of a Palestinian State that he believed he could convince the Israeli public to support. While this is frequently cited in the media, what he went on to tell us debunked the version often quoted by Israeli lobby groups of that famous meeting, that Abbas rejected the peace offer. He said Abbas asked if he could keep the map. ‘Only if you sign it!’ Olmert replied. Abbas said he could not sign a deal as momentous as this without consulting others. Before he could do this, however, Olmert was hit with massive corruption charges and went to jail. The two men never met again. Olmert told all of us at the dinner that night very strongly: ‘Abbas neither accepted nor refused. To say that he rejected that offer is wrong.’
As argued earlier, overwhelming evidence now exists that Israel determined from 1967 that it would aggressively execute its settlement push to make a Palestinian State impossible. Israel has been moving towards an extremist position for many years.
Israeli documents show Golda Meir (1969–1974) could have done a peace deal with Egypt much earlier, while Ariel Sharon (2001–06) saw off two peace attempts: the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and the Geneva Initiative of 2003. Sharon was both a formidable military strategist and a wily politician. As a military commander, he successfully took Israel into Gaza to establish settlements; as Prime Minister he successfully took Israel out of Gaza in 2005.
Withdrawing from Gaza was a political masterstroke. Sharon was able to tell the US that he was committed to withdrawing from ‘the territories’. As one European diplomat explained to me: ‘But what he didn’t add was that at exactly the same time he was massively boosting the number of settlers in the West Bank. This was what was important to Israel – it had no real religious and political connection to Gaza but it did to the West Bank.’ Sharon withdrew 10,000 settlers from Gaza, but was responsible, according to Israel’s Maariv newspaper, for 100,000 new settlers in the West Bank.
The growth in settlements was strongest under Shimon Peres (1995–96) and Ehud Barak (1999–2001) – both Labor Party prime ministers. Until, that is, Benjamin Netanyahu, who proved to be the biggest booster of settlements of any prime minister in terms of financial incentives for people to move there.
Netanyahu has now become Israel’s longest serving prime minister. He could bring peace to Israel if he wanted to. From a position of unprecedented strength, Netanyahu could force a solution by defining clear borders for Israel and Palestine. Instead, he has enmeshed the two, meaning that the two partners in perhaps the world’s most abusive marriage have been forced to live in the same house indefinitely. Many people who follow Israeli politics closely know this but an entire industry relies on continuing the fantasy that a two-State solution is still viable.
So who is Benjamin Netanyahu? Over my years in the Middle East I was able to observe him up close. He is the shrewdest politician I have ever seen. He is the great survivor. In the highly factionalised world of Israeli politics, he has always managed to cobble together a new alliance or to do another deal to stay in power. And when the history of the Middle East is written, I have no doubt that he will be recorded as the man who has consigned Israelis and Palestinians to decades of conflict.
To try to understand Netanyahu, I spoke to Israelis who have known and worked with him. This included having lunch with a senior official from the Israeli Foreign Ministry whom I liked and trusted. He not only had regular access to Netanyahu but had also known his family for decades.
I asked him: did he think Netanyahu was serious about peace?
He grinned and said there were two seminal figures in Netanyahu’s life: his brother, Yonatan, and his father, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, and to understand Netanyahu you needed to understand these two influences.
Yonatan Netanyahu led the bold rescue of more than 100 Israeli passengers held hostage by Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. The operation was seen as flawless, except for one Israeli death: Yonatan Netanyahu. My contact told me that it was the death of Yonatan while defending Israelis that motivated Benjamin to enter politics.
The other key to understanding Benjamin was his famous historian father, Benzion (who would die in 2012). The official told me that if Benjamin tried to ‘cross the Rubicon’ to bring peace, he would be halfway across when his father would shout: ‘Bibi, come back!’
The official pointed to an interview Benzion gave Maariv newspaper soon after his son’s re-election in April 2009 that Benjamin tried, unsuccessfully, to stop Maariv from running. In it, Benzion said the two-State solution was a charade. ‘There are no two peoples here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population … there is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation.’ When the interviewer suggested that Professor Netanyahu did not like Arabs, he replied: ‘The Bible finds no worse image than that of the man from the desert. Why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases.’
There was no solution, Professor Netanyahu insisted, except for ‘strong military rule’. He said there was ‘valuable experience’ to be gained from how the Turks treated the Arabs during Ottoman rule: ‘The Arabs were so badly beaten, they didn’t dare revolt.’ Asked how the Arabs in Israel should be treated, he said: ‘I think we should speak to the Israeli Arabs in the language they understand and admire – the language of force.’ Benzion said a war with ‘the Arabs’ should include ‘withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more’.
Finally, the reporter asked how much the professor thought he had influenced his son Benjamin. ‘I have a general idea,’ Professor Netanyahu replied. ‘Bibi might aim for the same goals as mine, but he keeps to himself the ways to achieve them, because if he gave expression to them, he would expose his goals.’
When I pointed out to the official that the views of a father could not be assumed for a son, he replied: ‘Indeed – but his father is the man he most admires. Do you think that Benjamin did not absorb many of these views?’
On 4 November 1995, right-wing activist Yigal Amir watched then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin speak to thousands about peace in Tel Aviv. Amir was a 25-year-old Yeshiva student who believed the settlements in the West Bank should continue and who opposed any peace agreement with the Palestinians. When he watched the famous handshake at the White House between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 – the same handshake which so inspired me as a young correspondent in Washington all those years ago – he was devastated. As the New York Times reported, that handshake ‘s
pelled the end of the world that Yigal Amir believed God had given the Jews’. The paper reported: ‘At the Institute for Higher Torah Studies, where Mr Amir was a diligent, argumentative student, the moment of reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders that was greeted so warmly around the world seemed a catastrophe; the celebration at home [in Israel] obscene … Yigal was in a state worse than depression.’1
That night in Tel Aviv, Yigal Amir watched Yitzhak Rabin talk about peace. Once Rabin had finished speaking, Amir made his way through the crowd, hiding a gun. He then went up to Rabin, pointed the gun at his back and fired three shots, killing both Rabin and the Oslo peace process.
Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar told me Netanyahu was ‘absolutely complicit in incitement against Rabin’. While Rabin was negotiating peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu, then Opposition Leader, campaigned against Oslo. ‘At one rally Netanyahu was filmed on a balcony addressing extremists, many of whom were carrying mock coffins for Rabin and Oslo,’ said Eldar. ‘Standing on that balcony with a coffin – he did everything to destroy [the Oslo peace process].’ Netanyahu addressed another rally at which an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform was held aloft. Shortly afterwards, Rabin was shot dead.
After Rabin’s assassination, Haaretz noted that he had been a war hero – the military’s chief of staff during the 1967 Six-Day War, including the triumphant taking of the Western Wall. ‘But Prime Minister and Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin was slain in the wake of systematic incitement led and orchestrated by Netanyahu,’ the paper’s journalist Sefi Rachlevsky wrote. ‘At the height of the incitement and under his direction, Netanyahu managed to turn a Zionist hero into a figure at which thousands and tens of thousands of people shouted “traitor,” with hoarse throats and leaps of hatred and ecstasy. And continued to the conclusion: “With blood and fire, we will oust Rabin.”’2
Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed the Likud leaders – including Netanyahu – for the climate in the lead-up to the assassination. After listening to Netanyahu calling for reconciliation after Rabin’s death, Leah Rabin said: ‘It’s too late. What happened wasn’t a bolt of lightning from the heavens. It grew from the soil, a very particular soil.’3
Just seven months later, Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as their new Prime Minister.
During his first term (1996–99), the US became highly suspicious of him. After Bill Clinton met with Netanyahu in 1996, Clinton adviser Dennis Ross wrote: ‘In the meeting with President Clinton, Netanyahu was nearly insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs. Clinton said “He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he required.”’
Netanyahu knew there was one thing that would kill the peace process: settlements. ‘He approved Har Homa, the first new settlement after Oslo,’ Akiva Eldar told me. This happened in 1997. ‘People don’t realise the importance of Har Homa: its purpose was to put a barrier between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. President Clinton gave his word to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that after Oslo was signed he would not allow Netanyahu to build a new settlement, and he even sent Dennis Ross on a secret mission to Netanyahu to tell him not to build Har Homa. But the Israelis said, “We’re not going to stop.” This said to Arafat that you cannot rely on the Americans.’ Netanyahu’s fast-tracking of Har Homa dealt a serious blow to the peace process.
When speaking to the international community, Netanyahu had a mantra: two States for two peoples. But for settlers, in private, he had a different message.
In 2001, two years after he lost the prime ministership, he drove to Ofra, an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian Territories, 20 minutes from his home. The settlers there believed that during his prime ministership he had not done enough for settlements – even though, like every PM before him, he had encouraged ‘the settlement enterprise’ through financial incentives. But for the settlers who want Greater Israel – a complete takeover of the West Bank – enough is never enough. To effect his political comeback, Netanyahu needed to win over the settlers – the most powerful lobby group in Israel.
The reason this meeting is important is that it explains why the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is worsening today. Here were the real thoughts of the man who would return to power and become Israel’s longest-serving PM.
Not realising he was being filmed, he boasted about how as Prime Minister he had sabotaged the 20-year peace process set in place by the Oslo Accords. ‘I know what America is,’ Netanyahu told the settlers. ‘America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get their way [in terms of a two-State solution]. They asked me before the [1996 Israeli] election if I’d honour [the Oslo Accords]. I said I would but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders.’
A key element of Oslo was that Israel would give the Palestinians limited autonomy in certain areas. But to allay Israel’s security concerns, President Clinton had agreed that ‘defined military zones’ would remain under Israeli control. The Oslo process relied on Israel acting in good faith in relation to these zones.
‘Why is that important?’ Netanyahu asked the settlers in his private meeting. ‘Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo Accords. How did we do it? Nobody said what “defined military zones” were. “Defined military zones” are security zones; as far as I’m concerned the entire Jordan Valley is a “defined military zone”. Go argue.’ Then came the punchline. ‘I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords!’
Oslo was meant to be a five-year interim agreement culminating in the creation of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. The Oslo process would then continue for several years, as both sides were required to adhere to ongoing conditions. But as Netanyahu said, he had used ‘defined military zones’ so that land intended for the Palestinian Authority would be under the control of the Israeli Army. Israel has in fact declared more than half of Area C in the West Bank to be ‘defined military zones’.
Washington had never been able to prove that Netanyahu was trying to derail Oslo. Yet the video found its way onto Israeli television.4 It has now been played several times, so Israelis are clear about what Netanyahu thinks of the peace process. Yet they continue to vote for him.
Akiva Eldar told me: ‘I think history will look at Netanyahu’s first term as the beginning of the end of the two-State solution. It started when he was taped saying he would destroy Oslo. The turning point was the incitement that led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.’
Shortly after Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the second time – in 2009 – indications emerged that he was yet again running interference with US efforts for peace. In the first eight months of his government, Netanyahu issued tenders for 25,000 units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported in May 2010: ‘Netanyahu is pleased by the fact that the Americans failed, so he said, to twist his arm and that ultimately, in the dual between him and the Obama administration, he was the one who emerged with the upper hand.’5
While defenders of Greater Israel, particularly in countries like the US, Australia and Canada, supported Israel’s obfuscation on the basis that ‘the situation is extremely complex’, for Netanyahu the game was simple. By not sitting down with the Palestinians he was guaranteeing his own re-election – he had already suffered the political trauma of being thrown from office in 1999 – but he needed to give the appearance to the US that he was serious about peace.
As Akiva Eldar said: ‘Netanyahu, when he was second- and third-time prime minister [2009–15], did everything to waste time. He wants history to remember him as the prime minister who saved Israel from the tragedy of a Palestinian State – that he was able to manipulate the entire world to save Israel from Oslo.’
In September 2011, I was one of a group of reporters who flew from Tel Aviv to New York with Netanyahu, for his appearance at the UN in connection with Palestine’s push for membership. I�
�d rung Netanyahu’s Australian-born press secretary, Mark Regev, and expressed my interest in being part of the media contingent. There were about 35 Israeli journalists on board, and two foreign journalists, including me.
The security was extraordinary. We’d boarded in a special part of Ben-Gurion airport, with massive concrete barriers and dozens of security men surrounding the plane. On board, security men sat every few seats. There were doctors on board and a huge medical kit in the cabin.
Mid-flight Netanyahu came down to the back of the plane with his wife Sara to say hello to us. The Israeli media weren’t won over, though. One of them, Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea, said to me, ‘There are 35 Israeli journalists on this plane and 34 of them don’t trust Netanyahu.’ When I asked him who was the journalist who did not hate Netanayahu, he said: ‘That guy over there,’ pointing at the reporter from Israel Today, US billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s free pro-settlement newspaper.
Many of these journalists would openly describe the Prime Minister in print as a liar or a hypocrite. Their general view was that ‘unless the occupation was dealth with, their children and grandchildren were destined to live in conflict.’ Nahum Barnea’s son was killed in a bombing in Jerusalem that he went to cover as a journalist, not knowing his son had been involved. Barnea and most of his journalistic colleagues believed there had to be a solution.
Sometimes Netanyahu would talk about media bias, but generally he would deal with the problem by going through friendly media such as Israel Today.
Netanyahu knew how to read people and managed to play the United States very well on this visit. After his pitch-perfect speech to the UN, he spoke to Congress and received something like 30 standing ovations.
Israel won a reprieve when Palestine downgraded its membership bid. But fourteen months later Palestine approached the UN seeking non-member status. When Israel tested the strength of its support the result was not good: only eight countries out of 192 voted with Israel. So remote and obscure were some of these countries for the Israeli public – such as Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands – that Benjamin Netanyahu issued ‘talking points’ to his Cabinet to explain where they were.