The Arab League’s decision to approve direct talks between the Palestinian
Authority and Israel is a clear-cut diplomatic victory for Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been lobbying hard for the resumption of such
talks.
The prime minister’s recent visits to Washington, Cairo and Amman
have paid off and international pressure will soon be brought to bear on
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to put to one side his
understandable skepticism concerning Netanyahu’s real intentions and agree to
meet him around the negotiating table.
But before Netanyahu allows this
rare diplomatic success to go to his head, he should pay attention to
the
worrying statement made by the new British prime minister David Cameron
during
his visit to Turkey last week, for it provides a serious warning as to
how
poorly Israel is viewed in the international community. Addressing
Turkish
businessmen in Ankara, Cameron first sharply attacked Israel’s behavior
in the
Mavi Marmara affair, saying “the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was
completely unacceptable.”
And then, more significantly, the Conservative
leader went on to say: “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a
prison
camp.”
Cameron’s words were not chosen purely to please his Turkish
audience. Just over a month ago, during a debate in the House of
Commons, he
declared: “Everybody knows that we are not going to sort out the problem
of the
Middle East peace process while there is, effectively, a giant open
prison in
Gaza.”
The greatest threat to Israel right now comes not on the
battlefield, but from the diplomatic and the assault on Israel’s
legitimacy and
the country’s sovereign right to act in self defense. The understanding
for
Israel’s position that world leaders displayed immediately after the end
of
Operation Cast Lead has evaporated over time, helped by the findings of
the
Goldstone Report, but even so, the description of Gaza as a “prison
camp” or
“open prison” is not the rhetoric Israel is accustomed to hearing from
the
leader of one the European Union countries more friendly to
Israel.
Before the knee-jerk reactions kick in and those on the right
look to label Cameron as “anti-Israel” or worse, it should be noted that
the
young prime minister is on record as saying: “I am proud not just to be a
Conservative, but a Conservative Friend of Israel.”
INDEED, CAMERON’S new
coalition government has recently moved to remove one the greatest
points of
friction in Israel-UK relations, the British law on universal
jurisdiction for
war crimes. This law, for example, allowed UK lawyers representing
Palestinians
in Gaza to apply successfully for an arrest warrant against opposition
leader
Tzipi Livni, in advance of a planned trip to London.
In Livni’s case, the
warrant was issued by a magistrate based on Livni’s leadership role in
Operation
Cast Lead and a justified fear of arrest led the former foreign minister
to
cancel her trip to the British capital. Mid-career IDF officers,
meanwhile, have
accepted for some time that they will have to forgo a year’s study-leave
at
British military academies because of this law.
However last month, the
UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke announced that the British government
will act
“at the first opportunity” to change the law. The government will take
the power
of issuing arrest warrants on war crimes charges out of the hands of
low-ranking
magistrates, and require instead the consent of the Director of Public
Prosecutions, who is expected to take a much more cautious approach to
approving
such warrants.
The previous Labor government had pledged numerous times
to remove this bone of contention between Jerusalem and London but never
followed through, so Cameron deserves the credit for moving quickly on
this
issue, particularly given the opposition of his Lib Dem coalition
colleagues to
reform of this law.
BUT AS EXPECTED, Cameron’s remarks caused the usual
outrage among the established UK Jewish community, with the president of
British
Jewry’s umbrella organization criticizing the prime minister’s
“one-sided,
emotive language,” although it is doubtful that Cameron’s stance on Gaza
bothered the majority of British Jews.
A fascinating survey of UK Jews
and their attitudes to Israel, conducted earlier this year by the highly
respected Institute for Jewish Policy Research and just recently
published,
found that British Jews are much more dovish than their Israeli
counterparts.
Out of the 4,000 UK Jews polled, 78 percent said they were
in favor of a two-state solution (with only 15% opposed); 74% are
opposed to
settlement expansion and a surprising 52% think the Israeli government
should
negotiate with Hamas, compared with 39% against.
And no, the survey did
not just question “self-hating Jews.”
Ninety percent of those questioned
regard Israel as the “ancestral homeland” of the Jewish people, 87%
believe Jews
have “a special responsibility” to ensure its survival and 72% of those
polled
said they considered themselves Zionists.
The views of British Jewry, or
even those of the British prime minister, are not particularly important
in the
wider picture of Middle East diplomacy. But they do provide an
interesting
insight into how a sympathetic Western audience sees the present
situation.
If Netanyahu is serious about direct talks with the
Palestinians, he must be aware of the price Israel will have to pay to
ensure
they succeed. If he simply intends on playing for time and not changing
the
situation, then we can expect further and more damaging criticism from
our
diplomatic allies and a serious erosion of Israel’s international
position.
The writer is a former editor-in-chief
of The Jerusalem Post.