Who and What Went Wrong?

Two of Israel’s three regional alliances, with Egypt and Turkey, are on the brink of collapse and even the third, Jordan, seems suddenly at risk.

By DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN
Erdogan post election win 521 (photo credit: REUTERS/Umit Bektas)
Erdogan post election win 521
(photo credit: REUTERS/Umit Bektas)
ISRAEL FINDS ITSELF ON THE BRINK OF A DIPLOMATIC blowout with Turkey, once its closest regional ally. Its foreign policy is increasingly unpopular and diplomatic incidents – blunders or not – heighten Israel’s sense of isolation on the world stage.
This description was applicable in February 2010, when this column last explored the seeming state of emergency surrounding Israel’s foreign relations. Then, like now, Turkey was the central protagonist in an unfolding drama of dislike. Then, like now, some of the tension involved diplomatic honor and ceremony – insults or apologies; some of it had to do with Israel’s actual policy, such as the Gaza war and its aftermath. When Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon sat the Turkish ambassador down on a low chair, it was hard to imagine that bilateral relations could ever reach a lower point.
But, since then, things have, in fact, gotten immeasurably worse.
Two of Israel’s three regional alliances, with Egypt and Turkey, are on the brink of collapse and even the third, Jordan, seems suddenly at risk.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made military innuendoes and angrily denounced Israel’s hubris following the latter’s refusal to apologize for the death of Turkish nationals on the Gaza blockade-running Mavi Marmara just over one year ago. Post-revolution Egypt is struggling (maybe) to contain expressions of anti- Israelism, but the killing of Egyptian security forces as Israel pursued perpetrators following a terror attack in August didn’t help. In each country there have been either threats or an actual diplomatic recall. In mid-September, a small protest at the Israeli Embassy in Jordan in support of the Palestinian cause and against Jordan’s alliance with Israel also set nerves on edge.
All this is occurring in the midst of the heightened diplomatic crisis with the Palestinians and the UN statehood bid.
How did things reach this point? Back in early 2010, we asked whether Israelis thought the country should adjust its foreign policy for the sake of soothing prickly relationships.
At the time, this would have meant continuing the settlement freeze and reviving negotiations. In our poll, Jewish society was split clean in half. Ultimately, the settlement freeze was not extended, although many months later, in September 2010, Israel did give negotiations sort of a chance.
But now, the high-tension tones of Erdogan and the current brinkmanship surrounding Palestinian statehood make it harder to envision the Israeli government sacrificing its pride to offer any sort of significant policy change (although in the Middle East there are often surprises).
So, instead, The Jerusalem Report decided to ask the Jewish Israeli survey respondents to try to identify which leader, in their opinion, is primarily responsible for the current diplomatic mess.
OUR QUESTION, AS READ TO THE RESPONDENTS, opened with the following introduction: “Lately Israel’s foreign relations have been deteriorating, and there is a great deal of tension between Israel and Turkey, Egypt, the Palestinians, the UN and even the United States.”
We then asked: “From the following list, which figure, in your opinion, is most responsible for this?” The list included: Erdogan, the Palestinian leadership, US President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
In addition to attempting to pinpoint whom the public blames for the situation, the questions also allow for aggregated interpretations: The first two choices tried to gather whether Israelis mainly blame outsiders and what they believe to be sources of anti-Israel attitudes. With the latter two choices, we sought to find out if Israelis look at their own leadership critically and identify Israeli mistakes. And the middle option, US President Barack Obama, sought to answer whether Jewish Israelis’ sometimes skeptical sentiment towards US President Obama translates into actual suspicion that he undermines Israel’s global position.
The survey was conducted on September 13 and 14, following on the heels of major developments regarding Turkey, Egypt and the Palestinians, which would have put them on the top of respondents’ minds. The peak of the Turkey crisis, the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador, occurred on September 2, more than ten days earlier; the storming of Israel’s embassy in Egypt happened just three days before the survey. Talk of the Palestinian statehood bid has been feverish for weeks but the notion of unilateral statehood has been gaining momentum for months or even, arguably, two years, since the release of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building plan – although Israel paid little attention until recently. Meanwhile, Erdogan embarked on a Middle Eastern tour on September 13, the same day that The Report’s survey began. In his opening speech to the Arab League, he criticized Israeli policy in very tough terms yet again.
Thus, given Erdogan’s prominence of late, it should not be surprising that the clear plurality of respondents, 40%, responded that he is the main figure responsible.
It is also not surprising that most Israelis avoid blaming their own leaders first – after all, they elected them.
But precisely for that reason, it is notable that the second-ranked choice was Netanyahu, with 15% who think he is mainly responsible.
Despite the tormented relations with the Palestinians, just 10% said that this mess is their fault – which is fewer than those who blame the prime minister.
Foreign Minister Lieberman, who pioneered the bullying approach in Israel’s foreign policy, comes out lowest on the list – just 5.7% said he is responsible. Thus, despite the fact that foreign relations are directly under his control, and even though those relations have rarely looked worse, roughly 95% of the Jewish public does not hold Lieberman accountable.
Almost the exact same percentage, 5.9% (too close to be statistically significantly different from the results for Lieberman) blamed Barack Obama. Considering how tense the relationship has been with Obama in the past, it is important to note that three times as many Israelis said Netanyahu is to blame rather than Obama.
Of course, Israelis might have a short-term glow for Mr. Obama after his intervention in the mob attack of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo days earlier. This could imply that even a shaky relationship can easily be redeemed in Israeli minds, at least temporarily.
But that observation strengthens the sense that overall, the responses point to very short-term thinking. After all, both Netanyahu and Lieberman have been orchestrating Israel’s foreign policy debacles for close to three years, yet combined, just 21% of the respondents place the responsibility for the current situation on them – and nearly 80% do not.
In terms of demographic variations, age and religious differences led to the most consistent trends, but they varied mainly in their responses regarding the Palestinians or Lieberman. For example, the youngest respondents blamed the Palestinian leadership more than the middle and oldest respondents – 18%, compared to 5% and 7%, respectively. Conversely, 9% of the oldest respondents and 10% of secular folks blamed Lieberman, compared to 3% among the youngest and less than 3% of the religious. Some 22% of secular respondents blamed Netanyahu (compared to 15% among the total sample), and more educated respondents blamed him slightly more than the lesseducated ones (17% and 11%, respectively).
ALTHOUGH THESE VARIATIONS REFLECT TYPICAL trends, there is something counterintuitive about the overall results. Netanyahu ranked second in terms of blame, behind Erdogan. But the Palestinian cause is at the root of nearly all the diplomatic tension (with Turkey, Egypt, the UN and to the extent that there’s tension with the US, it’s because of the Palestinian issue, too). If most Israelis view the Palestinians as the true “refuseniks” of peace and the perpetuators of conflict, or if they hold the very widespread belief that the Palestinians are a well-oiled propaganda machine made of anti- Israel svengalis, would they not blame the Palestinians more than the country’s prime minister? Perhaps some or most of the 15% are left-leaning respondents. It would make sense: in most surveys of the Jewish Israeli population, those who define themselves as left or center-left number between 15-20%.
But some respondents might also blame Netanyahu from the right.
Among religious respondents, 16% of them blame him and the percentage of young people – who are right-leaning in this and other surveys – who blame him is no lower than their percentage in the total population (15%).
For those people, Lieberman probably represents a boon to Israeli foreign policy. Ultimately, the fact that Lieberman is viewed as the main guilty party for the situation by just half the number of people who pointed to Netanyahu implies that, for many, Lieberman’s hard-line attitude towards foreign affairs is the correct approach.
To examine this interpretation, I asked a few people to weigh in on the survey question in a more open format.
While waiting for a friend at a café in Tel Aviv, businesswoman Karen Leumi, 38, tells The Report, “Most of the anti-Israel sentiment now has to do with Erdogan.” She was not provided with the list of responses, but gravitated to Erdogan first anyway. “He has a greater agenda than to fill a void in the Arab world and with his delusions of grandeur, he wants to get back to the same position Turkey was in a few hundred years ago.”
Of Israel’s foreign minister, the leader of the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, she says, “I voted for him. This whole thing about Israel apologizing – after the reports come out, it’s clear that it wouldn’t have made a difference. Israel would have been in a lose-lose situation and that’s it. I’m proud that he put his foot down and refused to apologize.”
When pressed, she identifies one factor other than individual leadership: “If anything [other than Erdogan] can be faulted, it’s the lack of Israeli hasbara [public relations].”
Yet not everyone views the problems as rooted in the short-term or in tactical moves of leaders. In a telephone conversation, Tehiya Ben- Tzur, a 43-year-old single mother in Tel Aviv who works at a high-tech company, says that the reasons behind today’s predicament go back through whole cycles of governments – and she specifically cites Likud governments. She thinks the long-standing “ethos of ‘we deserve’” has generated an arrogance that has “blown up in Israel’s face” because it leaves us unable to see the other.
She talks about past governments and the unwillingness to recognize and accept growing Palestinian national identity. She says she argues frequently with her family, who insist that there was “no Palestinian nation in the past.” She critiques Israeli militarism, which, she says, blinds Israelis to current developments.
But when asked why she does not initially cite Erdogan or the Palestinian leadership for blame, Ben-Tzur chuckles and says, “I look at it more from my side. It’s easier for me to talk about us.” There is radicalism and political interests on both sides, she explains. “I could criticize Erdogan, he is surely riding the wave,” implying that he is exploiting Israel for political opportunity. “The Palestinians also make lots of mistakes, with their corruption – of course, there are two sides to blame. But when you asked me, my first thought was, where did we go wrong?”