What the PM should have said to silence the world.
By MICHAEL BAR-ZOHARNetanyahu and Obama in New York(good)_311(photo credit: Reuters)
I am not Binyamin Netanyahu.If I were Binyamin Netanyahu, and were standing on the UN podium after Mahmoud Abbas’ speech, I would have turned to him and said, “Abu Mazen, I hereby announce a 6-month (or some other number) freeze on settlement-building. Given that, will you now enter into direct negotiations with Israel?”I know I am not Netanyahu—and neither would I want to be—and I know he is operating under a tremendous amount of pressure and constraints – especially from the Right. But I also know that he should do everything in his power to shed the negative image of Israel.What would such a statement in the UN assembly do?It certainly wouldn’t have convinced the 129-plus states who wildly applauded Abu Mazen’s speech in the UN. They would have applauded whatever he had said, and would have agreed to any proposal he would offer. As our former UN ambassador Dan Gillerman eloquently put it in a television interview, “If only asked, they would have voted to make Disneyland a member of the United Nations.”The statement I propose above wouldn’t have made the Palestinians love us, or the rest of the Arab world for that matter. They would have continued to incite hatred against us, and would have probably reduced the offer to being some sort of devious Zionist plot (inspired, perhaps, by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with everything else that Israel does).The statement I proposed wouldn’t have brought Abu Mazen and the Palestinians to the negotiating table, for the simple reason that they don’t want to negotiate. They do not want to compromise - not on the return of the refugees, not on Jerusalem, not on the borders, and certainly not on recognizing Israel as the Jewish State.A couple of years ago, the Palestinians decided to take a different approach – namely, to bypass negotiations and concessions and vilify and delegitimize Israel in an effort to obtain their own state by exerting pressure from without.And they do so with the support of the naïve, unconditional, and at times hate-filled UN choir that they have so deftly conducted since the day when former PLO leader Yasser Arafat walked in holding an olive branch and packing a gun.That way, they believe, they’ll become a sovereign state by international law; then they’ll hound us at the International Court in The Hague, demand that UN peacekeepers protect them from the Israeli army, fill the West Bank with weapons, attack the “illegal” settlements, campaign for the return of the refugees –basically they’ll get almost everything they demand without paying the price.So, you ask, why should Netanyahu make such a statement?Quite simply because doing so would score a victory with the nations that really count - the moderates that still survive and the friends that we still have.A statement regarding a settlement-freeze will stand as a testament for our American friends to see that they did the right thing by standing up to a tumultuous UN General Assembly and taking our side. It will provide proof for the European Union that we are the ones who really desire negotiations, and not the Palestinian leaders who every morning unearth a new pretext to evade them.It will provide irrevocable evidence to international media that we are the ones craving peace, and not the hypocrites in Ramallah.After all, this isn’t a battle for votes in the UNGA – we never had them before and probably never will. This is a battle for the recognition by a minority – but a minority that counts nonetheless – that we are the ones sincerely seeking peace.I know, we can always display our record of peace-seeking. We were the ones who initiated the Oslo Accords; we were the ones who pulled out of South Lebanon; we were the ones who pulled out of Gaza, uprooting thousands of settlers; we were the ones who froze the settlements in the West Bank for ten months.All this is true and commendable. But in politics the question most frequently asked is not “What did you do (for me…) in the past?” It is, “What did you do today?”And by saying “no” today, or by not saying anything, we only weaken our ties with our allies.Try, for a moment, to imagine US President Barack Obama along with all of our other Democratic and Republican allies in the US, and Tony Blair et al at the EU, as well as the silent majority of good people in America, Europe, and parts of the Arab world (and perhaps even in Israel - who knows?) to be able to say proudly to the whole world: “Did you hear what the Israelis offered?”And then imagine them turning to Abu Mazen and company and saying, “Well, Mr. Chairman? What is your answer?”But of course, I am not Binyamin Netanyahu. The writer is a former Labor Party MK and the official biographer of David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres.
