Al-Ahram
With the US presidential elections at hand it is hard to resist the temptation to turn to recent history. Around this time in 2000, Bill Clinton was gathering his papers as he prepared to leave the White House, weighed down by disappointment in the results of strenuous efforts he had exerted over the preceding months to reach a final settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He had succeeded in persuading Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak to come to Camp David to discuss final status issues in talks that he attended personally. Now Arafat and Barak had to reorder their cards, each in their own way, in order to ready themselves for a new phase in the conflict following the failure of Camp David II. Whereas Arafat realised that he had to prepare the Palestinian people to take on the burdens of another phase in the struggle that would be exceedingly difficult after Sharon's provocative visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque that triggered the second Intifada, Barak had to scramble to mend rifts in his coalition government and get ready for early elections. Within a short space of time after the US elections, which resulted in a Bush victory, Israeli Knesset elections were held and resulted in the victory of Sharon.
Eight years later we are almost experiencing a déjà vu, albeit against the backdrop of an entirely different international and regional climate. In the US, George Bush Jr who succeeded Clinton in the Oval Office is collecting his papers and preparing to leave the White House after the worst two presidential terms in the history of the US, the Middle East and the world. At the same time, the coalition game in Israel has stumbled into an impasse the only way out of which is early parliamentary elections that again will be held within a matter of months after the US presidential elections. So, the world is preparing to greet at around the same time a new US president, who will probably be Barack Obama, and a new Israeli prime minister, who will probably be Benyamin Netanyahu. But here's the difference. In 2001, it was clear that Bush and Sharon would inevitably be heading side by side in the same direction. But most signs for 2009 suggest that Obama and Netanyahu will probably have to part ways, bringing US-Israeli relations to a crucial turning point.
In 2000, no one could have predicted that the American people would elect a man of the calibre of George Bush Jr, with his rare blend of ignorance, extremism and arrogance to succeed Clinton, or that the Israeli people would elect a notorious war criminal to succeed Barak. Yet that is exactly what happened. Most political analysts at the time had failed to grasp the profound changes that were rippling through the US and Israeli societies as the consequence of regional and global developments and that drove these societies into the clutches of the ultra right. Naturally, these camps in the US and Israel were driven by different motives. The neoconservatives in the US felt that the Democrats under Clinton were squandering the golden opportunity of the collapse of the Soviet Union to assert US hegemony and spread the American model of democracy around the world. In Israel, the "neo-Likudists" saw in Arafat's rejection of Barak's "generous" offer at Camp David II an unpardonable slap in the face the only response to which was to eliminate Arafat, even if that meant destroying the entire peace process.
Within around nine months after Bush's inauguration, the US was struck by the airplane hijack bombings of 11 September, resulting in the death of around 3,000 people. Bush's response was to ignite wars against Afghanistan and Iraq that have so far caused more than a million dead, double this number of wounded, and the displacement of more than five million others. The wars, the way they were initiated, the way they were managed, and the attrition they wrought on US human and material resources have destroyed the US's international status and prestige. Also, during his eight long years in power Bush remained unable to fulfil his promise to establish an independent Palestinian state, and today, as his second term draws to a close, there is not even the glimmer of a hope of the possibility of founding this state in the foreseeable future in view of the current schism in the Palestinian national movement.
Sharon, Bush's number one ally in the region, fared little better. Responding to the Al-Aqsa Intifada with unprecedented violence, he reoccupied the Palestinian territories from which Israel had withdrawn in accordance with the Oslo Accords. He succeeded in eliminating Arafat. Then, when he failed to put an end to the resistance, he decided to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and to subject that area to a total blockade in order to starve it into submission. However, these brutal actions could not settle the score in favour of Sharon, who then suffered a stroke that sent him into a coma, later to be pronounced clinically dead. His successor, Olmert, tried to shift the strategic balances of the conflict back towards Israel. His means to this end was to launch an all out war against Lebanon, which he lost. His defeat at the hands of Hizbullah effectively ended his political career. He eventually decided to resign and withdraw from the political arena. He was replaced as Kadima Party chief by Tzipi Livni who, in turn, proved unable to form a government.
It was only natural for the ultra right camps that assumed power in the US and Israel in 2001 to turn the events of 11 September to the advantage of their respective agendas and to work together, using the anti-extremism card, to eliminate the forces opposed to their policies in the Middle East. It was Bush's "global war against terrorism" that gave Sharon the green light for which he had long been yearning not only to physically annihilate Arafat but also to destroy the infrastructure of any resistance organisations capable of bearing arms against Israel. The convergence of US and Israeli hawkish policies gave rise to an uninterrupted, nearly eight years long period of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories. Then, as mentioned above, these catastrophic policies backfired with disastrous consequences for the Bush and Sharon camps. Although the Taliban regime fell in Afghanistan, the Taliban movement itself was not destroyed. In fact, it has been increasingly successful in reasserting itself, so much so that it is threatening Kabul itself.
Meanwhile, the US invasion of Iraq may have toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, but the Bush administration's Iraq enterprise has not succeeded and appears fated to resounding failure. In Palestine, Arafat has indeed been eliminated and the Palestinian people are now surrounded and those in Gaza are still the victims of collective punishment. However, Arafat's successor has not yet signed a treaty of surrender to Israel, the resistance movements have not yet thrown down their arms, and the Palestinian people remain as steadfast as ever. Israel has also failed to achieve any of its declared objectives in Lebanon, whether through the war it waged on the pretext of eliminating Hizbullah or in subsequent political machinations. Hizbullah not only still exists, but it is stronger than it was before the 2006 war. Israel only managed to retrieve dead Israeli soldiers, whose capture ostensibly triggered the war, in the framework of a prisoner exchange deal in which Hizbullah obtained more than it had asked for before the war. Meanwhile, military defeat in the face of Hizbullah sent shockwaves through the Israeli establishment, eventually toppling Olmert and wreaking chaos in Israeli politics.
No political analyst can predict with absolute confidence the results of an election in any country, especially in Israel or the US. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the public moods in Israel and the US are totally different. In Israel, the liberal and left-wing forces no longer have the ability to lead the Zionist project in its current stage of development and, therefore, are unable to offer an alternative that would steer Israel out of its current predicament. Since the primary contest in Israel today is between the ultra right and the even more extreme right, it appears that the Likud Party will gain enough parliamentary seats to enable its leader, Netanyahu, to form a government.
In the US, the political climate appears to have swung in the opposite direction. When an African American can defeat the wife of a former US president in the political party primaries and become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate this can only mean that a critical mass is building up in favour of radical -- as opposed to merely superficial or cosmetic -- change in the US's foreign and domestic policies. However, since the true left has no history of note in the US, the pendulum has shifted from the ultra right to the most moderate right. Therefore, I have little doubt that, unless something extraordinary occurs, Obama will win, especially in light of the repercussions of the recent fiscal crisis. This, in turn, will soon bring to the fore the nature and substance of US-Israeli relations in the Obama/Netanyahu period.
I know that many will hasten to remind me of how strong US-Israeli relations have always been, that some two-thirds of American Jews generally vote Democrat, and that an even greater number will vote for Obama in this election for reasons too numerous to go into here. Yet, as much as I know that Obama will do his utmost to help Israel and will try to refrain from placing any strains on US-Israeli relations, he will still be faced with the inevitable question as to the type of change he is seeking and how he can bring it about. I am convinced that it will be impossible to introduce any essential change into US domestic and foreign policies unless the vision for change includes the reformulation of the substance of US-Israeli relations.
Obama is aware how much the world has changed. He knows that the US's weight in the global order has dwindled considerably, that the exhilaration that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union has entirely faded, and that the neoconservatives have behaved with extreme blindness and folly. He knows, in other words, that he will not be able to shape the world wearing American blinkers, that he will have to coordinate with the EU and Japan on questions related to the laying of the foundations of a new global fiscal and, perhaps, economic order; that he will have to consult with Russia, China and maybe India on matters related to nuclear proliferation; and that he will probably have to enter into serious talks with Iran and, perhaps, Syria and Turkey on the question of an ordered withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. Since Netanyahu, if he wins the next Israeli elections, would fight most of these approaches every inch of the way, it is difficult to envision smooth sailing for an Obama/Netanyahu phase of US-Israeli relations. The Obama phenomenon is not a bubble that Netanyahu can blow at or make go away.