MIDDLE EAST: Netanyahu to Confront Washington Again

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dilip Hiro

LONDON, May 11 1998 (IPS) - Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu flies to the United States this week but not to attend the Israeli- Palestinian summit proposed by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Instead he will meet Secretary of State Madeleine Albricht Wednesday to discuss latest differences over Israel’s refusal to accept a U.S. proposal for further troop withdrawals in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

(In Washington, State Department spokesman James Rubin said Monday that, after meeting Netanyahu, Albricht would be “in a positiion to report to the president on whether she believes there is a basis…to launch permanent peace talks.”)

Netanyahu’s trip originally was planned for him to adress the American Jewish Committee and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel Jewish lobby based in Washington. Undoubtedly he also will use the occasion to shore up support for his latest hardline stance toward the Middle east peace process, which has brought relations between his country and the United States to their lowest point in many years.

Clinton will not be confronting Clinton directly, as the U.S. chief executive will be flying to Britain Tuesday night for a meeting of the G-7 nations and Russia in Birmingham.

Conventional wisdom among veteran Middle East observers has it that when an Israeli prime minister locks horns with any U.S. president, he loses.

They point to the case of Israeli premier Yitzhak Shamir (1986- 92) who had a public row in 1991 with U.S. president George Bush (1989-93) when the latter refused to underwrite a 10 billion dollar loan Israel wanted to raise on the international financial markets. The money was for new housing for the large number of Jewish immigrants then arriving in Israel from the Soviet Union.

Bush demanded that Shamir cease Jewish settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian Territories if he wanted Washington to underwrite the loan at the cost of 800 million dollars to the U.S. treasury. Shamir refused. Against this background that the Israeli general election of June 1992 took place. Shamir’s Likud bloc lost to Yitzhak Rabin’s Labour Party.

But those who refer to this episode overlook the glaring differences between Shamir and Netanyahu. Netanyahu, the youngest Israeli to become the prime minister, is the most Americanised politician of his country.

Insiders say that Netanyahu knows more about the workings of the U.S. Congress than he does of the Israeli Knesset. Netanyahu has spent 16 years on the East Coast of America — as a school and university student, as a businessman and as an Israeli diplomat.

He arrived in the United States along with his parents in 1964, when his right-wing academic father, Bentzion, left Hebrew University in Jerusalem, after he was denied permanent tenure, to teach at a university in Philadelphia.

After finishing high school in Philadelphia, Netanyahu did three years of compulsory military service in the Israeli armed forces.

He then enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After obtaining a master’s degree in business administration, he held consulting and other jobs in the U.S. and then in Israel, where he became a sales executive of a furniture company.

In 1982, on the recommendation of Moshe Arens, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, and an engineering graduate of the MIT, then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin appointed Netanyahu, then 32, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. He held that job for two years.

On his return to Israel, Netanyahu ran the Jonathan Institute which specialised in researching terrorism.

It was not until 1988 that he became a Likud member of the Knesset (MK). But within five years he won the leadership of Likud — thanks largely to the financial and professional input of his right-wing Jewish American friends.

Of the four contestants for Likud’s leadership, Netanyahu was the most junior and least known, having served first merely as a deputy to the foreign minister, David Levy (now his rival for the top party job), and then as an adviser to Shamir.

In March 1993, for the first time Likud members were given the choice of electing their leader directly — a replica of the U.S. primaries. Netanyahu’s rivals, who included Levy and Benny Begin, son of a former Israeli premier, lacked the financial and professional resources he was able to muster.

Out of 142,000 of 216,000 Likud members, 52 per cent favoured Netanyahu and only 27 per cent Levy.

What makes Netanyahu more of an American-style politician than Israeli is his skill in using television to get his message across. Before his telegenic skills his rival for the premiership, the veteran Shimon Peres, looked an outright amateur in the sole television debate they had during the election campaign.

Little wonder that some U.S. politicians have embraced Netanyahu as no other Israeli contemporary. They consider him as one of their own. Two years ago when Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress legislators punctuated his speech with applause 14 times.

Following Albright’s failure last week to win Netanyahu’s agreement to the U.S. proposals for Israeli withdrawal from part of the occupied West Bank in exchange for further security guarantees by the Palestinian Authority, a majority of the 435 House of Representative’s members addressed a letter to Clinton, stating that Israel should not accept the U.S. withdrawal plan.

The Republican House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, declared that by pressuring the Jewish state, Clinton was endangering its security, and siding with the Palestinians against Israel.

(In Washington State department Spokesman Rubin emphasised that “at the end of the day, the one area where the Consititution is rather clear is that the conduct of diplomacy is in the purview of the executive Branch. And Secretary Albright will continue to act in what she believes is the best interest of the United States and, frankly, in doing so, expects to be advancing the interest of Israel.”