Is the Settlers’ Movement Right to Feel Deceived by Netanyahu? (Part 2)

More from the article in Israel Hayom on settlers’ mistrust of Netanyahu:

Polls have shown wide support in Israel for the UAE deal. But the ideological settler leadership has significant political clout, and has long been a bastion of Netanyahu’s support.

Aware that he might lose their backing to parties even more hawkish than his own, Netanyahu sought to keep settler hopes alive.

There is a clear, and unfair, insinuation by the reporter for Israel Hayom that Netanyahu has no intention of fulfilling the desires of the settlers, but intends only to keep them on the string so that they continue to support him, rather than shift their support from Likud to the further-right Yamina Party. Netanyahu believes his outreach to a half-dozen Arab states will in the end make more palatable to them, and more possible in the international context, that extension of sovereignty that remains dear to his heart. He simply thinks the ground should be prepared among the Arab states so as to minimize their disapproval.

“Sovereignty is not off the agenda, I was the one who brought it to the Trump plan with American consent. We will apply sovereignty,” he told Army Radio, saying the White House had merely asked for a postponement.

I believe Netanyahu intends eventually to extend Israeli sovereignty, as planned under the Trump Plan. The Americans were asking only for a postponement, an “off the table for now” understanding. That’s exactly what Netanyahu delivered. And when he was speaking to an Abu Dhabi interviewer and for an Abu Dhabi audience, Netanyahu made sure that they understood that he had agreed to the American demand which, in his telling, was only “to suspend the annexation of lands in the West Bank for a [sic] time being.” He was not telling his Emirati audience what they wanted to hear, but what he knew to be true. Prime Minister Netanyahu, should he remain in office, intends at some point to convince the UAE and possibly other Arab states that follow its path of normalization, that Israel can be of greatest help to them in the mighty confrontation with Iran if it is secure in its control of the Jordan Valley, that sits athwart the invasion route from the east, and if its nearly half-million Israelis are also secure in their homes that will be permanently part of Israel. Netanyahu doesn’t expect to persuade them overnight, but as the economic and security benefits of the “normalization” become ever more abundant and obvious, and the Palestinians, by contrast, continue to rage against the UAE, and vilify its leaders as traitors — which will only infuriate the Emiratis even more — he hopes to persuade the UAE to recognize Israel’s need for, and perhaps even its rightful legal claim to, that part of the West Bank that under the Trump Plan was to remain part of Israel.

But many settler leaders are unconvinced. MK Bezalel Smotrich (Yamina) said Netanyahu “has been deceiving right-wing voters for many years with great success.”

No doubt about it, Netanyahu can be a smooth politician in his domestic dealings – you don’t become Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister without having mastered the art of constantly making and unmaking shifting domestic alliances — but in dealing with the Arabs he has been both strong and consistent. He’s never made the kind of disastrous deals that Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert were willing to offer Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, respectively. Nor is he being deceptive. He has been consistent in making clear, to the settlers, to Donald Trump and Jared Kushner , and to the Emiratis listening to his interview on Abu Dhabi-based Sky News Arabia, that he never agreed to put an end to his annexation plans in the West Bank but only to “suspend” them “for a [sic] time being.”

And that’s the best promise that any Israeli Prime Minister has made to the settlers. Netanyahu has already managed the once-unthinkable: without withdrawing from a single dunam of land, or promising to do so, he’s managed to have ever-closer ties – “normalization” – with the UAE, one of the most important Arab countries. He’s started to nurture ties with other Arab states as well. He met in Muscat in 2018 for a friendly meeting with the late Sultan Qaboos in Oman. Oman has now praised the UAE’s move to normalize relations with Israel and is a likely candidate to do the same. In January 2019, Netanyahu re-established diplomatic relations with Chad which had been cut in 1972. Netanyahu has for years collaborated with Egypt in fighting Al-Qaeda and ISIS remnants that have re-grouped in the Sinai. He’s provided intelligence on Iran to Saudi Arabia. He met in Entebbe, Uganda with the head of the Sudan’s Sovereignty Council, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in February 2020, to discuss future relations. And there have been other contacts, too, such as that with Bahrain, whose King was bragging about meetings with Mossad agents as long ago as 2005. Oman, Sudan, and Bahrain are all on the short list of Arab states likely to follow the UAE in normalizing relations with Israel. Netanyahu has continued, and deepened, security ties to Saudi Arabia, whose Crown Prince MBS has been distinctly uninterested in the Palestinian cause, exasperatedly telling Mahmoud Abbas to “accept whatever deal the Americans offer you.”

Netanyahu believes that annexation in the West Bank – of the kind spelled out in the Trump Plan — will become more acceptable to the Arab states that normalize relations with Israel and then reap the many benefits of Israeli cooperation on trade, technology, tourism, agriculture (including drip irrigation, desalination, and wastewater recycling), health care, solar energy, and defense. The Palestinians, in the meanwhile, as usual shooting themselves in the foot, will be ever shriller in their denunciation of those very states for choosing to promote their own national interests through closer ties to Israel. That unending Palestinian fury will further alienate those Arab states from the Palestinians, and make them more willing to accommodate Israel’s extension of sovereignty in the West Bank. That is what Netanyahu is hoping to achieve. Given his track record so far, in widening contacts with, and winning friends for Israel in, Arab lands, he’s earned the right, even from the nervous and anguished settlers’ councils, to be given time to prove that his strategy, and that of the Trump Administration, will work.