By Alex Joffe
With regard to the possible application of Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, certain long-term aspects are clear. It would be a partial culmination of both longstanding Zionist aspirations to control the ancient heartland of the Jewish people and the strategic necessity of creating defensible borders for Israel.
The early Zionists made do with areas that could be purchased and settled and were diffident about pushing to control areas such as Shechem, Hebron and the central highlands, despite their ancient Jewish significance. But while practical-minded and often non-religious, they acknowledged the importance of those regions for the Jewish people and the long-term Zionist project.
So it is as well with the question of defensible borders. The Allon Plan, which emerged immediately after the 1967 war, envisioned Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. The communities built around Jerusalem were designed with the goal of creating a permanent Jewish majority within a defensible configuration of the city. The creation of Ariel and other settlement blocs was intended to create strategic depth and defend existing population centers.
The sovereignty issue has long vexed Israeli leaders, who have to contend with the settlement movement and the right as well as with the Palestinians and the international community. The wisdom of successive Labor and Likud governments allowing or sponsoring Jewish neighborhoods in areas both close to Jewish communities and right in the midst of Arab populations can be questioned from the standpoint of domestic and international politics; minorities created strategic realities with which governments then had to contend. As a voting and demographic bloc, the settlement movement exerts significant pressure, and it is doing so on behalf of the application of sovereignty.
These long-term pressures aside, the short-term reality is that the Trump administration has shown itself to be uniquely favorable to Israel. No American administration has ever been willing to support Israel diplomatically with the same determination and affection. The United States under Trump has consistently fallen in with pro-Israel positions, from moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem to defunding UNRWA to the “Peace to Prosperity” plan to adopting the Israeli position that Palestinian intransigence has not only been the key obstacle to peace but one that should no longer be rewarded.
Joining in condemnation are U.S. Democrats, including members of the former Obama administration like former National Security Advisor Susan Rice. These warnings also forecast the likely policies of a possible Biden administration, which would essentially be a third Obama administration augmented by the far-left and Muslim wings of the newly progressive Democratic Party.
These objections suggest a hitherto overlooked aspect of Israeli decision-making. The application of sovereignty would not simply represent an Israeli desire to change the status quo before the U.S. elections in November. To some degree, it would also constitute a response by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his treatment at the hands of the Obama administration.
Obama may thus turn out to be an unintended godfather of the application of Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank.
The Obama administration’s treatment of Israel is well documented, from repeated condemnations of “settlement building” no matter how minor or theoretical,
to constant derision of Israeli leaders as liars and “chickenshits,” to the covert last-ditch effort to orchestrate the United Nations into condemning all Israeli activities across the Green Line as “settlements” in Resolution 2334 and, above all, to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran.
Ever since Obama left office, Netanyahu has been hemmed in by ongoing corruption accusations, the inability to form a government despite three elections, the coronavirus pandemic and contradictory signals from the Trump administration, which for its own reasons was slow to reveal its peace plan. With the U.S. elections looming, Netanyahu may have played the sovereignty card clumsily and at almost the last possible minute, but in an irony of history, the Obama administration may have helped speed a slow-moving train toward its station.
Alex Joffe is a Shillman-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior non-resident scholar at the BESA Center. This article was first published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
