By Michael Stephens/Doha

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned home a hero after emerging from a bruising encounter with American President Barak Obama. Having initially made a dovish speech just a few days before his trip to America, he flew to Washington and reiterated his hard-line stance: no return to ’49 armistice lines, no resolution for refugees inside Israel and no division of Jerusalem. For this he received no less than 29 standing ovations from a joint session of Congress, a seemingly overwhelming show of bipartisan support from America’s gathered legislators.
Overnight Netanyahu’s approval rating in Israel jumped 13 points as he stoutly defended the status quo and refused to give any ground. In a time of insecurity in the Middle East, Netanyahu assured his people that he can guide their country through tempestuous seas and that not even the biggest waves have been able to tip him off course. As a result he has both reassured the vast majority of Israel’s public and delighted those who see Obama’s presidency as an overbearing and interfering nuisance that works to undermine Israel’s critical security needs.
The joy is, however, short sighted, for whilst Netanyahu may have wowed Congress and once again reinforced emotional and strategic ties between his nation and the United States, he has forgotten one important factor: the Palestinians.
None of Netanyahu’s words last month provided any encouragement to those who wished for a fleeting hope of restarting negotiations on the Palestinian side. Instead they were presented with precondition after precondition, which, given the weakness of the Palestinian president and his Fatah faction’s catastrophic loss of support following the publishing of the Palestine Papers allows for no negotiation whatsoever.
The result? The Palestinians ignored Netanyahu’s offers of “generous and painful” concessions and moved on with their goal of working with the international community to side step the increasingly obstinate Jewish state. Thus as the Israeli right celebrated Netanyahu’s speech as a triumph, they were already behind the curve.
The Arab and Palestinian response was immediate and hard hitting, using friends in the Arab world to wrest back the initiative that Netanyahu had seemingly gained from his trip to Washington.
Firstly, Egypt moved to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza indefinitely, signalling the death knell of four years of Israeli policy to assert security control over the territory. The crossing’s reopening undoubtedly and irreversibly has weakened Israel’s position on its southern borders; no amount of lobbying Congress can change that.
Secondly the Arab League in Doha affirmed its plans to begin putting in place preparations for a declaration at the United Nations for Palestinian statehood. The move is likely to be resisted by the United States but it raises an important question which Netanyahu has overlooked.
Is unconditional support from the United States enough to maintain Israel’s position as the occupier of a territory which the rest of the world views as an independent state?
If it is, then the rules of the game have changed. The Israeli right has oft claimed that there was never an independent polity in the history of human existence named Palestine. The argument then follows that Israel’s control over the West Bank does not mean an occupation of anybody’s territory, for there was never a country to occupy in the first place.
Should Palestine be almost universally recognised as an independent state, Israel is then placed in an altogether different conundrum. It will be the defacto occupier of foreign state, which by insinuation means that the United States is complicit in the occupation of another power. That American intervention will prevent this from becoming a de jure occupation will do nothing to change this perception.
This leaves the United States and Israel, (and also Stephen Harper’s Canada) in an odd fix. The Arab revolutions have shown the extent to which American power in the region is declining, and the increasing desperation of Israel and America to cling to one another in order to maintain a foothold in the region appears increasingly anachronistic and out of step with the movement of regional affairs.
Both the United States and Israel have anticipated the move toward Palestinian statehood for some time, therefore it is odd, given this understanding that they have chosen to revert to the default setting so reflective of the old Middle Eastern order. Israel no longer retains regional hegemony, it has been reduced the status of a player equal to that of Turkey and Iran.
Those who seek to ensure Israel’s security must now understand the nuances of this new order and work assiduously to change the ways of old. Which if maintained will surely lead to only one thing: Israel’s total isolation on the world stage, and further loss of American prestige and influence in the region.
Quite why the Israeli right believes this end goal to be a success is an indication of the extent to which short-term thinking has pervaded their outlook. It is often the case that nations embrace ideas that will lead to their destruction not with horror, but with rapturous applause. Unless something within the right’s mind-set changes in the very near future, we may begin to think of adding Israel to this list. 

*** Michael Stephens is a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in Doha.