Ehud Barak’s supporters have a right to feel betrayed. But it is nothing Barak himself is responsible for. Rather, the betrayal comes from a major, if unofficial, player in Israel: U.S. President Bill Clinton.
One of the arguments often used to batter outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was that he had brought relations with the United States to an unprecedented low. The Clinton administration sent a strong message that if Israelis would only replace Netanyahu with Barak, they would find the United States much more understanding and supportive of Israel’s concerns in the future. And many Israelis naively believed this.
Since the May 17 elections, however, Clinton has made it amply clear that this promise of support was a lie. He may not actually be trying to make life difficult for Barak, but he could hardly have done more damage if he had been.
The first step was his decision last month to once again postpone construction of the U.S. embassy in western Jerusalem, thereby implicitly stating that even pre-1967 Israel was disputed territory that ought to be on the negotiating table. This is a position more extreme than even the Palestinians have officially taken and one that hardly accords with a new era of understanding and support for Israel’s concerns.
Then, last week, Clinton did it again. He stated at a press conference that Palestinians should be free to live wherever they like — a statement interpreted by both Israelis and Palestinians as expressing support for a Palestinian right of return to pre-1967 Israel.
This is a position that every Israeli government — even the Labor-led government of 1992 to 1996 — has rejected out of hand because it would spell the end of the Jewish state. It is also a position far more pro-Arab than the United States has ever taken before.
Barak, who was embarrassingly silent on the Jerusalem issue two weeks ago, finally woke up this time around and sent Clinton a strongly worded demand for a retraction. To his credit, he has refused to accept clarifications by lower-level administration officials as sufficient.
But even if Barak gets his retraction, the damage has already been done. First of all, by raising Palestinian expectations, Clinton has made it much harder for Barak to obtain a final-status deal acceptable to a majority of the Israeli public.
Palestinian officials say they don’t seriously expect Israel to agree to a right of return. But once the United States has recognized this as a legitimate demand, the Palestinians are likely to insist on deeper concessions in other areas as compensation for giving up their claim to a right of return.
Even more serious from Barak’s point of view is the fact that Clinton’s remarks on the right of return indicate that no Israeli position, however vital it is deemed by the new government, will actually enjoy U.S. backing. There is no issue in Israel today which enjoys a wall-to-wall consensus like that of opposition to the right of return. If Clinton will not back Israel on this, he will not back Israel on anything.
This is particularly problematic because for most Israelis, U.S. support has always been the only possible asset that could compensate for the tangible assets they will be forfeiting to the Palestinians and for the real risks they will be exposing themselves to as a result. With Clinton now having made it plain that no such support will be forthcoming even to a peace government, Barak is going to have a much harder time selling any agreement to the Israeli public.
It is now clear that Clinton lied to Israelis just as he has repeatedly lied to Americans: It is not a government committed to pursuing negotiations that he wants, but a government committed to capitulating to every conceivable Palestinian demand, present and future. And he will have no qualms about applying ruthless pressure on the new government to conform to his expectations.
That isn’t exactly what Barak bargained for when he promised his voters an improvement in U.S.-Israeli relations. And it certainly isn’t what his voters bargained for when they supported Clinton’s choice.