Breaking down a diplomatic dust-up

The snowballing diplomatic dispute between Israel, the United States and just about every other state in the world is the topic du jour in Monday’s Hebrew papers after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spearheaded a diplomatic offensive against countries that voted for Friday’s UN Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements.

For one of the tabloids, Netanyahu is the man of the hour, his pronouncements in defiance of the UN resolution generating fierce headlines. “The Western Wall isn’t occupied territory,” his ever-loyal mouthpiece Israel Hayom proclaims, a picture of the premier lighting candles at the Jewish holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City alongside his comment. But curiously, the paper diverts attention from the diplomatic fiasco on Page 2, opting instead to underscore the importance of a gas refinery fire in Haifa whose magnitude was kept in check only by wintry weather.

Netanyahu’s order that ministers cut back on ties with states that voted for the resolution gets the headlines in Yedioth Ahronoth, but Haaretz breaks rank, leaving Netanyahu out of the headline and reporting that Israel “is prepared for the US and France advancing another international move.” A senior Israeli official tells the paper that during Sunday’s cabinet meeting “a prediction was presented according to which a series of decisions concerning the peace process will be presented at the meeting of foreign ministers held in Paris on January 15, as part of the French peace initiative.” These unspecified resolutions “will bring an immediate vote in the UN Security Council, and will be adopted by it before Obama leaves the White House” on January 20.

Yedioth Ahronoth offers a double-barrel opinion/analysis of the diplomatic battle, with right- and left-of-center columns flanking its main coverage. One falls in line with many Israelis’ impressions of the Security Council resolution, in which author Yaakov Sheinin points the finger at US President Barack Obama, calling the White House’s abstention “a childish revenge that actually harms those it wasn’t meant for.” The resolution could have distinguished between areas both sides generally accept as being part of Israel in a future agreement, he writes, and outlying settlements generally accepted as being part of a future Palestinian state. If it had, he argues, “it’s reasonable to assume that over 50% of Israelis would be able to live with the resolution, and perhaps even support it. But Obama didn’t do that.”

Who knows, he says, maybe after Donald Trump takes office next month the US will levy economic sanctions on the United Nations in retaliation for the resolution.

On the other side of the aisle, Eshkol Nevo assures readers that contrary to much of the spin heard in the Hebrew media in the past several days, “the Obama administration isn’t to blame for the UN resolution.” Rather, “the current Israeli government is the one who brought this evil upon us,” he writes, pointing the finger at the Netanyahu administration’s failure to evacuate the illegal outpost of Amona, the West Bank settlement regulation bill, and “above all else: the fact that it hasn’t proposed, for many years, a diplomatic initiative to solve the conflict with the Palestinians.”

He writes that the resolution is not anti-Semitic (as one Likud MK brashly charged), not anti-Israeli (as Netanyahu has asserted), and contains nothing that rejects the existence of the State of Israel. It’s merely “a clear statement by the international community: no to settlements.”

The resolution calls for Israeli discussion about the future of the state, not US-Israel relations. “Do we really and truly want to sacrifice the entire Zionist enterprise on the altar of West Bank settlements?” he asks.

The diplomatic gloves are off, writes Israel Hayom’s Boaz Bismuth in his full-page column. By taking the gloves off he means recalling two ambassadors for consultation, canceling a visit by Ukraine’s Jewish prime minister, and summoning envoys from states that voted in favor of the resolution. “Two of the aforementioned states, Venezuela and Malaysia, don’t have diplomatic relations with Israel and therefore there’s nobody to recall or anybody to dress down,” he points out. We showed them!

Canceling the Ukrainian leader’s trip is “a protest of the highest degree” and a “most extreme step,” he says, which signals Israel’s discontent with Kiev in no uncertain terms. Likewise Netanyahu summoning US Ambassador Dan Shapiro for “clarifications” was “very exceptional,” he writes. Overall, however, Bismuth says that in the meetings with foreign ambassadors the Foreign Ministry berated and attempted to persuade them of Israel’s position. “I’m not sure the ambassadors or their deputies bought it, but during this whole process there’s the scent of the American administration to come,” he writes.

In its daily editorial, Haaretz places the blame squarely on Netanyahu, saying that his reaction to Friday’s resolution reflects the new “alliance of bullying” engendered by President-elect Donald Trump.

“The violence with which [Netanyahu] responded to the Security Council resolution was meant to project strength considering the defeat that he himself suffered,” the paper says.

The prime minister, the paper says, “is pinning his faith on this imaginary, unwritten alliance supposedly between him and Trump, and perhaps he even fantasizes about a three-way alliance between them with the surprising support of Russia.” But, Haaretz heeds, Trump has already reneged on some of his campaign promises, and “also the promise that things will change at the UN is already irrelevant after the resolution was accepted. Relying on the US president’s position as the basis of changing policies concerning the territories could turn out to be a double-edged sword.”

It urges the premier to do the right thing for the state and end Israel’s occupation of millions of Palestinians.