New Year’s resolution

As the end of the year fast approaches, the Hebrew-language newspapers Friday are still attempting to make sense of the United Nations Security Council’s resolution demanding an immediate halt to all Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a motion which passed after the US chose to abstain rather than veto. Despite many Israeli government politicians’ outright dismissal of Resolution 2334 and a barrage of rhetoric that the vote will not deter the settlement movement, the analysts and contributors in the weekend papers do not seem convinced, as they discuss the effects the vote may or should have on the Jewish state’s foreign and internal affairs come 2017.

As anyone even slightly familiar with the workings of those titles in the left-to-center would expect, much of the commentary in those dailies is sprinkled with explicit and implicit attacks on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political conduct in the months leading up to the UN vote.

Yedioth Ahronoth, which at the beginning of the week labeled the Security Council resolution a slap in the face of Israel society, presents an exclusive, surprisingly sympathetic, interview with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, leading with a quote in which he insists that “the UN decision is against the settlements, not against Israel.” Abbas, at least on paper, articulates what some may consider to be a conciliatory message to the Israeli public, stressing that the Authority is ready to immediately relaunch peace talks with the Jewish state… as long as settlement construction in the West Bank ceases at once. “We know that we have a problem with the Netanyahu government and some of its components, [but] we also know that a significant number of Israeli citizens support peace and the two-state solution,” Abbas tells Yedioth.

He admits that the PA issued a draft list of demands concerning settlement construction to the Obama administration, but claims that the US did not consult him or his government before deciding to abstain from the UN vote.

Following up on Abbas’s words, Yedioth’s Sima Kadmon accuses Netanyahu of “biting the hand that had fed him,” a reference to the prime minister’s public and private disputes with US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry over the past years, and especially over the past week, following Kerry’s long speech where he set out key principles for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the two-state solution and castigated the settlement enterprise as centrally jeopardizing that solution. “[Netanyahu] recognized the dangers of the Regulation Bill but voted in favor,” she writes, referring to the controversial proposed legislation which would legalize some 4,000 housing units in dozens of outposts in the West Bank allegedly built on privately owned Palestinian land.

According to Kadmon, the advancement of the bill directly influenced the Security Council member states and pushed them to seek and pass the resolution against Israeli settlements at this time. Yoaz Hendel, a former adviser to Netanyahu, places much of the blame for the stalled peace process on the Palestinians, and adds that Kerry and Obama have had little to no influence on the advancement of talks, but asks readers to acknowledge that Israel does not have a consistent policy plan concerning paths to resolve the decades-long conflict. “[Obama’s] two terms were characterized by a failing foreign policy,” Hendel writes. “Kerry’s vision is a utopian invention that can not come into fruition — I agree with Netanyahu in this regard. The question remains though, what is Netanyahu’s vision in the face of all this?”

Haaretz’s writers, expressing their abiding hardline objection to and disdain for Israel’s West Bank policies, argue that Resolution 2334 is actually a blessing in disguise for the Jewish state. Carolina Landsman says the decision is a “lifeline” which will force the Israeli public to address the settler movement head on and demand a halt to construction in the West Bank, as the international pressure against building across the Green Line will grow too powerful. Amir Oren says that the resolution has left Israel with only one option in terms of the international community’s expectations from it, namely, the evacuation of West Bank territories.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Israel Hayom contributors launch numerous attacks against Obama and his decision to allow the UN resolution to pass, and look longingly toward President-elect Donald Trump, who they believe will be more supportive of Israel’s political claims when he enters the White House on January 20. “Trump against the UN: ‘They only cause trouble’,” reads an Israel Hayom headline, paraphrasing Trump and reflecting a dominant feeling among a significant proportion of Israeli society. The daily goes on to dedicate a full article to a comment made by Fox News contributor Ralph Peters, who claimed Obama’s policy over the past eight years was “to praise Muslims, to ignore Christians, and to blame Jews.”

Topping off its efforts to delegitimize the Obama administration and as well as the UN resolution, Israel Hayom features a lengthy interview with Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, a major advocate for Israel, who claims that the US president was motivated in these final weeks not by a will to achieve peace in the Middle East, but by a personal will to exact revenge on Netanyahu. “He lied and acted in a two-faced manner,” Dershowitz says of Obama. “This is some of the most deplorable behavior by an American president ever.”