Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s once and soon to be again prime minister, will face problems he has dealt with during his earlier 14 years in power, although in an even more volatile environment.
New challenges in dealing with Iran, long an object of Netanyahu’s foreign policy preoccupations, supplement the seemingly eternal conflict with the Palestinians.
Cool relations with Israel’s closest ally, the United States, complicate his hardline attitude toward the Islamic Republic. US President Joe Biden has been feverishly trying to conclude a deal with Tehran that would at least delay that country’s program to develop atom bombs. Netanyahu opposes the accord, arguing not only that it is insufficiently tough but that it leaves Iran’s military interventions in the Middle East unrestrained.
Netanyahu’s coalition is solidly hawkish, which makes compromises with the Palestinians or acquiescence to an Iran deal difficult. Yet, his government’s position will not significantly differ from that of his right-wing predecessors who led an interim government in advance of the November 1 elections. The ousted government handled differences with the US quietly while Netanyahu is characteristically loud.
Israel’s staunch positions on both the Palestinian and Iranian issues would normally be front and center in international relations. But Israel’s policies and the general persistence of violence in its neighborhood are far from front-page news, in competition as they are with Russia’s war on Ukraine, tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan and violent conflicts in Myanmar and Africa.
Netanyahu has long been wary of Iran and was a vocal critic of the approach US president Barack Obama took in dealing with Tehran. In concert with European countries, Russia and China, Obama signed a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran designed to curb its atomic arms development.
Netanyahu roundly complained about it in a 2015 speech to the US Congress.
The agreement was thrown out by Obama’s successor, Donald Trump. Biden – who was Obama’s vice president – is trying to revive it.
Netanyahu criticizes the agreement on two points: First, it might allow Iran to build nuclear weapons at a later date; second, it doesn’t deal with Iranian activities that Israel believes are detrimental to Middle East security, including in Lebanon and Syria.
Formally, nothing has changed in Biden’s approach toward Iran, nor in Netanyahu’s opposition. “History has taught us that deals like this, with extremist regimes like this, are worth noting,” Netanyahu recently said of the effort to reach an accord with Iran. “We have only one obligation – to prevent anyone who seeks to destroy us from carrying out his plot.”
Recent Iranian activities make Tehran an awkward partner for Biden and might save Netanyahu the need to keep objecting. Biden supports Ukraine’s military resistance against the Russian invasion, but Tehran supplies armed drones to Russia that are used to bombard Ukraine’s electrical system and other civilian targets.
A nuclear accord would open the gates for a windfall of funds for Iran withheld under Western sanctions. It would also boost sales of Iranian oil. Funds could help Iran build up its stock of conventional arms and the ability to project power in opposition to the US in its region.
In addition, ongoing anti-repression protests in Iran are spearheaded by women. Biden, who regards himself a champion of women’s rights, would not like to be regarded as someone who’s coddling a viciously misogynist regime.
But what if the talks break down and Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons production? Israel has hinted it would take military action. Success in trying to destroy Iran’s program on the ground is not foreordained, as Iran has fortified its nuclear facilities.
And the drones represent yet another threat to Israel in case of war.
It would still take many months – perhaps up to two years – for Iran to enrich enough uranium to build bombs, master detonation and construct a proper warhead to place on a missile.
Israel would likely hold off before taking any overt military action while hoping that diplomacy and more sanctions and diplomatic pressure would produce a change of minds in Iran. Since 2020, Israel, through covert action by its Mossad intelligence agency, has blown up at least three Iranian nuclear sites and assassinated the country’s leading nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh with a roadside gun operated remotely from an orbiting satellite.
Netanyahu’s rise to power in the 1990s represented Israel’s passage from governments led by so-called pioneers, who fought to create the State of Israel and who triumphed in wars with Arab adversaries including the Palestinians. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, from Israel’s Labor Party and a former general, began a process aimed at ending hostilities by negotiating the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In late 1995, an Israeli ultra-nationalist assassinated Rabin. National elections followed which pitted Netanyahu, representing the rightist Likud Party, against veteran Labor Party politician Shimon Peres.
Netanyahu won, having campaigned in opposition to the so-called “two-state solution” that would have ended Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Reporting at the time, the Washington Post predicted that, “Under Netanyahu, Israel would keep troops in wide areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and give them a green light to pursue troublemakers and terrorists in Palestinian-controlled cities. There would be no creation of a Palestinian state.”
Netanyahu’s policy has largely held steady through changes of governments and numerous outbreaks of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli settlers flowed into the West Bank, while Israel withdrew from Gaza, which became a Palestinian walled-in enclave.
An archipelago of cities, towns and rural areas in the West Bank is ruled by the Palestinian Authority, the docile successor to the insurgent Palestine Liberation Organization. The Palestinians are surrounded by Israeli-controlled areas.
In recent months, scattered armed militias have multiplied in the West Bank, notably the “Jenin Brigades” named after the town of Jenin and the “Lion’s Den” in the city of Nablus.
The Gaza Strip is ruled by the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym Hamas, a rival of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas and Israel have fought several short-term conflicts, that usually feature Hamas launches of makeshift rockets into Israel and Israeli armored ground invasions and aerial bombings of the Gaza Strip.
So far this year, Israeli Defense Forces have killed 175 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the highest number since 2015, when 259 were killed during the entire year. Palestinians have killed 25 Israelis, among them settlers.
This landscape of tension is unlikely to change during Netanyahu’s new stint in office, though an explosive battle may be brewing over control of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.
A key component of Netanyahu’s coalition, known as Jewish Power, is headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir. He rose to political prominence during the past year as a brash supporter of Israeli West Bank settlements – he resides in one. He also advocates Jewish presence and religious activity on the Temple Mount, the Jewish name for the artificial plateau where al-Aqsa stands.
The area was the site of the central Jewish temple destroyed by Roman legions in 70 AD. Ben-Gvir toured the area in the leadup to the November election in order, he said, to “remind everyone that we are the owners of the holiest place for the people of Israel.”
Permission for Jews to pray on the Temple Mount is in the hands of Israeli police on guard. They are wary of opening competing worships on the site. “A Jew that prays on the Temple Mount gets arrested,” Ben-Gvir complained during his visit. “Why are Arabs allowed to pray and Jews are forbidden? This is racism against Jews.”
During the past several decades, Jewish religious nationalists have campaigned for increased rights of access to the Temple Mount. On occasion, they tried to demonstrate on or near the site. Inevitably riots ensued.
A visit in September 2000 by Ariel Sharon, then head of the Likud but at the time in parliamentary opposition, set off violence that helped trigger the 2nd Intifada, which lasted for five years.
“Sharon’s visit was the spark that set the second intifada into motion; it was a match in a dry forest,” University of Connecticut Professor Jeremy Pressman wrote in the Journal of Conflict Studies.
Are more sparks to fly? “Netanyahu’s return is likely to have far-reaching implications for Palestinians,” particularly those living in the West Bank, said Khaled Elgindy, director of the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at Washington’s Middle East Institute.
That’s “not just because of his own hostility toward Palestinians and a genuine two-state solution, but also because of the likelihood that far-right extremists like Ben-Gvir will be part of the government – people who regularly incite violence and openly talk about the expulsion of Palestinians,” Elgindy told Israel’s i24NEWS television service.
After the Israeli election, in a phone call to Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, Biden tried to calm Arab fears. Biden assured Abbas that Washington still considers the two-state solution a route to peace.
However, Biden offered no plan to reopen talks on the two-state solution issue. It is likely that tensions over al-Aqsa – along with West Bank and Gaza violence – will be left to simmer, obscured by the shadows of more pressing and dangerous world crises.