When Naftali Bennett made his international debut at the United Nations General Assembly nearly three months ago, some observers were scandalized that he hadn’t mentioned the Palestinians even once in his 25-minute speech.
I spoke a few days later with someone very close to Bennett’s thinking who scolded me for even thinking it was significant. “There’s no equivalence between us and the Palestinians, and we don’t have to bring them up in every speech. It may surprise you people in the media, but most leaders whom the prime minister meets aren’t interested in talking about the Palestinians either.”
This week, Bennett met with Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the leader of the United Arab Emirates. I don’t what the two of them spoke about in their four hours together. But the joint Israeli-Emirati statement summing up the first official visit by an Israeli prime minister to the UAE, the Palestinians were once again conspicuous by their absence.
This week, there was more good news for Bennett’s policy of ignoring the Palestinian issue. It was reported that despite its previous statements, the Biden administration is not in a rush to reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem which maintains contact with the Palestinians and was closed by the previous administration.
Could it be that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is actually shrinking?
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in Abu Dhabi, this week.SAEED JUMOH – AFP
This was not how 2021 was supposed to end. This was supposed to be the year that the world began treating Israel as an apartheid state. In January, the veteran Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem with much fanfare issued a report declaring Israel an apartheid regime on both sides of the Green Line. Three months later the New York-based Human Rights Watch came out with an even more grandiose media campaign saying basically the same thing.
Apartheid is a serious allegation. It’s a crime against humanity, with heavy implications. The implications of the B’Tselem and HRW reports were a brief flurry of op-ed columns – and absolute silence from the rest of the world. Israel’s international trade flourished this year, the proceedings against Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court are bogged down and are unlikely to ever result in indictments, and in 2021 Israel opened new embassies and diplomatic representations in the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.
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The only country to temporarily downgrade its diplomatic relations with the Apartheid State of Israel was the ultra-nationalist government of Poland, but that wasn’t out of any concern for the Palestinians but in a fit of pique at Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s criticism of Polish legislation preventing Holocaust survivors and their heirs from claiming property stolen from them.
Instead of Israel’s apartheid dominating the diplomatic discourse, we’ve seen a lot of interest in a very different narrative. The “shrinking the conflict” concept, formulated by the new Israeli government’s favorite philosopher Micah Goodman, is of course not really new. It’s an evolution of the “economic peace” idea that Bennett used to advocate, which basically meant zero political gains for the Palestinians but some economic compensations.
The current iteration includes also a network of bypass highways that if ever built, is supposed to reduce friction between Palestinians and Israelis. But basically, just as the name suggests, it does nothing to solve the conflict.
Western diplomats based in Israel are intrigued and bemused by the shrinking concept, and for now it’s the de facto policy of the Biden administration – as long as Israel doesn’t build any major new settlement, like the Atarot neighborhood in North Jerusalem which has already been postponed indefinitely, they’re happy to see the conflict shrink. Apartheid or not, they’ve given up on solving it.
No-one is even arguing whether or not the case for calling Israel an apartheid state is valid. The implications of this argument are simply too daunting for anyone who has to actually formulate policy. Simply shrinking the problem is so much more convenient.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest against ‘Israel the apartheid state’ during a rally this summer in Washington D.C.YURI GRIPAS/ REUTERS
Maybe it’s wrong to take just one year as a test case for the strength of a narrative. After all, the world has had a lot to deal with in 2021: The second full year of the COVID pandemic, increasing recognition of a climate crisis. Who knows, perhaps when things have calmed down, people will pick up those detailed reports on how Israel has now decisively “crossed the threshold” and has become “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean” and start paying attention. Perhaps.
But the signs aren’t good. The political battlefield in the West is now largely between vague centrists and increasingly angry right-wingers. The peripheral left is busy tying itself into knots in increasingly esoteric arguments over what to call things, from minorities to Israel, but it’s all taking place in an ever-decreasing circle.
Israel’s governance transitioned from Benjamin Netanyahu’s performative name-calling nationalism, the mirror-image of Israel’s most strident but also performatively name-calling critics from 7000 miles away, to a government that believes in the low-profile shrinking of conflicts, not least by refraining from participating in the mutually obsessive shouting matches with those who constantly want to ramp up high-decibel talk about the conflict.
BDS activists in Los Angeles, 2016. AFP / Robyn Beck
Reflecting this shift, the new Bennett-Lapid government abolished the ridiculous Ministry for Strategic Affairs. “In its anti-BDS campaigning, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs made all the mistakes it could in dealing with this issue,” says an Israeli government official who spent the last decade dealing with what they prefer to call “delegitimization.”
“Take, for instance, the list of organizations whose members would be prohibited from entering Israel,” the official told me. Then-Strategic Affairs minister Gilad Erdan “insisted on publishing it, despite warnings that it would achieve nothing and only give those organizations a publicity and fundraising boost and help them to cooperate with each other.
“Thankfully, this government realized that talking about BDS is a waste of time and it’s much better to ignore it.”
So what about The Apartheid? It’s still here, but no-one with any real power or influence is going to call it that. All B’Tselem and HRW have succeeded in doing this year is to discredit themselves with pointless rhetoric. Next time they cry “Apartheid!” even fewer people will be listening. Those who actually want to solve, not just shrink and ignore the conflict, need first to come to terms with the fact that reality doesn’t care what you call it.
