Most of us can scarcely remember a time when Israeli politics wasn’t dominated by Binyamin Netanyahu, so it’s difficult to imagine what regional politics would be like if he was indeed forced to stand aside.
Netanyahu – with support from the Trump White House – has done everything in his power to kill off a two-state solution; with moves to permanently annex all of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and huge areas of the West Bank. By trying to take everything, Netanyahu went a long way to making peace impossible; not just peace with the Palestinians, but with Israel’s Arab neighbours.
The Arab position towards a peaceful solution has been remarkably consistent over the past two decades; encapsulated in King Abdullah’s Arab Peace Initiative, in which Israel must withdraw from Arab lands, while the Arab world would recognize Israel’s right to exist. Bahrain’s hosting of the “Peace to Prosperity” economic workshop for Palestine this June was conducted in the spirit of helping create the conditions for a future Palestinian state which could offer prosperity to all its citizens.
In recent years, Netanyahu sought to make cheap propaganda of the fact that both Israel and most Arab states nurtured a common hostility towards Iran. Indeed, Iran has posed a much greater threat to Arab nations than it ever did to Israel, with its efforts to dominate Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen; its efforts to stir up unrest in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere and its recent terrorist attacks against shipping and oil installations across the Gulf region.
Given this reality, Netanyahu could not claim to have influenced the policies and political positions of Arab states. In reality his anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab policies were the principal obstacle to any meaningful alignment of Arab-Israel policy-making concerning Iran.
Ahead of the elections, Netanyahu engaged in some shockingly racist anti-Arab language by inciting Israelis against moderate Arab Knesset members and representatives of the Israeli-Arab community. Arabs in Israel responded by voting in unprecedentedly large numbers, therefore allowing their parliamentary bloc to be large enough to be a major factor in trying to keep Netanyahu out of power. We wish them every success.
In the context of the Arab Peace Initiative, Arab nations have always been clear about the ultimate goal of peace with Israel, but only in the context of a just solution for Palestine. In the absence of progress towards this goal, any contacts and engagement could only be of a very limited nature.
The policies of most other mainstream Israeli political parties are not encouraging. Hardly any leading Israeli politicians are calling for a return to the peace process or arguing that occupied Palestinian land must be handed back. However, the civilized world and most Israelis had become sick of Netanyahu’s corruption, his hostility to peace and his relentless efforts to drive Israeli politics towards the extreme-right. If Netanyahu goes, it can only be a good thing.
However, Netanyahu knows that remaining as prime minister is perhaps his only route to avoid prison for a swarm of corruption charges. He is also the most experienced figure in manipulating the political system for his own ends. We can therefore expect to see several weeks of Netanyahu spinning for all he is worth in an attempt to remain in his office or drag the whole political system into the gutter with him, and it’s still likely that he may force yet another inconclusive round of elections.
Whatever, the outcome, Netanyahu has been fatally weakened at home and abroad. We can therefore hope that his ability to sabotage the peace process and the Palestinian cause is consequently weakened. With the likelihood of Trump being forced out of office in 2020 and new faces in Israeli politics, there will be grounds for Arab states to push hard in order for justice for Palestine to be forced back to the top of the global agenda.