The quick storyline is this: The president of Israel has just bashed the prime minister of Israel, which should create a dilemma in Washington-but only if someone is paying attention.
President Reuven Rivlin was speaking this week at a briefing for several dozen Israeli ambassadors to European countries-the kind of officially closed session from which leaks are certain, with important comments intended for the media. Three days before, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had retaliated for the Palestinian decision to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) by freezing the monthly transfer of taxes that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Rivlin said this wasn't smart, and wasn't good for Israel.
"With those funds, the Palestinians provide for themselves and the PA functions. It is in Israel's interest that the PA functions," Rivlin said, adding that when he was a working attorney, "I never filed a suit for damages that would end up hurting me."
Israel's president is an elected version of a European constitutional monarch, a purely ceremonial head of state. It's a break in protocol for a president to enter a political debate. I would have said "a rare break," but it's been less than two months since Rivlin publicly blasted the Netanyahu-backed bill to define Israel as a Jewish nation-state. (Netanyahu's government fell over the issue, and the bill did not become law.) The tongue-lashings are all the more impressive because before being elected president, Rivlin was a senior lawmaker from the same party as Netanyahu, the right-wing Likud.
The sensible right and the frenzied right are having a very public family falling-out
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Netanyahu would like to punish the Palestinians further, and hopes that the U.S. Congress will do his work by cutting or ending U.S. aid to the PA. But if the Palestinian Authority, in order to function, depends on the $125 million a month transferred by Israel, it also depends on foreign aid, including some $440 million a year from the United States. In reports of Rivlin's comments, he didn't say anything about American aid. But the logical extension of his sensible remarks is that if U.S. aid to the PA is slashed, it would only compound the impact of Netanyahu's halt of tax transfers-meaning even more harm to Israel. Will members of Congress listen to sense or to frenzy?
So far, the Obama administration has been evasive about the aid issue. At Monday's State Department daily briefing, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the "next step would be Congress deciding what step or action they [sic] may take as it relates to assistance." Does President Obama have anything to say? Unlike President Rivlin, his post is not purely ceremonial.
To go back a step, though, the Obama administration's confusion about what's in Israel's interests helped set off this crisis. For months, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas prepared to bring a resolution to the Security Council setting a deadline for completing negotiations on a two-state agreement. This was a diplomatic opportunity: The United States could have threatened the Palestinians with a veto and the Israelis with an abstention, and thereby pushed the two sides to negotiate on a resolution minimally acceptable to each. Alternatively, Obama could have used the opening to present, at last, an American framework for peace, in place of the Palestinian resolution.
Instead, the administration promised from the start to block the Palestinian resolution. To avoid using a veto, it leaned on other Security Council members. At the last moment, Nigeria folded, and abstained rather then voting yes. A resolution needs the support of nine of the 15 Security Council members for approval. Nigeria's switch left the Palestinian resolution with eight aye votes.
One of them came from France. When the French ambassador in Israel, Patrick Maisonnave, was called to the Israeli Foreign Ministry for a dressing down, he explained that his government had sought to avoid exactly what happened when the resolution failed: Abbas carried out his threat to sign the Rome Statute, the charter of the International Criminal Court, in the name of the virtual State of Palestine.
You didn't need to be reading your news in French see this coming. Abbas has little to show for his strategy of gaining Palestinian independence via diplomacy. It may be that his demands were too high in the U.S.-backed peace talks that collapsed last year-but the point is hard to judge, since his negotiating "partner," Netanyahu, had no intention of reaching a two-state agreement. Abbas's Security Council gambit was aimed at renewed negotiations with international weight on Israel not to stall. With the resolution's defeat, Abbas fell back on joining the ICC-at best, as a means of pressuring Israel; at the least, as a way of bolstering his domestic position.
Palestinian accession to the Rome Statute was approved almost immediately by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The Palestinian government also asked that the ICC apply its jurisdiction retroactively in the West Bank and Gaza from June 13 last year. That translates as a request to investigate whether Israel committed war crimes last summer in Gaza-and not to examine the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinian terrorists on June 12.
The chance that the ICC will launch a full-scale investigation of Israeli army actions in Gaza, much less charge any Israelis, is relatively small. The ICC is a court of last resort. The fact that Israel has carried out its own investigations is likely to stand in its favor, even if the extent of the inquiries doesn't satisfy outside critics.
But the Rome Statute also gives the ICC jurisdiction over a crime defined as "the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." This language is designed to eliminate any doubts about the illegality of Israeli settlements in occupied territory. And there is no chance that Israel will launch an investigation of the officials-up to and including the prime minister-responsible for continuing settlement construction. This is where Israeli vulnerability lies.
Rivlin, I should add, hardly went easy on the Palestinians. He described acceding to the Rome Statute as a violation of the Oslo Accords and said that Israel should respond-but in ways that serve its own interests. The European Union's foreign affairs chief, Federica Mogherini, meanwhile, declared that by withholding tax funds it owed the Palestinian Authority, Israel itself had violated the Oslo Accords.
Arguably, they're both right. But the fundamental transgression against the Oslo Accords is that the Palestinian Authority still exists as an entity with limited autonomy over fragments of the West Bank. The accords were supposed to be a prelude to a final status agreement, and the PA itself was created as an interim step. The interim has lasted two decades. The PA now serves several functions for Israel: It provides schools, health services and police for most of the Palestinian population of the occupied territories, relieving Israel of those responsibilities. It cooperates in preventing terror attacks by Palestinian extremists against Israel. And it is also available for a right-wing Israeli government to describe as a hostile entity. For the Palestinians, meanwhile, it serves as an unfulfilled premonition of statehood, with its own foreign policy but without sovereignty.
In the short term, Rivlin is right that starving the PA of funds does not serve any Israeli interests. Even the most one-sidedly pro-Israeli members of Congress would do well to pay more attention to Israel's symbolic president than to its prime minister.
In the just slightly longer term, though, trying to preserve the financially fragile, politically unstable PA serves no one's interests. Rivlin's own confused ideas about creating a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan in which Jews will somehow remain the majority show that even the sensible right has a limited supply of good sense. The lesson from the Palestinians' desperation move of joining the ICC is not that the PA needs to be financially starved. Rather, it needs to be upgraded to real statehood alongside Israel.
The Obama administration claims to understand this. Before the ICC gets around to turning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a court case, the Palestinians are likely to return to the Security Council with a revised resolution. If they do, the Obama administration will get a rare second chance to seize a missed opportunity-but only if it notices that the opportunity was missed the first time around.
