Israel’s Hanegbi says Trump may facilitate Palestinian deal

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu with Donald Trump at their meeting in New York in September.

Donald Trump may well be good for the Middle East. Far from being isolated, Israel has never had wider or deeper diplomatic contacts and international friendships than now. The route to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may lie through the broader Arab region. And Israel wants to pursue direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership towards a two-state solution even now, in the midst of everything that is happening in the Middle East.

These superficially counterintuitive insights were delivered this week by Tzachi Hanegbi, the Israeli minister in the Prime Minister’s office with responsibility for national security and foreign affairs.

Hanegbi is a heavyweight of the Israeli government, a long-serving and often controversial minister in several previous governments, a senior Likud cabinet minister and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Laconic and soft-spoken, Hanegbi nonetheless has a reputation as a hard man in Israeli politics. He gradually has moved from the right to the centre, and is now a passionate advocate of the two-state solution.

I had a long discussion with him in Sydney this week as he wound up a remarkably low-key but highly influential Australian visit. First, to Donald Trump. “I personally think Donald Trump will be less challenging to Israel than Hillary Clinton would have been,” Hanegbi says.

“In a sense the Israel-US relationship has nothing to do with the personality of the individual leaders. We have had decades of steadily enhancing co-operation. But in the last eight years, especially in the last two or three, we have had more concrete disputes with the President (Barack Obama), which still didn’t interfere with an unprecedented military agreement.

“But,” says Hanegbi, “on Iran, and on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, maybe we will have less tensions with the new president-elect. His instincts on these two issues are more similar to ours.”

But the bitter fallout of the Arab Spring also has helped Israel in its de facto co-operation with its Sunni Arab neighbours, beyond the two Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan, with which it has functioning peace treaties.

“We feel the change in the Sunni world,” Hanegbi says.

“It started with Egypt and Jordan. But now many countries in the Gulf understand that Israel is not Satan but can be an important ally for them against Iran, against Daesh (Islamic State), against global terrorism, against the idea of the caliphate to replace all the Arab regimes.

“It is surprising to us (in the Israeli government) to see articles in the Saudi Arabian press saying it’s about time to reconsider (attitudes to Israel). Eventually this will help the Palestinian leadership make the hard decisions for peace.”

This line of thinking actually marks a profound revolution in thinking for Israelis, and indeed for everyone concerned with the Middle East, about the peace process.

“We used to say that we can’t have friendships with the Arab countries until we solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but perhaps it’s the other way around.”

What Hanegbi is arguing here is that increasingly the Arab Gulf states are coming to see Israel as a force for stability in the Middle East and also as facing mostly the same enemies they face. Moreover, no analyst, no matter how insanely anti-Israel, could imagine that the Jewish state is at the heart of the emergence of Islamic State, the civil war in Egypt, the Sunni-Shia conflicts in Iraq, the turmoil in Libya, the breakdown in Yemen or indeed really any of the other profound challenges that confront the Arab world.

But economically, politically and tech­nically, Israel may be able to help its neighbours meet some of these challenges, which also bear fundamentally on Israel’s security.

If a sufficient habit of co-operation develops, this may influence Israel’s Arab neighbours to counsel the Palestinian leadership to come back to direct negotiations with Jerusalem over the shape of a two-state solution: one a Jewish state for the Israelis, and the other an Arab state for the Palestinians.

Hanegbi’s mother, Geula Cohen, in retirement now, was for a long time a famous right-wing Israeli politician who was deeply sceptical of the peace treaty with Egypt.

But, as Hanegbi recalls, she got special permission to bring him into the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to hear Egypt’s Anwar Sadat deliver his historic address. “In his speech Sadat didn’t give up one of his demands — the return of all the Sinai, the dismantling of the (Jewish) settlements — but he said no more war, no more blood. Every Israeli felt the winds of peace.”

Hanegbi believes even today peace is possible between Israel and the Palestinians, and this has to be through a two-state solution. He praises the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, for his condemnation of violence. But he urges him to come back to direct negotiations with Israel, for there is no other way to a peace settlement.

In the past couple of years, Hanegbi says, the Palestinian leadership has embarked on a “bizarre” strategy of trying to embarrass Israel in international forums in the hope that a settlement can be imposed externally. But this can never happen, he points out, because both sides have vital interests they will have to protect. In the meantime the Palestinians have lost two years while Israel has continued to develop its economy and society.

But a two-state solution must be found eventually, Hanegbi insists: “There cannot be permanent Israeli occupation, and there cannot be a Palestinian surrender.”

The issue I found Hanegbi most surprising on was Syria. “It has never been an Israeli interest to see the fall of (Syrian dictator) Bashar al-Assad,” he says. There is no major role for Israel in the Syrian quagmire and the debate in Israel is in a sense theoretical.

“Some, like me, see Assad as the reason for such a horrible massacre that took 400,000 lives and since he’s the problem he can’t be the solution. Others use the formula of preferring the devil you know, and fear what might come into the vacuum after Assad.”

Israel’s actual involvement is quite limited, Hanegbi tells me. It has set up an emergency field hospital on the border and treated thousands of Syrians, many women and children, who have no other options for treatment. It wants to prevent the export of missiles to the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon. And it seeks to prevent the establishment of a terrorist infrastructure in the Syrian Golan Heights.

The Russian position in the Middle East is slightly perplexing for the Israelis. The Russians have good relations with Israel, which has a million citizens of Russian extraction, as well as the Palestinians, and the Syrian regime of Assad. Russia is clearly reasserting itself as a significant power in the Middle East but has never sought to insert itself seriously into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hanegbi’s visit is a precursor to the planned visit of Netanyahu early next year, which will be the first time a serving Israeli prime minister has come to Australia. Hanegbi believes it will take the relationship into a new dimension of much broader and deeper practical co-operation.