A conservative approach can be wise at times, and Netanyahu’s caution has served Israel well on some fronts. So far, he has generally done a good job managing Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria, for example, mostly staying out of the turmoil in both those countries while protecting core Israeli interests. But on balance, Netanyahu’s strategic conservatism has damaged Israel’s international standing and restricted its room for maneuver.
Whether or not the Iran nuclear deal succeeds, there is little doubt that Netanyahu’s stance has isolated Israel internationally, strained its alliance with the United States, and strengthened critics’ view of Israel as rejectionist. Indeed, Netanyahu’s conditions for an acceptable deal with Iran were so stringent that they seemed to preclude any agreement at all, despite his claims to the contrary.
On the Palestinian issue, too, Netanyahu and Yaalon have set their policy standards so high as to block realistic progress. Their demand that the Palestinians accept the idea of Israel as a nation-state makes sense in the context of reconciliation between the two parties, especially in light of the Palestinians’ demand for the right of return for refugees and their descendants. Yet if a practical peace is ever to be achieved, Israeli and Palestinian leaders will need to accept that their demands will be only partially met. A full right of return for Palestinians, for example, will simply not be possible under any realistic settlement, and even those Palestinians who accept the existence of Israel are not likely to forget their dismay at its creation. Conditioning peace with the Palestinians on their acceptance of Zionism’s basic principle is therefore not only a stretch; it also confuses perfect conflict resolution for achievable peace—which tends to be ugly, practical, and unsatisfying. In this sense, Netanyahu’s anti-solutionism reflects just as much naiveté as the solutionism he and Yaalon have decried.
Properly applied, moreover, strategic conservatism should keep a country’s long-term options open. In the case of Israel, that would entail maintaining the possibility of a future Israeli-Palestinian partition, an objective that Netanyahu has claimed to support.
Yet Israel’s current approach is gradually ruling out this long-term objective. Yaalon and Bennett vigorously support settlement construction in the West Bank [11]. Netanyahu has also advanced settlement construction, although often on a more limited scale. If the conflict lasts for decades, as Yaalon has suggested it must, such settlement construction will render Netanyahu’s stated goal of partition increasingly impossible. This logic is not lost on right-wing Israelis, many of whom support settlement construction precisely to eliminate the future possibility of a two-state solution.
Netanyahu’s muddled settlement policy reflects an attempt to accommodate both international pressure and the demands of his right flank. Yet his dance between progressives abroad and the right wing at home has convinced neither of his commitment. As in the immediate aftermath of the Iran deal, Netanyahu has failed both to persuade his critics of his sincerity and to effect change. Instead, he has cast himself as a rejectionist.
A cautious strategic approach, finally, makes sense only when the passage of time works in one’s favor. Time is indeed on Israel’s side with respect to many of its traditional Arab adversaries, which are so mired in internal conflict that they currently pose no conventional threat to Israel and are unlikely to anytime soon. Israel also has a dynamic economy and a robust nuclear security blanket.
With respect to the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, time is decidedly not on the side of either Israel or the Palestinians. To begin with, Israel’s control over many aspects of Palestinian affairs has created widespread anger and disgust toward Israel abroad, with increasingly harsh consequences for its international standing and its relations with the United States. More important, Palestinian politics and society are unstable. As time passes and the prospects of a peaceful resolution to the conflict recede, the political fortunes of those Palestinians who advocate compromise in negotiations with Israel will wane, and those of Hamas and other militant groups pushing for violent conflict will ascend.
Israel’s open-ended control over millions of non-citizen Palestinians, meanwhile, has strained the country’s otherwise robust democracy. The festering conflict and the country’s lack of defined, recognized borders have encouraged extreme nationalism and divided Israelis. Indeed, Israel’s continued control over Palestinian affairs has strengthened chauvinistic, racist, and violent tendencies on the fringes of the Israeli right.
Israel’s strategic anxiety understandably derives from the Jewish people’s long history of persecution. Yet the overly cautious policies that anxiety has produced in recent years are an unfortunate departure from the can-do spirit that has historically characterized Israel. Indeed, twentieth-century Zionism was at once wildly idealistic in its goals and pragmatic in its execution, transforming Jewish history rather than succumbing to it. Israel’s current leaders should likewise seek to proactively shape their country’s future, even if the outcome falls short of the ideal.
What seems rational in the short-term is suicidal in the long-term.
There's a saying in baseball, "play the ball, don't let the ball play you." Israel has adopted a strategy of letting the ball play Israel.
the consequences are as predictable as they were once avoidable
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