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Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Israel Threatens New Settlements in Retaliation for Palestine Recognition


CNN ran this story a few days ago, detailing statements from some Israeli government officials promising expansion of West Bank settlements in response to the decision by several European nations to recognize Palestine as a state.

Israel’s government says it is looking to “strengthen” Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank after several countries unilaterally recognized a Palestinian state.

In a statement issued on Sunday, the Prime Minister’s Office said all of the proposals for strengthening settlements in what Israel biblically refers to as Judea and Samaria would be voted on at the next Security Cabinet meeting.

Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia have each recognized an independent Palestinian state in recent weeks, a move motivated at least in part by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open refusal to commit to a two-state solution.

[....] 

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said in May that Israel should approve 10,000 settlements in the West Bank, establish a new settlement for every country that recognizes a state of Palestine, and cancel travel permits for Palestinian Authority officials.

At the top level, this is another data point for an already-complete illustration showing that the Israeli government has quite a few far-right expansionist extremists in positions of alarming power and influence. Not new, but still essential to flag.

But there is another point worth mentioning, which also is not especially novel but does need to be pointed out. It is common to argue that Israel's brutal, hyper-aggressive assault on Gaza is persisting because other nations (particularly, but not exclusively, the United States) haven't taken sufficient punitive action against Israel to punish it for its misdeeds. Diplomacy is a function of carrots and sticks, and we've left the "stick" part out of our repertoire for too long. Had we utilized sticks more robustly, then maybe much of the current crisis could have been averted or at least ameliorated.

Perhaps. But as the above story illuminates, it's not necessarily the case that diplomatic "sticks" always serve to bring their targets to heel, or even arrest their bad behavior. Sometimes, particularly over the short-term, they can instead accelerate it. For obvious reasons, states have a very strong incentive to not give the impression that hostile action (or actions they perceive as hostile) against them will yield positive results. To the extent Israel doesn't want other countries to recognize Palestine, it's very predictable that its next move in the game will be to take actions that suggest "doing this has led to X Y Z bad consequences you don't want to see repeated." Countries that feel isolated or as if they can only rely on themselves often are more aggressive or reckless than those enmeshed in thick webs of relation, precisely because they believe that even a single mistake or miscalculation could be their ruination. As awful as it can seem to feel complicit in another nation's bad behavior because one is seemingly continually coaxing and pleading and appeasing rather than just putting a foot down and saying "no", the latter approach often runs the risk of being triggering terrible backlash with devastating immediate consequences.

This isn't to say sticks are never warranted at all. Sometimes the stick-like action is important enough for its own sake to absorb the immediate negative reaction. More broadly, the stick-wielders also have good reasons to communicate that where a given actor crosses certain redlines, they'll endure consequences they won't enjoy.

All of which is to say that diplomacy is a delicate dance, and there are more moving parts than many would care to admit. Sometimes it's worth swallowing an immediate bad consequence to set a broader precedent or to secure a long-term goal. But sometimes there are good reasons to think that the stakes of the immediate backlash demand swallowing one's pride and continuing to take what to an outsider may seem to be a maddeningly light-touch approach. The fact is that in all diplomatic relationships there are multiple players in the game, and it is rare that anyone -- even a hegemon like the United States -- can simply fiat someone else into compliance (I thought this old post from Cheryl Rofer on the term "deterrence," and how the term purports to "transfers agency to the deterrer" while obscuring that the "deterred" has agency too and won't necessarily react how you want them to, raised similar points).

Am I saying recognizing Palestine is a circumstance where countries should have backed off to avoid the Israeli reaction? No -- in fact, I think there are some very good reasons why here it was reasonable for the countries in question to bite the cost and go through with recognition. Again, sometimes absorbing the immediate backlash is worth it. But we should be clear-eyed about the trade that may have been made: recognition of Palestine for increased and accelerated settlement activity in the West Bank.

Is it fair that this is a "trade"? No. But diplomacy isn't about what's fair. And the broader lesson is one that's important to remember -- regarding Israeli and Palestinian actors alike. Too often, too many of us are seduced by the notion that it is possible to simply bludgeon the bad guy into obedience. The reality is that often, the project of avoiding the worst outcomes means making nice and doing nice things to actors who are doing, have done, and will continue doing all sorts of unlovely activities. If you can't accept that, you might want to find a different field to commentate on.

4 comments:

  1. I think the logic you lay out here is sound and proper. But it also implicitly bolsters the argument that Israel isn’t fundamentally an ally with common values and interests to be cooperated with, but a rogue actor to be dealt with.

    Israelis’ claim to decent-minded Americans has always been that the occupation is a necessary evil for Israel to ward off Hamas hordes at its border. And there was some degree of truth to that. But when Israel pursues settlements as a goal and expands them as a response to something like Europe as recognizing a Palestinian state, they’re behaving like a rogue regime in the vein of Iran.

    And this post quite clearly suggests that the US and its allies should treat Israel like an Iran— as a problem to be managed via carrots and sticks to do the right thing, not as a state that has any fundamental inclination to do the right thing to begin with. Which is sad and unfortunate but… seems right.

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  2. I think there is something to this, though I'm not as convinced that the dynamic I lay out is something confined to "rogue" states as opposed to a ubiquitous feature of international relations (quoth De Gaulle: "Nations don't have friends, only interests."). If/when our policy priorities sharply diverged from the UK's, I think one would encounter similar dynamics. Nonetheless, it is the case that -- to the extent people might have held a romantic view that Israel and the US simply would naturally be in alignment on all issues (and where we were not, some intangible bond of friendship would inexorably pull us together), that's just not the case. And while I don't think that the U.S. can simply bully Israel into complying with our will, I also think we're past the point of believing that Israel can be snuggled into good behavior either. Carrots and sticks.

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    1. The thing is, I don’t know that there are circumstances where our policy priorities would diverge that sharply. Some jingoistic yelling about freedom fries aside, there wasn’t any talk of sanctioning France over their (ultimately very correct) non-support of the US’s Iraq misadventure. I can’t really think of any case where the US has used meaningful sticks in relations with first order allies like the NATO countries or post-WWII Japan or Korea, or vice versa. I tend to think that that would signal a reimagining of the relationship, which is where it seems we’re headed with Israel.

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  3. I think there needs to be some reassessment by political scientists of what is going on with world democracies. Bibi and fellow loathsome travelers are just one example of it. You also have India where Modi government is actively silencing (and killing) Sikh opposition leaders in US and Canada (though there was some rebuke to his policies in recent elections). But Westerns powers will sure look different with Le Pen as president of France, coalition government with AfD in Germany, and Trump in the White House. Who is rogue then? Who is to sanction who?

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