Round two goes to Washington. This time, Barack Obama has won against Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, says Peter Beinart:
He’s won because he’s hurt Benjamin Netanyahu more than Netanyahu has hurt him. For decades, the relationship between an American president and an Israeli prime minister has resembled two guys with revolvers pointed at each other’s heads. For an Israeli prime minister, alienating your biggest patron is an excellent way to lose power—as Yitzhak Shamir learned after his showdown with George H.W. Bush and James Baker in the early 1990s. But for an American president, fighting with Israel almost always guarantees a fight with Congress, which tolerates little criticism of the Jewish state.
Obama’s first confrontation with Netanyahu—when the White House demanded a halt to the growth of settlements in the West Bank early last year—didn’t go particularly well. (…) But if round one went to Netanyahu, things are looking very different in round two. After Israel announced new building in east Jerusalem during Joe Biden’s visit there, thus imperiling proximity talks that the Obama administration had been laboring mightily to arrange, the White House reacted with fury. Alarmed, AIPAC soon urged members of Congress to begin lobbing grenades over the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue fence. Republicans, and a few hard-line Jewish Democrats, complied. Interestingly, however, most Jewish congressmen refused to join in. To the contrary, Howard Berman, the influential chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declared that “the administration had real justification for being upset.” (…)
Obama has shown that he can take on Netanyahu and inflict more political damage than he incurs. Both sides will remember that the next time.
A bad investment? In the FT, Richard Youngs calls on the EU to rethink its aid to Palestine:
The EU has long been the largest donor in the occupied territories, pouring billions of euros into helping build the institutions of Palestine’s proto-state. Unfortunately, the way in which such funds have been delivered has deepened the debilitating lack of Palestinian unity.
Since the Hamas government was elected four years ago, European assistance to the occupied territories has increased dramatically. Paradoxically, overall European funding nearly doubled in the 12 months after Hamas’ election. As the EU declines to engage with Hamas, now confined to Gaza, all such funding is channelled through institutions under Fatah’s tutelage in the West Bank. Such aid has been switched away from longer-term governance reform to short-term emergency help. Its allocation has become opaque, sitting uneasily with European demands for greater Palestinian accountability.
Better governance standards could have tempered the polarisation between Fatah and Hamas. The latter rose to power on the back of popular discontent over Fatah corruption. And yet the EU has further indulged this same nepotism and centralised political control. It has talked the language of political reform, but has conceived such reform as a matter of supporting one ostensibly moderate leader – President Mahmoud Abbas.
The EU mission providing support to the police force in the West Bank has empowered Fatah security bodies against forces under Hamas’ control. The mission formally includes human rights and rule of law provisions, but in practice it is seen to equip Fatah forces in their battle for supremacy against Hamas. Such surreptitious attempts to defeat Hamas under a governance reform label can only sharpen existing divisions amongst the Palestinians.
The cost of the EU’s one-sided approach is now patent. Hope was invested in a leader who now threatens not to stand for re-election. The EU actually supported Abbas’ decision to delay elections last year. And it has failed to map a clear route towards a Palestinian unity government. Divisions even remain between EU states over how onerous should be the conditions demanded from Hamas members of such a government.
In private European diplomats admit they backed themselves into a cul-de-sac after the 2006 elections, by limiting themselves to dealing with only one part of the Palestinian political spectrum. The beginning of another phase in the electoral cycle represents an opportunity for the EU to escape this dead-end. Lady Ashton can make an early mark on this issue: a serious shortcoming in recent years has been the paucity of diplomatic backing given to those running EU aid programmes on the ground – witness the moribund border monitoring mission, now kicking its collective heels miles from the Rafah crossing.
Unity government would not in itself constitute a solution to Palestinian woes. What is needed is not an opaque set of back-room deals between Fatah and Hamas leaders, but more vibrant open politics. European donors should take aid out of the hands of the feckless elites that rule the roost on both the Fatah and Hamas sides. The need is to assist in the bottom-up democratic capacity of Palestinian society, by routing aid to grassroots organisations. Only this can give citizens a sense of ownership and the incentive to overcome factionalism, as a necessary first step to negotiating terms with Israel.
Dealing with Yanukovych’s Ukraine. In a briefing paper, the ECFR’s Andrew Wilson says that recent elections in Ukraine might open up new opportunities for the EU:
It is possible that, through a policy of small but steady steps, Yanukovych could bring Ukraine closer to the EU than his predecessor Viktor Yushchenko’s often reckless attempts to claim a ‘European destiny’.
Paradoxically, Yanukovych’s quest for good relations with Russia could also make it easier for EU member states to reach a consensus about how to deal with Ukraine. Too often in the past, the EU has been unable to develop a coherent policy on Ukraine because some member states fear offending Russia. Meanwhile, other member states have appeared to try to force Ukraine to choose between Russia and the West, for example over NATO membership. The EU now has an opportunity to develop a new approach to Ukraine that explicitly factors Russia into the equation. And if the EU supports Ukraine as it reaches out to Russia in some areas, the EU could help Ukraine push back in others.
The EU thus needs a new twin-track approach of encouraging Kiev to engage with it and with Russia in trilateral formats in areas where the EU and Russia have common interests, while using the good will this generates to push Kiev more strongly in areas where interests diverge. For example, the EU could take advantage of Yanukovych’s election to explore a trilateral format on gas and to talk about a new European security order that includes Russia and NATO. This will put it in a better position to make progress on the bilateral track – for example, by getting Ukraine to sign a Deep Free Trade deal with the EU rather than joining a customs union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and also by using the Eastern Partnership to help build Ukraine’s chronically weak political institutions.
Georgia: Damage from TV hoax. Alex Rossi writes on the Sky blog:
Georgia has perhaps done more to damage its international image in the last few day than at any other time. Its TV hoax reporting that the Russians had invaded again has backfired massively. The incident has not only made the country’s elites look like a bunch of clowns, it has also angered some of Georgia’s staunchest allies.
The British and French ambassadors are said to be furious and are now demanding apologies for being included in the now notorious false Imedi TV report. EU monitoring teams have also claimed the broadcast could have caused enough confusion to have created another conflict on the volatile border.
The fallout from this for Georgia will be enormous. It’s hard to think any country will take President Saakashvili and his government seriously ever again.
Pushing Bejing towards Iran sanctions. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband notes on his blog about his China trip:
Iran was the issue that took more time than any other in my meetings. I argued that China should not leave itself isolated. The dual track process – engagement and pressure – is the right one. Sanctions are not a wonder-cure but neither are they a deviation from a negotiated settlement. In fact they are the basis of one.
New EU diplomatic service. Nicolas Gros-Verheyde has published the first organigram for the EAS on his Bruxelles2 blog: here (explanations are in French). DPA reports that “a battle over control of the European Union’s multi-billion-dollar development budget heated up yesterday as the bloc’s member states and its executive arm both claimed the right to manage the money”:
Ashton is expected to make a formal proposal to member states and the commission on how the EAS should work by the end of the month. Both bodies will have to approve the proposal for the EAS to be born. But diplomats say that the question of which side should control the development budget, worth some 30bn euros ($41bn) over six years, has so far deadlocked talks.
All sides agree that the commission, which according to EU rules oversees the bloc’s budget, should keep control of the fine details of spending. However, member states want the EAS, which will be run by Ashton and one-third staffed by diplomats from national capitals, to define the main priorities for development aid in line with foreign policy. “The commission can supply the money, but it is (Ashton) who should decide how we prioritise that money,” the EU diplomat said, adding that EU states and the European Parliament back that approach.
The commission argues that it, as the legal manager of the EU’s budget, has a duty to control development strategy. “We need to be very clearly involved as the commission in all five stages (of development financial planning), and we should be fully in charge of the last three (national multi-annual and annual planning, and implementation),” the commission official said.
Diplomatic sources say that a compromise is likely to involve giving the commission an advisory role in the strategic debate and full control over more detailed spending.
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