Is Netanyahu an ideological fanatic?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Nobody has been able to solve the mystery of how Netanyahu's brain works," wrote Israeli columnist Yoel Marcus recently. Eleven months after the Israeli prime minister won power on a platform of 'peace with security', the mystery has only deepened.

Much of the time, Benjamin Netanyahu functions like a normal leader, expressing ritual outrage at the actions of his opponents and denying that his own actions have anything to do with it.

"Do I send my people to blow up babies like this?" he asked reporters after the suicide bomb in a Tel Aviv cafe last Friday. Nobody was rude enough to reply that no, when Israel kills Arab babies, it uses fighter-bombers or heavy artillery instead.

When a reporter asked about the connection between the recent upsurge in Palestinian violence and Netanyahu's decision to build a new Jewish suburb on Palestinian land in east Jerusalem, he used a classic politician's evasion: "I find that line of questioning obnoxious and immoral." So far, so good; the man may be wrong, he might even be wicked, but his tactics make perfectly good sense.

His strategy, however, does not make sense -- not unless he is secretly committed to destroying the Arab-Israeli peace process.

This kind of ideological obsession does not fit the image of a cynical opportunist, spouting right-wing rhetoric for personal advantage, that Netanyahu gained during his years as ambassador to the United States and subsequently as leader of the Likud Party.

What puzzles Israelis and non-Israeli observers alike is that Netanyahu repeatedly provokes unnecessary confrontations with the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the international community.

In September he opened a second entrance to the tunnel under the Western Wall in Jerusalem, provoking Palestinian protests that led to savage confrontations and 70 deaths. There was ample warning of the scale of Palestinian backlash if he opened the tunnel, and there was no significant public pressure in Israel to go ahead with the opening. He did it anyway.

For eight long months Netanyahu refused to evacuate Hebron, as required by the Oslo peace accords. He was finally forced to pull Israeli troops out the city in January in order to avoid a rupture with the United States. But the dust from that crisis had barely settled before he started the next one by announcing the building of a whole new Jewish suburb in east Jerusalem.

Last week the bulldozers started removing the pine trees from the ridge that local people call Jabal Abu Ghneim and the Israeli authorities refer to as Har Homa. The plan is to build housing for 27,000 Israelis, thus completing the ring of Jewish settlements that have cut off the Arab parts of Jerusalem from the rural West Bank since the Israel conquest in 1967.

As a senior American diplomat in Israel told a reporter from the Jerusalem Post, "Israel's message of Har Homa for Palestinians is: 'Screw you'." The Palestinians have responded to that message with mass protests and, in the case of the fundamentalist Islamic group Hamas, with a suicide bomb in Tel Aviv.

All this was completely predictable -- so why did Netanyahu set it in motion? One hypothesis is that Netanyahu, behind his smoothly manipulative facade, is secretly a true fanatic. If he were dedicated to the destruction of the peace process in order to facilitate the spread of Greater Israel over every square metre of what used to be Palestine, then his actions would make sense.

The alternative hypothesis is that he does all this to placate the extremists in his own coalition, who would bring the government down if they did not get their way. (They, of course, do want the destruction of the peace process, as a matter of principle).

Netanyahu, on this hypothesis, doesn't really care either way so long as he stays in power, but he has to go along with the hard right for tactical reasons. Thus the delays on Hebron, the opening of the tunnel, and the Har Homa project. Thus his declaration last Friday that the Palestinians will never get the 90 percent of the West Bank they expected under Oslo, but at most 45-50 percent.

Thus, too, his recent proposal to scrap the Oslo timetable and move directly to 'final status' talks on Palestinian refugees, the future of Jerusalem, and Palestinian statehood. (It is better to discuss topics on which no agreement is possible than to follow a timetable that requires major transfers of territory to Palestinian rule at scheduled intervals over the next year).

But it's very hard to believe that Netanyahu is a hostage to his own right wing on all these issues. They need him far more than he needs them. No other conceivable alliance could bring them and their extremist agenda into government, whereas Netanyahu could switch to a 'national unity' coalition with Labour.

There have even been moves to ease the transition to such a coalition: members from Netanyahu's Likud party and the opposition Labour Party recently made a joint call in the Knesset to lower from 80 to 61 the number of votes required in the 120- seat legislature to dismiss the prime minister without dissolving parliament. Then they could vote for a change of coalitions without having to face a new general election.

So would the real Netanyahu please stand up? Is he an ideological fanatic who doesn't care about losing power if he can just abort the peace process first? Or is he just a weak-willed careerist who has been overawed by allies who are fanatics.

The former explanation fits nothing we used to know about Netanyahu's character. The latter hypothesis would explain almost everything he has done in the past 11 months, since it simply says that Netanyahu, isolated and dependent on ideologically motivated advisers, has come to believe that he must make constant concessions to his own right-wing allies.

In terms of the lethal impact of his policies on the peace process, unfortunately, it may not make any difference which hypothesis is right.