Kerry’s Miscalculation on the U.N. Palestine Resolutions

On December 18th, John Kerry told a luncheon gathering of twenty-eight European Union ambassadors that Washington would not support, or even discuss, any United Nations resolution on Palestine before the Israeli elections on March 17th. The remarks were ostensibly private, though it is hard to believe twenty-eight ambassadors were expected not to talk. (Foreign Policy reported on the meeting the following day.) Kerry was referring to two resolutions. The first, drafted by the Palestinian Authority and presented by Jordan, failed to gain the necessary support in a Security Council vote last night. There were eight votes in favor, including Russia, China, and France; two opposed, the U.S. and Australia; and five abstentions.* Nigeria’s last-minute abstention was reportedly secured by a conversation between Kerry and President Goodluck Jonathan.

The defeated resolution reflected familiar P.A. positions on core issues, such as immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood, Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and a three-year deadline to end the occupation of the West Bank. Think of it as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s last-ditch effort, at seventy-nine, to prove his diplomatic standing to a skeptical West Bank street, after months of reciprocal violence between Israel and Hamas during which Abbas seemed only a bystander. Today, Abbas moved to join the International Criminal Court, where Israeli leaders could be charged with violations of the Geneva Conventions, a measure that he had threatened to take if the resolution failed. (Netanyahu had previously countered that a move to the I.C.C. could lead Israel to dismantle the Palestinian Authority.)

But Kerry was actually responding to a second, less imminent resolution, a French initiative reflecting the European Union’s determination to help Abbas without adopting his positions. This resolution would notionally offer symbolic recognition to Palestine and establish principles for a peace agreement, culled from past negotiations and the Arab League peace plan from 2003. (On December 17th, the European Parliament voted to recognize a Palestinian state, four hundred and ninety-eight to eighty-eight, with eleven abstentions.) E.U. diplomats assumed that their own resolution would supersede the P.A.’s, if only Kerry would commit to supporting it and agree to help draft it, ideally incorporating his own unpublished framework from last spring.

Kerry’s statements at the luncheon were meant to dampen this hope. He was prepared to veto both resolutions on Palestine, he made clear, though he added, tantalizingly, that he might “ultimately support some sort of Security Council resolution that didn’t prejudge the outcome of stalled political negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.” His real message was in his “ultimately”; by inference, the U.S. might support a resolution sometime after the Israeli elections. Kerry had consulted with, among others, former Israeli Justice Minister and peace negotiator Tzipi Livni, who has allied with Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog to run against Benjamin Netanyahu. Livni urged Kerry to oppose both resolutions, even if one could be made consistent with Kerry’s own framework, and he agreed. Any “text imposed by the international community” would reinforce Netanyahu and “further embolden the more right-wing forces along the Israeli political spectrum,” he told the ambassadors.

It turned out that Kerry did not have to veto the first resolution, though Abbas may try to reintroduce it in January, when the composition of the Security Council will change to his advantage. Kerry is trying to avoid “doing stupid stuff,” as Obama has often put it. If the nuclear negotiations with Iran finally produce an agreement this winter—even one that opens the country to permanent inspections and greater economic integration—Netanyahu and the Republican Congress can be expected to attack it. Why provide them with more reasons to accuse the Obama Administration of being unfriendly to Israel? At the same time, Kerry knows that doing nothing to quell the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians may not be shrewd. Jerusalem witnessed escalating acts of violence this year, some with religious overtones, and Kerry saw how the collapse of his mediation effort last spring contributed to the eruption of war in Gaza. So Kerry is asking for a three-month grace period on the second, more significant resolution, in which all sides sweat out the Israeli election results with him.

Kerry’s most subtle assumption is that a conflict with Washington will work to Netanyahu’s advantage. Here, I think Kerry is misinformed, even if Livni is informing him. Livni, after all, is eager to appear more influential than Netanyahu in the West and to replace him as custodian of the crucial American relationship; she can hardly call for an American-imposed solution. Netanyahu knows how to use European hostility to rouse his base, the “national camp”—as many as forty percent of Israeli Jews, dominant in Jerusalem and its environs, who support the settlement project and the merging of civil and Jewish law. But they have never been able to win a Knesset majority without attracting voters who do not share their ideology. Hanan Krystal, Israeli radio’s shrewdest pundit, supposes that Netanyahu’s increasingly zealous Likud, Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Party, and various ultra-Orthodox parties are assured about forty of the hundred and twenty seats in the Knesset, but no more. A U.N. resolution will madden them, and an American veto won’t appease them, but neither would make them a decisive factor in the election.

To win a Knesset majority, Netanyahu’s party has always needed what has come to be called the Israeli center, the quarter of the Jewish population that’s changed in composition over the years yet remained curiously stable in outlook: dubious about the settlements, secular in theory, traditional in practice, and apprehensive that Palestinians can never be trusted. Since 1977, centrists have usually voted Likud and for its allied parties, flocking to leaders (Begin, Ariel Sharon, Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu) who defined security as “deterrence.” Centrist voters have always included a disproportionate share of Jewish voters with roots in the Muslim world, or Mizrahim, and the former Soviet Union. Two generations of Mizrahi leaders have avoided any party descended from the Labor Zionists, who they claim pushed them around when they arrived in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Later, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who scorned “the left” and longed for a Jewish Putin, also gravitated to the Likud.

The national camp’s opponent, the more secular and liberal camp that Livni and Herzog now lead, counts on about a third of Jewish voters, many of them from Tel Aviv, and from the élite class of scientists, scholars, and entrepreneurs. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and the leftist Meretz are in this camp, which tacitly relies also on the support of various Arab parties. Leaders of this camp have always defined security not only in terms of military preparedness but in terms of diplomatic integration into the West.  They assume that there should always be an active peace process, if not peace, with Palestinians. When the liberal camp has garnered a reasonable share of the center's vote—with Yitzhak Rabin, in 1992; Ehud Barak, in 1999; and Ehud Olmert, in 2006—it has won the Knesset.

The key to the liberal camp’s victory each time was its claim, amplified by centrist pundits, that the national camp was ruining relations with Washington, and, by implication, Israel’s economy and global standing. Now Netanyahu has polarized the country by building new settlements and firing Livni and Lapid, his former coalition partners, mainly over their opposition to his controversial effort to declare Israel a “Jewish nation.” The polls suggest that the Herzog-Livni camp and the Arab parties together are assured of about forty-eight seats. They need at least another twelve from centrist voters to secure a Knesset majority. Will they lose them to Netanyahu if Washington works with Europe on a U.N. resolution to recognize Palestine?

The opposite may well be true. The Israeli economy is stalled, tourism is down, and real estate prices suggest a bubble. More than a third of Israeli children are living in poverty, and economic growth appears to be too slow to outpace the tensions produced by social inequalities. The liberal parties understand that economic anxieties will work to their advantage. “Netanyahu prefers to transfer hundreds of millions of shekels to isolated settlements in a gesture to the Likud central committee, and continues to ignore the plight of Israeli society,” a spokesman for Lapid’s Yesh Atid said.

Moreover, there is a new player in the center, Moshe Kahlon, a former communications minister, who is widely credited with breaking Israel’s cell-phone duopoly and bringing down the price of wireless service. Kahlon, the son of immigrants from Libya and a former Likud member (he founded his Kulanu party when new elections were called) is running on a consumerist platform, speaking about the need to break other monopolies. Unlike Yesh Atid, Kahlon connects with poorer Mizrahi voters. He is polling at ten seats and will likely take them from the Likud, and from the Mizrahi-Orthodox Shas Party, which seems to be imploding after the death of its spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Kahlon’s strategic ideas are not really known. He’s signed up Michael Oren, an American immigrant to Israel who served as its ambassador to the U.S., who tends to share Netanyahu’s skepticism regarding the P.A. But Oren is also an American-Jewish liberal who once worked for Rabin, and earlier this year called for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. Kahlon is not a natural for the national camp, either. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert once told me that, had he managed to stage a comeback with a centrist peace party, Kahlon almost certainly would have joined its leadership.

Russian-speaking voters may also be rethinking their loyalty to the Likud. They tend to be more educated than the average voter and know, if only intuitively, that Israel is a part of a global information economy, in which many of them work. They see how the E.U. sanctions imposed on Russia made Putin’s gambit in the Ukraine look economically reckless rather than strategically bold. Even Russian-born Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who usually loves bravado, has been gesturing toward this new globalist pragmatism. “For anyone who doesn’t know, our largest market is the E.U., in both exports and imports,” Lieberman said. “We must internalize this. When diplomatic relations deteriorate, you see what happens to the economy. I can cite the example closest to me, that of Russia. … The more developed the state, the more sensitive it is to political decisions or changes in economic relations based on treaties and agreements.”

Meanwhile, centrist voters are getting younger. The mean age in Israel is about thirty, and the younger generations are not moved by their parents’ resentments but rather by vague and contradictory judgments: about the personalities of leaders, sensationalistic headlines, the racist impulses that can come from conflict, the cosmopolitan values derived from global media. Recently, on a television comedy show, Livni, born to a right-wing family, explained her decision to make common cause with Herzog, the child of Labor Zionists, the following way: “I decided to stop fighting over what separated our parents, and work for what unites our children.” The audience, mainly young, erupted in applause. Israeli pundits deride Netanyahu’s erstwhile threats to bomb Iran, and lament that this summer’s Gaza conflict, with all its horrors, achieved almost nothing. Hamas is more despised than ever, but the idea that Israel can achieve permanent quiet by intimidating Palestinians seems increasingly hollow, like Moshe Dayan’s post-1967 “security borders.”

The Herzog-Livni camp may well reach a majority if Kahlon joins, and a comfortable one if Lieberman follows suit. That’s an enormous if. In recent days, Lieberman’s party has been riven by a corruption scandal, and there’s a long campaign ahead. Nevertheless, centrist voters are unlikely to side with the national camp if they can be made to see that “reaching an agreement with the Palestinians is important for our relations with the European Union and the United States,” as Lieberman insists. By taking initiative at the U.N., the E.U. has given Kerry the chance to provide all sides with a political horizon, and Israel’s centrist voters with a measure of dread, one to counter Netanyahu’s claims about the necessities of dealing with a “tough neighborhood.” Kerry is right to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. But there is no need for him to tell Israeli voters that, as always, American support is in the bag.​

• A previous version of this post stated that Britain, not Australia, voted with the U.S. against the first U.N. resolution.