Netanyahu builds up his majority – and the “iron wall”?

Netanyahu builds up his majority – and the “iron wall”?

Brian M Downing

Last week Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu replaced his defense minister with Avigdor Lieberman – a conservative who has found a niche to the right of the PM. Lieberman’s public support is in the Russian immigrant community and West Bank settlers. His ideological forbears are the “Revisionists” who as far back as the 1930s saw no hope of peace with the Arabs. The new country would be ever at war with surrounding states and must build an “iron wall” around it.

Along with Lieberman come additional seats in the Knesset, raising the Likud majority from razor-thin to reasonably comfortable. While increasing a majority in a legislative assembly is an end in itself, Netanyahu will probably use his newly strengthened majority to act, in the West Bank and elsewhere.

The West Bank

The Likud, and many others in Israel, want to expand their control over the West Bank – an area taken from Jordanian control in the ’67 war. Many security experts see the area as providing strategic depth in an area where the country is as narrow as 10 miles. These experts point to the ’73 war, during which Egypt drove well past IDF positions in Sinai before being outflanked at great cost. Other analysts and generals see little chance of a conventional war with a neighboring state, and scoff at the strategic depth argument.

The West Bank contains aquifers which are sorely needed in a country with a growing population and an agricultural sector. Israel presently uses desalination plants and imports water from Turkey – a dubious trade partner as of late.

Israel’s Religious Right views the West Bank – Judea and Samaria, as they insist – as granted them not by UN mandate or Moshe Dayan’s victory. It is theirs by God’s design. No argument or man-made law can change that. Politicians who call for ceding the land to the Palestinians are deemed apostates and traitors. Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts to form a Palestinian state led to his assassination.

Impending programs?

The Likud is opposed to a Palestinian state and deploys all three justifications to keep the West Bank. It will consolidate its authority over the West Bank with its strengthened majority. Legally, the West Bank is an occupied territory and administered by the defense ministry. Its new head is Avigdor Lieberman.

The settlement program may accelerate, especially as the government tells the diaspora that Europe is no longer safe for them. Foreign objections will be rebuffed, perhaps more vocally. Palestinian demonstrations will be suppressed, perhaps more harshly. The Likud knows well that it can accelerate Palestinian objections and violence by firmer suppression, and perhaps by something as seemingly innocent as a prayer near or on the Temple Mount.

The Palestinian Authority will be in a quandary. If it stands by quietly, it will lose support to Hamas and splinter groups. If it objects and supports stronger opposition, the Likud will dismantle it, claiming it had no choice. A de facto annexation will be further underway and the iron wall will be more formidable.

Abroad

Netanyahu and Lieberman have long seen Iran as a grave danger and hoped to strike its military and nuclear sites. Despite the nuclear deal, and Iran’s dismantling of centrifuges and export of enriched uranium, the desire to strike Iran remans in parts of the Israeli government. (Other parts have long opposed it.) Options include strengthening support for Kurdish, Arab, and Baluch insurgent groups inside Iran.

Syria no longer exists. Military realities, and coming diplomacy, will see that Shia-Alawi power is confined to a small portion of the former country. Israel will seek to further weaken the rump state by increasing its attacks on Hisbollah and IRGC forces in Syria.

Egypt is the only major military power near Israel that has not disintegrated. It is governed by its army – the most effective of Arab armies – and increasingly aligned with Saudi Arabia. The Sunni world is falling apart, but Riyadh is trying to win control of the pieces – with Egypt and its army the crown jewel.

Egypt faces internal turmoil, which can be encouraged and even supported. The restive bedouin of Sinai are already in revolt and finding common cause with al Qaeda and ISIL. Tribes in the west and south are increasingly disaffected with Cairo’s authority. The Muslim Brotherhood, now banned, is splintering into clandestine groups that attack security forces and tourist sites.

An Egypt in disarray will secure Israel’s west for some time to come. A lawless Sinai detached from Cairo and governed, if barely, by rivalrous bedouin militias would constitute a vast buffer state between Egypt and the iron wall.

Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who has written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.