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In print | Published November 6, 2008

The curtains around voting booths have blinded Americans to more than just the ballots of their neighbors. In the face of a historic American presidential election, it has become easy to lose sight of the fact that events in the rest of the world do not suddenly come to a halt merely because we make our way to the polls.

Threats from Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to lead militants in a march across the country leaving violence and destruction in their wake have scarcely warranted mention in the American press. News of two bombings in Iraq on Tuesday, killing 16 and wounding over 40, was pushed far below the fold of The New York Times. And in Israel, the Knesset, the state’s governing body, seems poised to disintegrate, leaving a lame-duck government until a general election in February. This warrants a closer look.

For all the discussion during the American presidential campaigns about candidates’ “Israel policies,” it seems that both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain had forgotten that Israel is an active and complex democracy, not a marionette to be played by American politicians. American foreign aid buys this country a voice in some of Israel’s affairs, but by no means does it guarantee the United States veto power over Israel’s actions. Accordingly, if Americans want a complete perspective on the future of the reason, there is cause to pay a great deal of attention to its present political dilemmas and future electoral prospects.

At the core of the present issues in Israeli politics is its multiparty parliamentary system. Whereas Americans directly elected Barack Obama, Israeli voters don’t specifically select the leader of their government. Instead, voters choose parties, who are then allocated seats in the Knesset proportional to the number of votes they receive. The leader of the government, the prime minister, is simply the head of the party that receives the greatest number of votes. Among the duties of the prime minister is the formation of a coalition of parties that, together, are able to govern the country.
The problem facing Tzipi Livni, the current head of Kadima, the largest party in the Knesset, is that she has been unable to form such a coalition. The reasons for this difficulty are myriad. First, Ms. Livni has run afoul of Shas, the Sephardic-Orthodox party, who demanded that, among other things, she refuse to negotiate with Palestinians over the issue of Jerusalem. Without their support, forming a viable coalition became extremely difficult.

But second, and more importantly, Ms. Livni’s coalition difficulties represent a broader divide in Israeli politics over how to proceed with negotiating peace agreements with the Palestinians and Syrians. Kadima as a party supports a two-state solution, obtained through Israeli withdrawals from contested territory, such as the West Bank. Kadima’s opponents, and the Likud party in particular, take much more hawkish positions, refusing to budge on the question of Jerusalem and insisting on maintaining control over parts of the West Bank.

Nevertheless, any sort of referendum on these issues seems unlikely in the near future. Israeli voters will have to wait until February to cast their ballots either for Livni, Benjamin Netanyahu (a former prime minister and the leader of Likud), or Ehud Barak (another former prime minister and head of the Labor party). In the meantime, Israelis are left with a lame-duck government, unable to effectively negotiate or pursue policy changes.

And this is where President-Elect Obama enters the fray. During this time of relative political instability in Israel, the American government should not put undue pressure on it to take radical actions in the name of peace. The dismantlement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, already in a precarious position, will have to remain on the back-burner. And large-scale peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, even with the mediation of an eager American regime, ought to be put on hold for the moment — a placeholder Israeli government is in no position to make promises of change, even in the most general sense.

Instead, Mr. Obama should use this opportunity to look at the other side of the peace equation: the Palestinian government. The Palestinian National Authority has been perennially hamstrung by the divisive Hamas, a radical party which presently controls Gaza and to which many Palestinians remain loyal. Without a united Palestinian front, any peace process an Obama administration may undertake is doomed to the same failures President Bush encountered in his contrived 2007 summit in Annapolis — specifically, despite the best intentions of the Palestinian and Israeli people and governments, squabbling between the PNA and Hamas serves to derail any substantive attempts at negotiation. This infighting, rather than any malicious intent on the part of the Palestinians, represents one significant blockade along the path to peace.

While the fragility of the Palestinian regime precludes putting an excessive amount of pressure on it for reform, Mr. Obama should stress the need for reconciliation efforts between the PNA and Hamas. If autonomous unification seems unlikely, American aid should be put on the line. While Palestinian politicians have cried foul at the suggestion, claiming the humanitarian implications of decreased aid could be devastating, the intransigence of some of their lot (the cataclysmic Hamas, which has yet to formally denounce terrorism as one of its methods, comes to mind) has left America with few options. Hamas’ grip over some Palestinian hearts and minds will indubitably become less firm if they are seen as the dam holding back American aid dollars.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a thorn in the side of American politicians for decades, to the point where President Bush appears to have lost interest in the matter. But as he prepares to assume office, Mr. Obama needs to make a clear commitment to achieving substantive progress in the region. There are, undoubtedly, great foreign and domestic problems he will have to address during his time in office — but they cannot come at the cost of once more allowing the Middle East peace process to falter.

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