Israel Matzav: Netanyahu's freedom of action

Netanyahu's freedom of action

Dr. Aaron Lerner argues that the Obama administration's attacks on Prime Minister Netanyahu have freed the Prime Minister from attempting to placate Obama. According to Lerner, Netanyahu can now act in Israel's best interests without worrying about what America might think.

At the start of the Ramat Shlomo incident Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had to carefully and painstakingly weigh his moves as he attempted to placate Washington without causing a crisis in his own party and the ruling coalition.

This all changed when, over the course of the weekend, it became clear that the Obama team had decided to exploit the Ramat Shlomo incident to try and oust Netanyahu by forcing him to take actions that they themselves expected would ultimately break up his ruling coalition.

This simplified matters considerably.

Fine tuning was no longer relevant.

And thus, a clearly relieved Netanyahu was able to take a very clear stand today that construction would continue, as it has ever since 1967, in all of Jerusalem. And he reiterated that the settlement housing construction freeze would indeed end as promised after ten months.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, the real lesson Bibi learned in 1999 was to keep his coalition together and not, as is commonly believed abroad, not to 'screw up' Israel's relationship with the United States.

But the real question is what will happen if the Labor party threatens to withdraw from the coalition when the 'settlement freeze' ends unless Bibi extends it or makes 'progress' with the 'Palestinians.' At that point, I hope that Bibi has the courage to keep going with a Right wing only coalition. But I'm not sure he does.

Aaron takes this in a different direction. Read the whole thing.

Israel Matzav: Netanyahu's freedom of action