The 1% Pressuring Netanyahu to bring peace, they finally realized that war is bad for business as well. (Haaretz Editorial) Six entrepreneurs and businessmen who were invited for a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned him about the economic price of the impasse in the diplomatic process with the Palestinians, according to a report by Barak Ravid in Haaretz Tuesday. haaretz/1.530429 The six aren’t hostile to Netanyahu: Some of them are his personal friends and avowed supporters, though others have a different worldview than he does. The businessmen’s argument is familiar: In the absence of diplomatic progress, the Israeli economy won’t succeed in realizing its full potential. Foreign investors will hesitate to gamble on an explosive environment; Israel will no longer be the startup nation; its best brains will flee; the defense budget won’t shrink. At the same time, the demographic clock will continue to tick, threatening Israeli democracy, and that, too, has economic ramifications. Because one can’t suspect an intelligent and experienced politician like Netanyahu of having overlooked these aspects of the situation, one has to wonder why he took the trouble to commission such a warning lecture − especially since he certainly assumed that a group conversation like this wouldn’t remain a secret, and its contents would leak. The unavoidable conclusion is that the prime minister shares the situation assessment of these businessmen, and that publication of their warning suits his purposes. Against whom does Netanyahu need this verbal stick? It seems that his target audience was his own Likud party − both the settlers among its members and their champions, from MK Moshe Feiglin to Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon − as well as the parties to Likud’s right. The internal message to his party’s activists was that the Israeli public proved in the recent Knesset election that such socioeconomic considerations top its agenda. National economic growth and individual households’ standards of living are both closely tied to progress toward peace. Without a diplomatic horizon, the economic skies will also darken − and Likud will lose power. As for Habayit Hayehudi − the party whose chairman, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, has been making aggressive statements that in effect challenge not only Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas but also U.S. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and even Netanyahu himself − this message is a step toward ousting it from the government and courting the Labor Party as a coalition partner in its stead. But even if these are Netanyahu’s motives, this isn’t enough. Using the warnings of others for political purposes won’t change the reality. And the reality, including the economic one, is that a Palestinian state is an Israeli interest. Therefore, Netanyahu would do better to work energetically to break the diplomatic impasse, desist from his ritual of casting blame on Abbas, and above all, abandon his efforts to evade negotiations.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:14:32 +0000
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