The cold war is back. Last week, Vice President Joseph Biden announced in a television interview that Israel, as a sovereign state, was free to take military action to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. But President Obama was not pleased to see his partner-in-leadership improvise foreign policy. Obama must have immediately cautioned his vice president about the need to avoid cold war rhetoric in managing the potentially explosive tension between Iran and Israel. This accidental and unexpected VP announcement was soon diplomatically discredited by the president.

Netanyahu

If the Biden declaration truly reflected U.S. foreign policy, it would have amounted to licensing Israel to start an unjust and unprovoked war on Iran. Can Israel now afford another devastating and counter productive military adventure in the region? Furthermore, symbolically, would not such explosive American cold war client-state talk give President Ahmadinejad a fresh excuse to scapegoat his recently mobilized domestic critics as “agents of U.S. imperialism”?
More rhetoric fallout: The nature of the statement that Biden addressed to Israel further emboldens the current regime in Tel Aviv, a regime which badly needs limit-setting rather than morale boosting.

Biden is well aware that Netanyahu insists on continuing the building of settlements on Palestinian land. In addition, the Israeli prime minister has made unrealistic demands from the Arab side before engaging in peace negotiations.

Israel’s territorial expansion in Arab land is related to Iran’s aggression. But to be fair, the solution of Israel’s hegemony is not, and should not be, in the hands of the Persian state.

Ahmadinejad

The peace process in the Middle East is not likely to bear fruit as long as Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad are in power. The two leaders are hurting the peace process in very different ways: one is too comfortable with an occupation policy to the point of making it a cause of security and faith, and the other is too comfortable with a policy of destabilization of regimes in the region. As long as Israel and Iran conceive of regional security through divine intervention, peace in the Holy Land is doomed.
Over the last three decades Iran and Israel have become the two superpowers of the region. These two countries are different, but today they share one decisive factor: poor leadership.

Neither of the two leaders is responsible for engineering their countries’ broad political framework. But both excel in exaggeration and rationalize their excesses by demonizing the adversary.

Netanyahu represents those in Israel who are willing to risk their nation’s future by obstructing the formation of a viable Palestinian state. The current Israeli leader is betting that Palestinian leadership and Arab states will remain forever weak and divided. He is betting also that changing demography can be ignored and the United States will remain hesitant and ambivalent in applying pressure on Tel-Aviv.

For his part, Ahmadinejad applies the Khomeini lens in viewing the Arab- Israeli conflict. Ahmadinejad has singled out the support of Hamas and other Islamic resistance groups. By considering the Palestinian issue primarily as an Islamic affair, he has reinforced the religious dimension of the conflict. By exploiting the religious symbols of the conflict, he has unwittingly strengthened Netanyahu’s parallel exclusivist thesis that Israel is the “Jewish state.”

If Netanyahu gets his way and Israel continues the building of settlements, the Arab states will eventually be forced to shelve the two-state solution and take an alternative position. On the Arab street, the momentum of the one-state solution is already growing fast. This “solution” requires the merger of Palestine and Israel into a single bi-national state. If Israel dislikes the two-state option today, it will dread the one-state scenario tomorrow.

If the peace process is to come alive, Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad must change their outlook or be replaced. By arousing the Israeli appetite for future military adventures, Mr. Biden is not promoting the peace process. He is acting as a cold war politician.