In September 2020, following the White House signings of agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, former US secretary of state John Kerry appeared unexpectedly on the Israeli radar screen – though not in a favorable light.
A video clip went viral of his predictions for the Middle East uttered in December 2016 at the Saban Conference in Washington, just before he left office. He said that no Arab state would ever make peace with Israel until an agreement was reached with the Palestinians.
“I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians. No, no, no and no,” Kerry said with his signature supreme confidence.
“There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace,” he continued. “Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.”
Four years later Israel signed agreements with four Arab states; the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco – one state, someone quipped at the time, for each of Kerry’s noes.
On Wednesday, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed in a Facebook post another time, three years earlier, when Kerry – now the US’s special envoy for climate – was wildly off the mark.
In 2013, while Kerry was neck-deep in efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, Netanyahu wrote that Kerry invited him to take a secret trip to Afghanistan “to see, in his words, how the US established a local military force that can stand alone against terrorism.”
“The message was clear,” Netanyahu continued. “The ‘Afghanistan model’ is the model that the US wanted to apply to the Palestinian issue as well.”
In other words, Kerry wanted Israel to buy into the idea that a US-trained and equipped Palestinian force under the control of the Palestinian Authority would be enough to keep terrorists from taking over the West Bank after an Israeli withdrawal.
“I politely refused the offer and rejected the very idea,” Netanyahu wrote. “I thought then that the minute the US would leave Afghanistan, everything would collapse.... We would get a similar result if, God forbid, we would give parts of the homeland to the Palestinians.”
Netanyahu said that the lesson is clear: Israel cannot rely on anyone else when it comes to its security. Though he said that this was a doctrine that guided him, this doctrine was by no means his alone.
When Ariel Sharon was prime minister, he used to pepper his speeches with the phrase that Israel retains the right to defend itself, by itself, against any threat or combination of threats. In fact, an American commitment to this idea was incorporated in the famous letter he received from then-president George W. Bush in 2004 that paved the way for Sharon’s decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
“The United States,” the letter read, “reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats.”
In other words, the US understood that Israel would not place its security in anyone else’s hands and would ensure that it has the capacity to defend itself by itself.
Kerry’s apparent efforts to convince Netanyahu to rely on a US-trained Palestinian force in the West Bank, similar to the US-backed Afghan army, would seemingly contradict that commitment.
IN LIGHT of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s lightning takeover of the country, the idea about not being able to rely on anyone but oneself – not even the US – is obviously being internalized these days not only in Jerusalem but in other capitals around the region and the world.
If former president Barack Obama brought Israel and the Persian Gulf countries closer because of his pivot away from traditional US regional allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and because he was determined to sign a nuclear deal with Iran, the recent events in Afghanistan will strengthen those ties even more.
Even if Saudi Arabia will not formally normalize relations with Israel, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the quick Taliban takeover will push it toward even closer security cooperation with the Jewish state.
If the US is seen regionally as a power that will not be there in the end, then countries long reliant on a US umbrella will get the message and look to strengthen ties with Israel – not out of any expectation that Israel will send troops to save their regime, but, rather, in the hope that close security cooperation could better help them defend themselves.
The Taliban victory is likely to embolden jihadists and both Sunni and Shi’ite fundamentalists throughout the neighborhood, from Morocco to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Abbas Kamel, the director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, was in Israel on Wednesday discussing the situation in Gaza. During a meeting with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, he extended an invitation on behalf of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for Bennett to visit in the coming weeks – the first such invitation to an Israeli prime minister from an Egyptian president in more than a decade.
The timing of the invitation just as the Taliban is taking over Afghanistan is surely not coincidental. When the two leaders do sit down, it’s a sure bet that – in addition to discussing Gaza – they will focus on what they need to learn and the joint policies they need to implement following the dismal developments in Afghanistan.
And that is a type of discussion Bennett is certain to have with a number of other Arab leaders – both discreetly and out in the open – over the next few weeks.