The writer explains why, despite his recent decision to legalize 3 communities in Judea and Samaria and contrary to the right´s expectations, Bibi is focused on not making waves, rather than on asserting Israel´s rights.

PM Netanyahyu doesn’t have a wanderlust. He is keeping the ship of state snuggly anchored in the harbor and has no interest in sailing out into troubled waters. So says a highly respected Israeli analyst with access to the PM Office. I spoke with him for an hour.

Bibi is quite happy with the status quo and has no interest in changing it. Israel controls Judea and Samaria, Arabs there have autonomy and they are cooperating with security. There is no need to govern them or give them citizenship.

He wants international money to keep flowing to the PA. It keeps them stable and enables them to buy Israeli goods.

The PA has no interest in the peace process. It will not make a final agreement with Israel. Instead it will get the international community to deliver Israel up. It prefers to be recognized as a state by the UN without the necessity of declaring itself a state. The Palestinian Arabs are trying to have it both ways. Meanwhile the money is flowing and the leadership is raking off their unfair share.

Israel is fearful of the UN recognizing them as a state because that would give way to the PA state bringing war crime charges against Israel’s leaders and senior officers. It would also give way to sanctions.

Israel is doing what it can to avoid this from happening. It is fearful of becoming another South Africa.

Sha, shtil. Israel has no intention of drawing attention to itself by provoking the West. It is keeping a low profile. It is keeping settlement construction east of the green line, even in Jerusalem, to a bare minimum. It will neither annex some of this land or extend sovereignty to part of it.

Why bother? We already control it.

My analyst friend cared only for security and not in making the land ours. Bibi probably shares that view. Bibi is always talking about the need for security and never - except in Congress last year - talking about our rights to the land, which essentially is the import of Res. 242 and the Oslo Accords.

I told the analyst that Bibi should be fighting for our right to the land rather than for our right to security.

Is it any wonder that American Jews support Obama’s handling of US/Israel relations, the centre piece of which is his attack on settlements. Bibi is in no way standing up for our right to build and for the legitimacy of the settlements.

I complained to him that the High Court decision to recognize certain lands as “private Palestine land” was in violation of most legal norms and shouldn’t be allowed to stand. He agreed.

But Bibi is doing nothing about it and instead has positioned himself as the protector of the independence of the Court.

Rest assured he supports the policies of Ehud Barak. For the most part, Bibi has stymied the initiatives of the right to gain more control over what is happening. In effect, Bibi is buying into the narrative of the left with which the international community is aligned. If they say something is undemocratic, he accepts it as such, even though much can be argued to the contrary.

Bibi is focused on putting out fires rather than starting them.

Remember in forming his government, he made sure to include [centrist] people like Sol Meridor high up in the Lidud rankings and [rightist] Moshe Feiglin low down. So Meridor is now a high ranking Cabinet Minister and Feiglin is not even an MK.

Similarly, he shunned the National Union Party and invited Labour into the coalition instead. This should have told us all we needed to know about how Bibi was going to govern.

In all probability, even if the right-of-center parties increase their seats in the up-coming election, Netanyahu will invite Kadima under Mofaz to join the coalition. He needs to have a counter-weight to the pressure from the right. Mofaz, not Yaalon, would replace Barak.

The Government of Israel is adamantly against the toppling of King Abdullah of Jordan. It works with the Bedouin who keep the King on the throne and the border with Israel quiet. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Israel’s quid pro quo is that it won’t expel Palestinians on the "West Bank" to Jordan.

My analyst friend didn’t trust the Palestinians there one iota. They would not, in his opinion, abandon Judea and Samaria to make Jordan the Palestinian State. Even if some of their leadership would, all kinds of infighting and terrorism would take place to destabilize such a Palestinian regime and assassinate the leadership.

Steady as she goes. (IsraelNationalNews © 2012 05/02/12)