My new column is up at The American Prospect:
On Sunday morning it seemed that Israeli scientists, or perhaps John Kerry, had learned how to do personality transplants. The first operation was reserved for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, heretofore the growling voice of unreconstructed Israeli ultra-nationalism.
“I want to express my true appreciation of the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry, who works day and night … to bring an end to the conflict between us and the Palestinians,” Lieberman told a conference of Israeli ambassadors who were home from posts around the world. Kerry’s positions on a peace agreement, Lieberman added, were better than “any alternative proposal that Israel will receive from the international community.”
Two days earlier, Lieberman had met with Kerry and issued an upbeat statement declaring that the American-brokered negotiations “must continue.” Was this the same man who began his first term as foreign minister in 2009 by declaring that the previous round of U.S.-sponsored talks—the ones between former prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas—were over, dead, and that Israeli concessions would only bring “pressures and more war”? That declaration fit the Lieberman we knew before and set the tone for everything he said after. Had one magical conversation with Kerry transformed him?
Well, not completely, and probably very little at all. In the same conference this week with Israeli diplomats, the foreign minister said that his “basic condition” for supporting an agreement with the Palestinians was an “exchange of territory and population.” This is the Lieberman we know, and his demand is one that Kerry, much less the Palestinians, cannot accept.
There are two ways to understand Lieberman’s sudden change in tone toward peace talks. One reading is that Lieberman is in the first stages of becoming a recovered right-winger—a hawk who finally notices that the status quo of occupation can’t go on….
Read the rest here.