Israel has new friends

Israel has lots of new friends in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will tell David Cameron on Thursday morning—and while it would like European support, it doesn't need it.

It is also talking quietly to many Arab governments to counter both Iran and extremism from Islamic State, senior Israeli officials say.

The tough line that Netanyahu is likely to take comes in the face of growing public criticism in Britain and much of the European Union to Israel's policy towards Palestinians. But European governments and companies will shoot themselves in the foot if they boycott products made east of the 1967 border, on land occupied by Israel since then, Israeli officials argue. Demand from China, India, Brazil, and others for Israeli cyber technology and other high-tech is booming, they claim.

Netanyahu's visit, which has triggered protests outside Downing Street, comes in the wake of the deal with Iran over its nuclear programme, brokered for years by Britain, France and Germany, and pushed hard by President Barack Obama. The prospect of sanctions against Iran lifting has appalled Israel, and Netanyahu has claimed that it will enable Iran to raise funds to back extremism across the region while only delaying the point at which Tehran gets nuclear weapons capability. Through his official Twitter account, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said today that Israel would not survive 25 years, while calling the United States by the old epithet the Great Satan, and rejecting the notion of talks beyond the nuclear deal.

The Iran deal represents a blow to Netanyahu and a rebuff to his attempts to influence the US. Relations with the Obama Administration have been famously cool, but the confidence of his team in future support from the US may be bolstered by the calculation that almost every candidate for the US presidency, on Republican or Democrat side, sounds warmer to Israel than has Obama.

Netanyahu's government has appeared unperturbed by international criticism—which Cameron will no doubt repeat tomorrow—of its policy of building east of the “1967 line” in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, on land Israel captured in the 1967 war. British ministers have doggedly issued statements of condemnation every time Israel's government issues an announcement of more building. William Hague, when Foreign Secretary, made repeated and impassioned statements to the Commons that Israeli building would destroy the possibility of a “two-state solution”—separate states for Israel and Palestinians, side by side—by eating up land that would be part of the Palestinian state. The BDS movement, along with new moves by the Palestinian government to apply for recognition to international bodies such as the International Criminal Court, is aimed at drumming up outside pressure, and is gaining momentum especially in Europe.

But Netanyahu's officials maintain that there is no desire for a “bi-national state”—where Israel continues to control all the land, and the people, between the Jordan River and the sea. That would leave Jews in a minority, and would open Israel to accusations that it was not a democracy, withholding voting rights and other civil rights from many people under its control. They say that the government's intention is to achieve separation from the Palestinians—but repeat their traditional scepticism that Palestinian leaders are prepared to do a deal.

The rise of IS and the implosion of Syria, while sending refugees streaming across the region, may have opened the chance for new allies for Israel, however, they say. Sunni Arab governments, including the monarchies, are appalled both by the growing reach of IS and other extremists, while have common interests with Israel in curbing Iran's ambitions of becoming the region's great power. Contact is at the moment private, they say. However, increasingly frequent contact with African governments is public and advertised with some exuberance by Israeli government officials.

Virtually all the Arab states, some officials claim, would like Israel to get a process in place to talk to the Palestinians so that these informal contacts can be made more formally.

If these informal ties exist as Israeli officials describe, they might echo the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, re-endorsed in 2007, by which some Arab governments attempted to sketch out a potential deal. That included recognition of Israel in return for, among other points, withdrawal from land east of the 1967 line. Any reopening of that kind of plan, Israeli officials suggest, would have to be updated; the advance of IS in Syria would rule out from their point of view, for example, ceding the Golan Heights to Syria. But the common cause against IS and Iran, and the concern of some Arab monarchies about their own survival, opens new opportunities for working alliances, they suggest.

Arab governments might retort that even though there is common cause on these fronts, they are sceptical of the Netanyahu government's willingness to compromise on the Palestinian front—not least, removing many of the hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews living east of the 1967 line. Arab governments are also hardly united among themselves. But it is clear that the Iran deal, the fallout from what was once called the Arab Spring, and Saudi Arabia's mistrust of the depth of US support, are causing a recalculation of interests in the region.

Cameron is likely to tell Netanyahu that Britain remains a firm friend of Israel but to repeat criticism of Israel's treatment of the West Bank and Gaza. He may calculate, too, that while Netanyahu may claim to shrug off European public criticism, Israel is far more sensitive to the loss of European support—and business—than this bravado implies. It is at an early stage, too, in cultivating some of these new friendships and is in no position to make light of old ones. But he will also recognise Israel's well-worn but forceful point that in a region in turmoil, the support of a democracy with extensive ties to Europe is not something that Britain or other European countries will jettison.