Christoph Schult

Avigdor Lieberman, 50, squeezes his bulky frame into a chair at the head of the table, facing a tray of sticky chocolate croissants and soft drinks. “We have achieved a lot,” he says, in his Russian-accented Hebrew, pronouncing his O’s as A’s and rolling his R’s. A yellowed map of the faded Soviet Union hangs on the wall.

Lieberman founded and shaped his party. For him, an immigrant from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, a new era is about to begin. He intends to be Israel’s new foreign minister. It will be a historic moment, and he can hardly wait. “The faster a government is formed, the better for the country,” he tells the media patriotically.

The man who is set to become Israel’s chief diplomat is known for many things, but not his talent for diplomacy. Words like “compromise” or “consideration” have been absent from his vocabulary so far. When then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed releasing 350 Palestinian prisoners in 2003, Lieberman uttered one of his notorious sentences: “It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea.”

His words have the force of cluster bombs. He spares no one. He once proposed executing Arab members of the Knesset with ties to Hamas or Hezbollah as “Nazi collaborators.” Later he suggested that Israel should proceed in the Gaza Strip the way Russia did in Chechnya — without consideration for losses or civilians. This remark gained him a reputation as a virulent racist.

If Lieberman had his way, perhaps Tehran would have been obliterated as a punishment for Iran’s refusal to shut down its nuclear program. Years ago he threatened Egypt — Israel’s key ally in the Arab world — with the bombardment of the Aswan Dam unless the regime withdrew support for then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He also had one of his typical remarks at the ready for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It was about time the president paid a visit to Jerusalem, Lieberman said, “and if he doesn’t want to come, he can go to hell.”

Cairo has made it clear that the foreign minister-designate remains persona non grata in Egypt and that he won’t be received unless he issues an apology first. To protest the Lieberman choice, the Egyptian ambassador in Tel Aviv may not attend a celebration in Jerusalem this week to mark the 30th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal.

For many Arab governments the thought of Lieberman as foreign minister is tantamount to a declaration of war. In the United States, where President Barack Obama wants to pursue an “aggressive” policy of peace in the Middle East, the declared foe of the negotiation process may face a cool reception. The European Union will probably not behave any differently. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana calls Lieberman “a man with whom I have been at odds for my entire life.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, who will soon become Israel’s prime minister for the second time, would have preferred to avoid such problems. He wanted to place the warhorse into a lower-profile position, such as finance minister. But Lieberman is set on being foreign minister. Netanyahu managed to forge a government on Tuesday with Ehud Barak’s Labor Party — but not without first closing coalition deals with two of Israel’s right-wing parties, including Lieberman’s.

It’s an irony of history that Lieberman can now dictate terms to the man who paved his way in politics. Lieberman started his career in the right-wing Likud Party as an activist for the party’s student wing. Netanyahu appointed him party secretary in 1993, and in 1996 Lieberman ran Netanyahu’s first successful campaign for prime minister. He was then named director-general of the prime minister’s office. But he left Likud in 1999 to found a competing nationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, or Israel Our Home — which immediately secured four seats in the Knesset.

Since then, Lieberman has been part of almost every administration, but he has always found an excuse to leave the government and join the opposition. As transportation minister under Ariel Sharon, he resigned to protest Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The next prime minister, Ehud Olmert, invented a new post for him, the Ministry of Strategic Planning, but Lieberman resigned because of the peace talks in Annapolis, one of the many unsuccessful attempts to bring permanent peace to the Israelis and Palestinians.

Lieberman dressed up each of his resignations as the result of his unwillingness to compromise — out of pure conviction, of course — but in fact he wanted to shine a favorable light on his party before the next election, a strategy that almost always succeeded.

But now he will be Israel’s next foreign minister — an unbelievable step up the ladder, even by Israeli standards. Never before has an immigrant from the former Soviet Union made it so far.

“Vladimir the Thug”
Lieberman was 20 when he arrived in Israel in 1978. At first he made ends meet by working as a baggage handler for the national airline, El Al, then — famously — as a nightclub bouncer. He is said to have literally hunted down Arabs in his student days, a rumor he denies. According to official records, however, he was charged with having hit a boy in the face who had beaten up his son. Lieberman confessed to the crime in a court two years later and was fined and ordered to pay compensation. The satirical television show “Hartzufim,” the Israeli version of the British satirical puppet show “Spitting Image,” named a doll after him: Vladimir the Thug.

The name fits. Lieberman wants to turn all of Israel into a virtually exclusive club for Jews. He sees minorities as a threat, and in the election campaign he demanded that Arab Israelis should take a “loyalty test” to ensure their patriotism. He bluntly expresses ideas many Israelis may think but won’t venture to say out loud.

Even Tzipi Livni, the current foreign minister, who is respectable and moderate compared with Lieberman, recently suggested that Israeli Arabs should seek their “national identity” in a Palestinian state. The tenor of her remarks was that in Israel, at any rate, they were not about to accommodate any Arab nationalism.

Lieberman used to align himself with advocates of a Greater Israel, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. But he’s no fundamentalist Jew for whom the partition of the country would constitute a sacrilege. He lives in a settlement on the West Bank, but he would give up his house for peace, he said recently. “I support a viable Palestinian state,” he claims.

Lieberman is fond of combining ideas from the right and the left. For instance, he proposes redrawing the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories, thereby annexing groups of settlements while ceding Arab cities near the border. For this reason, even some moderate Palestinians see Lieberman as a thug who can be a pragmatist.

The former negotiator Mohammed Dahlan has called Lieberman a “key to peace,” at least according to Jossi Beilin, one of the architects of the Oslo Agreement in the early 1990s. In his recent book “Innocent Abroad,” Martin Indyk, one of the U.S. negotiators at the failed Camp David talks in 2000, describes a secret channel of communication between Lieberman and an envoy of then-PLO President Yasser Arafat. According to Indyk, Lieberman agreed in principle to the Barak administration’s territorial concessions.

So is Lieberman a thug with pragmatist tendencies? Such transformations can never be completely ruled out in Israel, the land of extremes. Sharon, the father of settlement construction on Palestinian soil, later withdrew Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. His successor, Olmert, wanted to “Judaize” Arab East Jerusalem. Today he advocates dividing the city.

Even Lieberman is starting to exhibit symptoms of prudence. A few weeks ago, he paid a visit to a well-known Israeli geographer, who used maps to show Lieberman how Jerusalem, the Holy City, could be divided up between the Jews and the Palestinians. “He was very interested,” the geographer said after the meeting.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

As head of the preventive security forces of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in the 1990s, Dahlan, 46, took a heavy-handed approach to punishing members of the rival Hamas faction, locking many of its leaders in prison. Current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas named Dahlan coordinator of the Palestinian security forces in March of this year. Dahlan stands for everything the Hamas extremists hate: He took part in the secret peace negotiations between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel. He has long maintained contacts with U.S. and Israeli intelligence, placing him at the top of Hamas’ death list as a collaborator and traitor to the Palestinian cause. Early this year he was asked whether he was afraid. “Forget it,” he answered, “not for a second.” Dahlan insisted that he stood behind his men 100 percent. “We will do everything, I repeat, everything, to protect the Fatah activists,” he said at the time.

But when the Islamists in Hamas began the last stage of their fratricidal war against Fatah secularists last week, there was no trace of Dahlan. He had gone abroad weeks earlier, officially to undergo knee surgery, and seemed in no hurry to return. He was in Cairo when he learned of the first casualties within Fatah. Instead of hurrying back to the Gaza Strip to lead a counteroffensive, he went into hiding in the West Bank.

It was the second time in 18 months that Hamas took the world by surprise. In January 2006, contrary to all expectations, the party won a parliamentary election in the Palestinian territories. Fatah went on as if nothing had happened, but now, more than two and a half years after its founding leader’s death, the party of Yasser Arafat has been driven from the Gaza Strip.

Israeli intelligence agencies had been warning for months that Hamas was arming itself with new weapons and ammunition through clandestine tunnels. Informants had reported that the Islamists were sending fighters to Lebanon and Iran for training.

The power struggle — which a “government of national unity” under Hamas’ prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was meant to avert — erupted with unprecedented violence. Early in the week, Hamas militias abducted a cook from Abbas’ presidential guard and hurled him from the roof of a 15-story building. They stormed the apartments of Fatah members with hand grenades and automatic weapons, mowing down everyone in their path, including old women and small children. More than 100 people were killed and 200 were wounded in the fighting.

President Abbas abandoned the Gaza Strip and declared the government of national unity a failure. On Sunday he swore in a new emergency cabinet with Salam Fayyad, his finance minister, as interim prime minister. Abbas dismissed Haniyeh from government, but Haniyeh still insists he leads a legitimate Palestinian cabinet. The result is two geographically separate Palestinian regions, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — politically separate and even hostile entities.

The takeover in Gaza is sending rumbles throughout the Middle East. Hamas has links to radical groups in other countries, particularly Egypt. Sixty percent of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees or the descendants of refugees, and many young Palestinians from Gaza have studied in Cairo, where they were inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. A number of these radicalized young men founded an Islamic resistance movement in 1987 called Harakat al-Mukawama al-Islamiya, or Hamas for short.

Now, a subgroup of the Muslim Brotherhood controls its own territory for the first time. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has managed to keep the Brotherhood under control in his country through brutal tactics — but now Gaza may become a breeding ground for anti-Mubarak radicals. In Lebanon, the Shiite group Hezbollah has acted as a state within a state for years, demonstrating its military strength in a war with Israel last summer. Even Jordan’s King Abdullah may feel unsafe, because a large percentage of his country’s population is of Palestinian origin, and some of the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan are under de facto Hamas control.

The division of the Palestinian territories into a “Hamastan” on the Mediterranean and a “Fatahstan” on the West Bank of the Jordan River puts an end, for now, to the dream of an independent Palestinian state. This fraternal strife is the most recent example of the Palestinians’ habit of “not missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban put it. The Palestinians refused to accept the UN’s partition plan in 1947, which would have given them 45 percent of the former British mandate of Palestine. In 2000, then-PLO leader Arafat rejected the offer of Israel’s then-prime minister, Ehud Barak, to establish a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the territories occupied in 1967. When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, Fatah and Hamas had a chance to demonstrate their capacity for ruling their own people. But the militias opted for civil war instead.

Israel has contributed to the escalation in the Gaza Strip. Immediately after Hamas’ takeover of the government, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert froze Israel’s monthly payments of sales tax and customs revenues to the Palestinians. These funds stemmed from the export of Palestinian goods and, according to an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, were collected by the Israeli authorities. The funds in question amount to about $54 million, which is about a third of the Palestinian Authority’s budget. On Sunday, Olmert promised to shore up the West Bank government by releasing these funds to Abbas and his new prime minister.

Israel has repeatedly sealed off Gaza, and important staples like milk and flour have grown scarce. Exports come to a periodic standstill; flowers spoil behind border checkpoints and tomatoes rot in Palestinian greenhouses. Unemployment has led to growing frustration — providing a recruiting pool for the military arm of Hamas, the so-called Qassam Brigades. “For many people, this was the only way to make money,” says Fatah official Abdallah Frangi, wearily. Because the Palestinian government was no longer able to pay salaries, some members of the security forces even led a double life, serving the Fatah-affiliated police units by day and the Hamas militia by night.

The so-called Middle East Quartet, consisting of the U.N., the United States, Russia and the European Union, has also given mixed messages over the last year and a half. First the group managed to secure Hamas’s participation in the 2006 parliamentary election (over Israeli opposition), but after Hamas won, it severed ties with the new government and made talks with Hamas contingent upon three conditions: The Islamists would have to recognize Israel, renounce violence and adhere to existing peace deals. Hamas refused, which led to its international isolation.

The United States, in particular, worked to undermine Hamas, supplying Abbas with money, weapons and ammunition. “The Americans clearly encouraged a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas,” wrote Alvaro de Soto, the U.N.’s recently resigned Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, in a recent report.

Now the Palestinian movement is split, suddenly, under two leaderships; and once calm returns to Gaza, the militants may be expected to return their attention to Israel and resume firing Qassam rockets across the border. Israel fears not just a new terror offensive but also growing Iranian influence in the Gaza Strip. (Tehran already funds and supports Hamas’ military operations.) The government of Prime Minister Olmert wants to prevent the conflict from spilling over to the West Bank at all costs. This explains its promise on Sunday to unfreeze Palestinian tax revenue. Now — according to the strategy — Palestinians in Gaza will come to realize how much better off their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank are under Fatah.

Hamas has also been attempting to maneuver beyond the violent streets of Gaza. As a gesture to the West, it announced last Friday that it would take steps to secure the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who has been held by kidnappers in the Gaza Strip for the last 14 weeks.

Meanwhile, a new humanitarian crisis has begun to take shape there. The territory has been sealed off, and aid organizations estimate that food and fuel supplies will last for about another two weeks. According to reports on Monday, an Israeli fuel company, Dor Alon, lifted a gasoline embargo placed on Gaza last week, but it’s hard to see how ordinary Palestinians there will avoid feeling isolated. “If there is a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, we cannot abandon the people there in their misery,” said Hans-Gert Pöttering, the German president of the European Parliament.

Ironically, the crisis may lead to something Israel has refused for the year and a half since Hamas won power at the polls — diplomacy. Even the government in Jerusalem realizes that it will have to open Gaza’s borders as soon as starvation becomes a real possibility. “Then we will be forced,” predicts a senior government official, “to talk to the new leaders.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

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This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, please visit Spiegel Online at http://www.spiegel.de/international or subscribe to the daily newsletter.