What Could Nick Clegg’s Meteoric Rise Spell for Middle East Peace?

“Nick who?”

That, undoubtedly, was the reaction of most Americans on Saturday to news that Nick Clegg, leader of Britain’s third largest political party, the Liberal Democrats, managed to catapult his organization to an unprecedented thirty point gain in the most recent opinion poll, edging out Conservative heir apparent David Cameron in the run-up to the May 6 general election.

Buoyed by a sterling performance in the United Kingdom’s first ever televised debate, Clegg is now poised to assume the role of kingmaker in Britain’s next government. In the likely event of a hung parliament, the Lib-Dem leader could cut a deal with Gordon Brown’s Labor Party that would secure him, if not the premiership, then at least the influential post of Foreign Secretary.

Depending on what side of the Israel/Palestine divide you fall on, Clegg’s rising star is either a hopeful sign or a terrifying portent. The charismatic social democrat — who bears many remarkable similarities to candidate Barack Obama, including a connection to indicted Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko — has taken a noticeably harder line on Israel than either of his fellow prime ministerial aspirants.

Anglo-Israeli relations have steadily worsened since Israel’s war on Gaza in early 2009, and particularly following the release in September of the controversial “Goldstone Report.” Activists in the UK have attempted to use the UN report — which offers prima facie evidence of Israeli and Hamas war crimes — to activate criminal proceedings against visiting Israeli dignitaries (critics have derisively labeled this practice “lawfare”). Responding to complaints by Israel, Brown, who by European standards charts a relatively pro-Israel course, apologized and vowed to modify British legislation enabling the arrest of alleged war criminals under the rubric of “universal jurisdiction.”

Tensions escalated further in February when it was revealed that Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, had forged UK passports and stolen the identities of 12 British citizens in its plot to assassinate Hamas weapons smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The government’s response to this massive breach of trust was again perceived by many on the left as pusillanimous: Foreign Secretary David Miliband ordered the expulsion of a low-level diplomat suspected of being the Mossad’s London station chief, who was almost immediately replaced. No harm, no foul, no lasting repercussions to deter hubristic acts of international lawlessness.

Enter Nick Clegg.

During Operation Cast Lead, Clegg published an impassioned Op-Ed in the Guardian urging Brown to “condemn unambiguously Israel’s tactics” and to “lead the EU into using its economic and diplomatic leverage in the region to broker peace.” “The EU is by far Israel's biggest export market,” he wrote, “and by far the biggest donor to the Palestinians. It must immediately suspend the proposed new cooperation agreement with Israel until things change in Gaza, and apply tough conditions on any long-term assistance to the Palestinian community.” (The EU-Israeli cooperation agreement has indeed been placed on ice.)

Perhaps more significantly, Clegg called for a total arms embargo on Israel: “Brown must also halt Britain's arms exports to Israel and persuade our EU counterparts to do the same. The government's own figures show Britain is selling more and more weapons to Israel, despite the questions about the country's use of force ... There is a strong case that, given the Gaza conflict, any military exports contravene EU licensing criteria. Reports, though denied, that Israel is using illegal cluster munitions and white phosphorus should heighten our caution.” In the event that a suspension of EU arms sales cannot be secured, he added, “Brown must act unilaterally.”

It was largely in response to the agitation of Clegg and his parliamentary allies that Miliband announced the revocation of five export licenses for naval equipment destined for the Israeli military. The move, however, fell far short of the full embargo envisioned in Clegg’s Guardian piece.

On the question of universal jurisdiction, while Clegg has offered no public comment, his Lib-Dem parliamentary faction voted overwhelmingly for a resolution opposing changes to the existing laws, making their repeal unlikely should his party increase its seats next month. That could throw a serious wrench into the works of British-Israeli diplomacy, particularly should Tzipi Livni — Foreign Minister at the time of Operation Cast Lead and a prime target for legal activists — assume a ministerial post in a future Israeli unity government.

Ultimately, the United Kingdom exerts little material influence over Israeli decision-making outside its role as a leading EU member state. But given Clegg’s ambition of using the EU as an instrument of economic coercion — in particular, to end the blockade of Gaza and halt Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land—his election could spell trouble for Israel’s right-wing, pro-settler government, already teetering on the precipice of a full-blown “delegitimization crisis.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, for his part, is counting on the EU to endorse  his projected unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood in 2011. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Miguel Moratinos, his Spanish counterpart and current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, have already voiced support for such a proposition. And with someone like Nick Clegg at 10 Downing Street, Fayyad’s vision of an independent Palestine within the pre-1967 borders could become an internationally recognized reality, whether Israel likes it or not.

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