The Israeli prime minister's speech at Bar-Ilan University on 14 June 2009 returned the middle east to the days of George W Bush's "axis of evil". Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a patriarchal, colonialist address in the best neoconservative tradition: the Arabs are the bad guys, or at best ungrateful terrorists; the Jews are the good guys, rational people who need to raise and care for their children. In the West Bank settlement of Itamar, they're even building a nursery-school.
Akiva Eldar is an award-winning Israeli journalist with the daily newspaper Ha'aretz
Also by Akiva Eldar in openDemocracy:
"The United States and Israel: moment of truth" (18 May 2009)
No empathy for the refugees from Jaffa who lost their entire world; not a word for the Muslim connection to Jerusalem; not a fragment of a quote from the Qur'an, nor a line of Arabic poetry.
Netanyahu's provincial remarks were not intended to penetrate the hearts of the hundreds of millions of al-Jazeera viewers in the Muslim world. Instead, he sought to appease Tzipi Hotovely, the settler Likud member of the Knesset, and make it possible to live peaceably with the settler foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. Netanyahu's demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people didn't even leave him an opening for forging reconciliation with the Arab citizens in the country.
The prime minister's declaration that Jerusalem will remain the "undivided capital" of Israel - only Israel - slammed the door before the entire Muslim world. His Hebron, moreover, is solely the city of the Jewish patriarchs; the Arabs have no such rights at all. The Palestinians can have a state, but only if those foreign invaders show us they know how to eat with a fork and knife. Actually, without a knife.
The demilitarisation of the Palestinian state was mentioned in the Clinton guidelines (December 2000), the Taba understandings (January 2001) and the Geneva accord (December 2003), as was the "right of return" (to Palestine, not Israel). The difference between these documents and the Bar-Ilan address is not only that the former recognised the Palestinians' full rights to the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The real difference lies in the tone - in the degrading and disrespectful nature of Netanyahu's remarks. That's not how one brings down a wall of enmity between two nations, that's not how trust is built.
It's hard to believe that a single Palestinian leader will be found who will buy the defective merchandise Netanyahu presented at Bar-Ilan.
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Among openDemocracy's recent articles on Israel-Palestine and middle-east diplomacy: Khaled Hroub, "The ‘Arab system' after Gaza" (27 January 2009) Lucy Nusseibeh, "The four lessons of Gaza" (4 February 2009) Prince Hassan, "Palestine's right: past as prologue" (11 February 2009) Thomas O'Dwyer, "Israel: how things fell apart" (13 February 2009) Colin Shindler, "Israel's rightward shift: a history of the present" (13 February 2009) Gershon Baskin, "The state of Israel: key to peace" (19 May 2009) Gideon Levy, "Barack Obama: Israel's true friend" (25 May 2009) Robert G Rabil, "Barack Obama's middle east: pragmatism and hope" (1 June 2009) Nader Hashemi, "What Obama must say (and do) in Egypt" (3 June 2009) Godfrey Hodgson, "The Cairo speech: letter to America" (8 June 2009) Karim Kasim & Zaid Al-Ali, "The Cairo speech: Arab Muslim voices" (8 June 2009) |
Comments
Far from being a mirage, Netanyahu's answer to Obama's call for "a two state solution" was a polite and muted statement of the harsh realities.
Since the end of the 1967 war, in which the Arabs tried to annihilate the State of Israel, every "Tom, Dick and Harry" and every U.S. president, has called for peace between the Arabs and Israel, because it is a nice and fashionable thing to do. No peace will be ever possible there, because it is commanded by the most basic beliefs of the Muslim faith that once a territory has been conquered by them it can never be allowed to revert back to the infidels, even if they are "people of the book." Palestine was conquered by them in the 7th century, so that is the end of the argument so far as they are concerned.
Netanyahu simply used a polite diplomatic ploy to turn down the futile and historically ignorant proposition by Obama.
This speech, and Israel's voting system is a classic example of how proprtional representation can cause paralysis and inaction within a democratic system of government.
The nature of Israel's voting system means that the ultra Orthodox Jews and other right wing groups get a significant greater say in the affairs of governent. With pro-settler / anti Arab rhetoric, Netanyahu keeps the right wing members of his government on side, but such rhetoric is counter-productive to moving in the right direction towards peace in the Middle East.
For all the effort being put globally for peace in the Middle East, all that Netanyahu can give are old lies and roadblocks, what a shame?
You have one people subjugated for a half a century on their own their land, yet the occupier cannot even acknowledge their plight. Netanyahu and his coalition are not only defying international consensus on the two-state solution- they are taking the Palestinians back two decades on the framework of agreement.
Barack Obama has showed quite encouraging signs of commitment; George Mitchell is a serious peace-maker; and Europe seems ready for new Mideast policy. What remains is for America to translate this historic moment in action. The US must convince Israel that it is serious. Netanyahu must be told isolated.
Obama should realise that the time for playing Mr Nice Guy is over. Unless Israel agrees to genuine and real negotations to resolve this issue, he should instigate a total cultural, economic, military and political blocade of Israel. Action, not rhetoric is what is needed, for results to be achieved.
That's not how one brings down a wall of enmity between two nations, that's not how trust is built.
I guess Netanyahu would like peace with the Palestinians. The question is: how many concessions does he want to do? The answer is: very little. The longer he can hold up the "wall of enmity", the longer he doesn't have to do concessions. For Netanyahu, peace has a very low priority.
Sour Grapes. Do the Arabs ever mention the Jewish links, history to Jerusalem or Hebron or the "Holy Land"? They spend their time denying it. Not a scintilla of recognition. Have they ever acknowledged the 800.000 Jews who were forced out of their home throughout the Muslim Near East and North Africa? These refugees are invisible. Arab imperialism and colonialism lives on. here has to be some reciprocity. Until the Arabs and Muslims show they are in part responsible for the plight of both Palestinians and Jews, a settlement will be almost impossible to achieve.
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Bibbi Netanyahu seems to think that Jews have nowhere else to go but to listen to his perpetual campaign diatribe. Whatever he has to say will be taken as truth by Jews because, after all, he too is circumcised. And the goyum will listen and shake their heads in approval for sure, well, because, after all, they're only "dumb goyim." Like far too many Israelis Bibbi keeps shielding his bad side with the ever blinding and paralyzing (so he thinks) Holocaust. Perhaps because they never bothered to consider whether there is a logical connection between the Holocaust and the Zionists' right-- just taking it for granted-- permissive to extermination the Palestinians, he has this week used it at the UN and on the Charlie Rose Show-- as indeed in his perennial ever in the USA campaigns for political office in Israel-- as a distraction from Israel's "rat hunt" for Palestinians to exterminate simply because you can't have Jews and Arabs alternating standing on
eachother's head to occupy the same "greater" tiny nation. But there is the question of: what really was the "Holocaust"? Was it the industrial killing of German Jews or the manual massacre of "doubly inferior" (for being both inferior as Jews and as East Europeans) Jews of East Europe? This, today, is the question raised by Holocaust scholars:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875
His little history lesson cheapens the obvious horrible reality because it is used as a verbal shower curtain pulled closed before the UN General Assembly to hide the Gaza and Lebanon industrial killing of civilians DELIBERATELY from the air. It wasn't even his party in power that did that, so why should he be put in a position excusing the darkness at an opportunity to manifest the light? Could it be that Bibi the shyster takes over whenever he leaves the soil where he knows that to do good he has to be serious? Is he calculating that if he speaks at the UN of current issues, as he does in Israel, American Zionists will no longer fund his perpetual political campaigns abroad instead of at home? Did he forget that now he came to New York as a Prime Minister and not as as a perpetual campaigner seeking funds as if a TV evangelist?
Because he thinks himself such a "shmecker," he talks extemporaneously and doesn't consider his sentences, only his for-effect hot-button words. For example, on the Charlie Rose show, in making the case that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a "Jewish" state, he invoked the "demographic time bomb" which would make Arabs more numerous than Jews in Greater Israel-- thus sounding like the Afrikaners explaining why "Kefers" (blacks) couldn't be given a vote in the apartheid days in South Africa (an all-white government that Sharon spent many months in studying how to create Palestinian "Bantus-tans" instead of two states but later realized can't be done). If Israeli Arab Christians and Muslims are such a population time bomb to him, he thus admits that Israel is NOT the Jewish HOMELAND state because Jews like it fine being Diaspora citizens, only enjoying Israel as a nice place to visit but not to live in. Is the Great Aliyah full of "olims" coming
to *THEIR* Jewish state or "yorims" in a reverse aliyah to Los Angeles and New York, sick of Israel's garrison state economy living as a fetal state off of an American placenta?
Holocausts are many so the evidenciary momentum is definitely in favor of each and every one of them as proof of how much man can be wolf to man. But when you use the deaths of Jews that millions of Diaspora Jews are still mourning over in daily grief and reverence as a cheap cover for your own brand of lebensraum tactics to prune the "Palestinian vermin" at the very time when his government is acting like the Sudanese Government over Dar-fur in refusing to face the charges in the World Court (even before they have been filed)-- especially when in Israel German refugees from the Holocaust were unsympathetically derided as "Yekes" during the Holocaust-- you thus alienate the very global Jewish political base on whose behalf you claim to be the Head of State.
Israel is a reality to the mass majority of Palestinians as much as they want Palestine to be a reality to Israelis-- a reality whose mail fist they often feel to remind them of how real it is. There's no need to try and steal the identity of the Diaspora nor the victims they cherish in silence to muddle the issue with guilt. Indeed, Netanyahu presents Israel, not as just a Jewish homeland, but as Hitler and Stalin presented their people under their regimes, as "new men" that are no longer sheep that march to slaughter. He thus doubly desecrates the Jews who chose to believe in THEIR Western Culture rather than run to Palestine-- the Jewish state to which generations from survivors now still in the Diaspora STILL contribute so very, very much-- as bovine fools that are mere propaganda fodder for the "new mensch" sabra fighters exterminating Arab human vermin just as did Hitler and Stalin race and class enemies. This "Zionazi" perspective is not the one
Bibbi got elected with. He advocated raising the Palestinians economically, helping them achieve HOPE in their own humanity as a SISTER STATE in a two-states, one-economy paradigm that rebinds the historic familial ties between Jews and Arabs all through the sands of the Middle East in hope that Israel can help modernize them and free from their poor prognosis as one crop economy (oil) banana republics. Bibbi instead avowed to sympathetic old Charlie Rose in response to loving softball questions that he hears voices, the voices of the Arab leaders in their private conclaves plotting Israel's demise. Charlie doesn't challenge, after all the Mossad hears everything! Bibbi also speaks of blasting Iran into a lunar landscape so Israelis can feel safe that no one else in the Middle East will acquire atomic weapons while Israel chokes on its 500 or so hydrogen bombs that it twice almost used.
Please Bibi, we are not "dumb goyim" in America, though we put our hopes in you. Be weary of us Americans, however, for we tend to say one thing (bravo!) and do another (squeeze into compliance). So spare yourself from the strangling dependency on the ridiculously generous American dole you swore you would end when Sharon's Finance Minister. Now we are broke and feel more desperate than generous. The only way you can escape it is by rejoining as a Semitic family member in the modernized Middle East. That's mensch-hood" instead of chutzpah. You're not Bibbi the Shyster, you're-- again, and maybe for the last time, so make the most of it-- Bibbi the Prime Minister. Please act PM-ish at home as well as abroad. Don't look to Ahmadinejad and Qaddafi for how to be an asshole abroad. Be a mensch, the mensch your father raised you to be!
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