Netanyahu: Train Wreck for Israel, Middle East;
Looming Disaster for United States
The selection of rightwing expansionist Binyamin Netanyahu to form the next Israeli government is being greeted with dismay by the Egyptian government, which remembers him for having derailed the Oslo peace process in the late 1990s.
Netanyahu has vowed to abandon negotiations with the Palestinians, and says he will expand the program of Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank.
Since even before Netanyahu's coronation was announced, the Israelis had been busy stealing more Palestinian land and planning more colonies on the purloined territory, Netanyahu will just be accelerating an already inexorable process.
Despite today's faintly ridiculous attempt in the NYT to depict Netanyahu as a born-again pragmantist, in fact he rejects any withdrawal from the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli squatters, despite Israel's commitment to pull back in the Oslo accords. Since the West Bank looks like Swiss cheese with regard to administration and settlement patterns, there isn't a Palestinian state to be had there without an extensive Israeli pullback, and Netanyahu has never shown any interest in either pullback or Palestinian state.
Now his people are trying to revive this bizarre idea of giving Jordan some sort of vague authority over the West Bank Palestinians as a way of denying them statehood in their own right. Jordan's government has been under severe pressure to expel the Israeli ambassador over the brutal Gaza campaign, and any such active collaboration with Israel to repress the West Bankers would risk toppling the Hashemite throne. King Hussein once accused Netanyahu of single-handedly destroying every positive thing the Jordanian monarch had worked for.
Netanyahu is a train wreck for the Middle East. He is willing to ally with Avigdor Lieberman, an open racist who is gunning for the 20 percent of Israel's citizen population that is Palestinian. Netanyahu wants a war with Iran, and when the Israeli Right wants a war nowadays, they usually want our children to fight and die in it for them. The 1996 "Clean Break" Neoconservative policy paper advocating a war on Iraq was written for Netanyahu. (They are not satisfied with picking our pockets for their weapons and colonization projects). Netanyahu will further oppress and brutalize the Palestinians, which he will keep in a slave-like condition of statelessness, and from whom he will steal what little property they have left. Last time he was in office he went around poisoning his enemies, for all the world like the Bulgarian KGB in the old days.
Netanyahu is the devil's gift to international terrorism, which his policies will provoke. Fifty years from now, the turn of Israel to the hard right will be looked back upon as the beginning of the end of Israel, the time when the crucial decisions were made that rendered it impossible for the Israelis to stay in the Middle East in the face of the increasing popular anger Netanyahu will have provoked in 1.5 billion Muslims. No, Israel cannot be defeated on the battleground. But the French colons in Algeria were never really defeated on the battleground, either, nor were the thousands of Britons who had ruled India.
More bracing realism from Ben White, the the West Bank.
More immediately, all Americans will have reason to rue Netanyahu's return to power, since the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other elements of the powerful Israel lobbies will pull Congress around to support Likudnik policies in the next few years.
And it won't even be allowed to protest where Netanyahu will take America. I mean, really, not allowed.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/21/2009 12:54:00 AM
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11 Comments:
Words regain meaning. Israel has colonies on the West Bank. The Israelis who live there are colonists, they are squatters, but most squatters in the west occupy empty real estate. The Israelis are like someone who breaks into your house, sits down in the middle of the living and tells you to shut up or leave. And eventually tells you to get out anyway despite their good intentions.
"King Hussein once accused Netanyahu of single-handedly destroying every positive thing the Jordanian monarch had worked for."
That piece just links back to the article I found it in, I assume it was meant to go somewhere else?
Mr. Cole, i've read reports that Lieberman may be denied a US visa, on the basis of his membership in Kach, the Kahanist group that is on the official list of terrorist organizations, both in Israel and the US. Many people today, including myself, lack knowledge of the Kahanists, so if you are taking requests, could you perhaps do a post on the Kahanists, and how they connect to Lieberman and today's right-wing Israeli movement? Many thanks in advance!
What I fear is that Netanyahu will be the Gavrilo Princip who will launch a war on Iran into which we will be dragged.
Perhaps a way to restore the economy, but an epochal disaster otherwise.
We need a China-like deal linking us with Iran and downgrading our alliance with Israel, à la Taiwan.
What does it mean to be neutral?
Suppose it is possible to be a friendly, neutral, objective, informed observer of ME situation.
The question is - can such an observer recommend the Arabs and Iranians to talk to the Likud and Beitenu? Is Kadima really better in this respect?
In fact, the 2-state solution is all based on the assumption that peaceful Arab/Iranian/Israeli dialogue is possible and highly positive for all the participants.
But anybody who knows who Netanyahu, Feiglin, Lieberman are and what they want, should completely discard the idea of any productive discussion between them and even the most moderate, Westernized Muslims. In fact, Lieberman makes this 100% clear.
So, for the sake of objectivity and common sense alone, it makes sense to acknowledge all the grim consequences of the imminent death of Oslo process and 2-state solution.
Now why should Israel-friendly Palestinian administration die any differently than pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan?
On the one hand, the swiss cheese, open Bantustan nature of any prospective Palestinian "state" is not a new thing and it is not even the biggest obstacle to a mutually agree two state solution.
The Palestinians aren't going to freely vote to renounce the right to return. The US can, as it is doing, starve the Palestinians to vote the way the US wants, but a vote under duress such as this will not be accepted as valid.
The two-state solution didn't die recently. It was never viable. It has always been a mirage, an agreement always just over the horizon to assuage the guilt of supporters of Zionism, both in Israel, the US and other places as the Palestinians are continuously dispossessed.
The Western idea of starving the Palestinians into submission to accept Israel, in hopes that then the people of Egypt, Jordan and Israel's other near and far neighbors could accept Israel without US-propped dictatorships has been morally reprehensible from the beginning.
But anyway, if now it is more clear to Westerners that there is no viable two state solution possible, then I call on those Westerners who understand this, even if belatedly, to begin advocating a peaceful transition to a one state, Arab-majority solution.
White Americans fought serious wars against Native Americans and violently stole billions of hours of labor from African Americans. But today Native Americans are full voting citizens with full freedom of movement in all US-controlled territories.
If White Americans can ask African Americans and Native Americans to accept numerical minority status in a single state, and Black South Africans can ask White South Africans to live as a numerical minority in a single state then there is no reason Jewish Israelis cannot be asked to accept minority status in a single state in Palestine.
Now that it is clear, belatedly, that a two-state solution is just not practical - starvation-to-submission is just not going to work - it is time to start advocating a one-state solution.
Re Nuclear Likud leadership
Netanyahu in charge of an inflamatory settlement expansion policy, backed by the fifth or sixth largest nuclear arsenal... Holy Moses!
Israel's prussianized military staff, and intel apparatus is increasingly looking like a permanent Likud administration, regardless of whose party forms the parliament coalition.
AIPAC's hold on the White House (Goodby Addington, hello Rahm) is also taking on an aspect of one-party rule.
We are seeing a global rise of fascism, similar to the early thirties.
Re: ...Israel will see the present goverment a disaster in fifty years...
I give it more like ten...
I don't understand why the Israelis, or anyone else for that matter, does not understand the math of 1,500,000,000 Muslims vs. 3,000,000 Jews.
That and the fact that those Muslims control most of the worlds OIL.
So what if they don't have nukes yet. If they don't, they will.
We are seeing a global rise of fascism, similar to the early thirties.
I fully agree. It has taken a slightly different form "soft" form of fascism, in the sense that the controll of opinion succeeds by the controll of the media, not by imprisonment (at least not in the typical "western democracies").
However the way the Americans were drawn to support the Iraq invasion through pure lies (concerning WMDs or the pretended connexions existing between Saddam Hussein and Al'Quaeda) was a clear psyops, one in the line of Goebbels theories of repeating a lies often enough till it becomes an admitted truth. The Bushists discourse that "You are with us or against us" and those who don't support the invasion are unpatriotics... all that points in the direction of fascism.
Add the crawlings of the international finances system and the real economic crisis now following. All this is fearsome. I hope that we have learned lessons from the past and that we will be able to return to true democratic practices.
Netanyahu's first words after he officially took office were of attacking Iran. No outreach for peace; no invitation for informal get togethers with Iran leadership...just out-and-out war.
Netanyahu is a mad man and will bomb centrifuges thus releasing radioactivity 100 times more than Chernobyl.
Netanyahu must be stopped by the world community.
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