In his latest article, Biberman & Co, Uri Avnery, the sagacious Israeli peace activist and founder of Gush Shalom, gives his prediction about the next stage of Israeli peace avoidance, which applies to dealing with Obama. How Netanyahu will handle Obama is apparently an old formula used before in keeping the United States in line. Although I will only quote the relevant section from Biberman & Co (meaning Bibi plus Lieberman with Ehud Barak thrown in, as in Bibarak), the entire article can be read HERE.
According to Avnery, a clash with Obama is inevitable. Obama wants to create a new world order in the Middle East and he knows that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict poisons the atmosphere against America in the Arab and the entire Muslim world. Obama wants to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is exactly what Netanyahu and his partners want to prevent.
How will Netayahu do this?
The solution is written in the Bible (Proverbs 24:6): “For by ruses thou shalt make thy war.”
(In the King James version, the Hebrew word Takhbulot is translated as “wise counsel”. In Modern Hebrew it means ruses, tricks, ploys – and that is the way it is understood by all Hebrew-speakers today.)
FROM THE beginnings of Zionism, its leaders have known that their vision necessitates a large measure of make-belief. It is impossible to take over a country inhabited by another people without disguising the aim, diverting attention, hiding the acts on the ground behind a screen of flowery words.
All states lie, of course. 400 years ago, a British diplomat, Sir Henry Wotton, observed: “An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Because of the special circumstances of their enterprise, the Zionists have had to use deceit perhaps a bit more than usual.
Now the task is to present to the world, and especially the US and Europe, a false picture, pretending that our new government is yearning for peace, acting for peace, indeed turning every stone in search of peace – while doing the exact opposite. The world will be submerged by a deluge of declarations and promises, accompanied by lots of meaningless gestures, conferences and meetings.
People with good ears are already hearing Netanyahu, Liberman and Barak starting to play around with the “Arab Peace Initiative”. They will talk about it, interpret it, accept it ostensibly while attaching conditions that empty it of all content.
The great advantage of this initiative is that it does not come from the Palestinians, and therefore does not require negotiations with the Palestinians. Like the deceased “Jordanian Option” and others of its kind, it serves as a substitute for a dialogue with the Palestinians. The Arab League includes 22 governments, some of which cooperate on the sly with the Israeli leadership. They can be relied on not to agree among themselves on anything practical.
BUT DECEIVING, like dancing the tango, takes two: one who deceives and one who wants to be deceived.
Netanyahu believes that Obama will want to be deceived. Why would he want to quarrel with Israel, confront the mighty pro-Israel lobby and the US Congress, when he can settle for soothing words from Netanyahu? Not to mention Europe, divided and ridden by Holocaust guilt, and the pathetic Tony Blair moving around like a restless ghost.
Is Obama ready to play, like most of his predecessors, the role of the deceived lover?
The Biberman/Bibarak/Bibiyahu government believes that the answer is a resounding yes. I hope that it will be a resounding No.
(with permission)
So there we have it: the next four, maybe eight years of Middle East politics. Although things change, they may remain the same.
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(Haaretz editorial) – Israel’s 32nd government, which was sworn in last night, is destined to fail. In putting this government together, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated sophisticated political skills and impressive tricks of wheeling and dealing, along with a total lack of vision, courage and practical judgment.
The fate of the State of Israel was not on the agenda in forming this government, but rather the lust for power of a handful of politicians and the creation of power for their boss. Israel has received the largest government in its history and one of its most meager. Its makeup bodes ill.
When coalition considerations are the only criterion for forming a government, the outcome is a finance minister with no qualifications in economics, a foreign minister liable to be shunned abroad, a defense minister who has failed at the job, an education minister with no experience in education, a Health Ministry without a minister and a long list of ridiculous ministers and useless ministries. There is also a batch of ministers without portfolio and without a role to play, apart from filling a seat at the cabinet table. Such a giant government sends a message of scandalous wastefulness, with the economy on the brink of a grave financial crisis.
More Haaretz headlines:
● Obama tells Netanyahu: U.S. committed to Israel’s security
● FM Lieberman: Israel not bound by Annapolis
● Netanyahu to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations
● Obama and Medvedev: Iran has right to peaceful nuclear program
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Thanks for beefing up this diary, Oui.
The results of this next Israeli government may be comical, but the tragedy is that the Palestinians will continue to suffer from it.
Netanyahu and his fellow travelers have only one goal with respect to the Palestinians. I believe the semi-official terminology for it is “mass transfer”. Whatever they’re calling it these days, the expectation is that eventually, either as a small but continuous trickle or, given the opportunity, one large forced exodus, the Palestinian remnant in what used to be Palestine will end up in Jordan.
Jordan already has a large Palestinian population — the West Bank, of course, used to be part of Jordan before it was seized by Israel during the 1967 war — and the hope amongst the Likudniks is that the “demographic time bomb” of the Palestinians can be allowed to explode harmlessly — to Israel, anyway — in Jordan. This is the closest Israel will ever get to endorsing a two-state solution.
I confess that I cannot present much in the way of hard evidence to support this view, aside from the usual slew of unofficial statements by Israeli leaders that can be plausibly denied to be the official stance of the state of Israel. However, I submit to you that there is no other possible path for the Zionists to take if they wish to secure Israel’s existence as a Jewish state; all other approaches render the existence of Israel untenable in the long run. For us to pretend otherwise amounts to collaboration with their designs.
I rather suspect that Barack Obama is more than adequately intelligent to figure this out if he hasn’t already. What is uncertain are his actual intentions toward Israel. And even if he has no desire to play along with the perverse Zionist reenactment of the Third Reich, it may be beyond his ability to overcome the subversion of the both the bureaucratic and elected portions of our government by the Zionists.
One thing is certain, though: at least one of the major players in this sad drama, probably but not necessarily Jerusalem, is going to force matters to a head, and soon.
Corvus, you are very correct in your main point here, but it is not only Netanyahu et al. whose goal is “mass transfer” of the remnants of the Palestinians. It has been going on for decades, and every Israeli government has engaged in it in one way or another, including that of the “saintly” Yitzhak Rabin, who was never really serious about allowing a Palestinian state to come into being.
Oslo was about buying time for the Israelis to tighten their grip on the OPT, and squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller more and more isolated enclaves surrounded and hemmed in by Israeli-controlled and colonized land, obviating the creation of a Palestinian state. The pattern of colonization was and is aimed at destroying social, political and economic cohesion, and making any semblance of normal life for Palestinians less and less possible. Jeff Halper is one Israeli who has spelled it out very clearly over the decades.
Some of the terms that have commonly been used for it by Israeli advocates for Palestinian rights are “slow ethnic cleansing”, and “quiet ethnic cleansing”. The idea is to make life so untenable for Palestinians that they will little by little abandon their homeland. Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, makes it clear in his most recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, as well as in his speeches and articles, that the ethnic cleansing did not stop after 1948, it has just taken different forms.
Recognition of the necessity of “transfer” – now known as ethnic cleansing – and discussion of how best to accomplish it begins with Herzl’s earliest Zionist works, and is a consistent thread throughout the history of Zionism and Israel. We should understand that Israel’s founders were mainly secular, very assimilated European Jewish elites who held the typical European colonialist views of “Arabs”. To them, among other typical European misconceptions, the Palestinians were all generic “Arabs” (they were and are not all Arabs, but are much more diverse than that). And to them an Arab was an Arab was an Arab, and Arab land was Arab land was Arab land. They had no concept of regional cultures and regional societies within the greater Arab world, or that people who lived in a particular part of the Arab world were very tied to it and viewed it, very correctly, as their ancestral home and their homeland. They really believed that the Palestinians would be equally happy anywhere in the Arab world.
They considered the “Arabs” of Palestine as very lowly beings not entitled to much in the way of rights, but the early ideas were not of forcible transfer. There was even one scheme by which they would buy land in Iraq, move the Palestinians there, and provide everything they needed to get established there, including farming equipment. Eventually, of course, it began to sink in that the Palestinians were not going to leave their homeland willingly, and they ended up resorting to terrorism, and forced expulsion.
Can I use Avnery’s article over at fsz?
Gush Shalom provides anyone permission to copy articles, including Avnery’s, so long as you reprint the entire article intact and link back to their site.
Of course, you can always use fair use as a basis for quoting portions of articles without permission.
reportedly.
Here’s hoping the push is real!
If Obama can do what all previous presidents were unable to do, it would please a whole lot of people blogging for years for Palestine. Retirement, finally.
Thanks Martini for drawing attention to this headline:
“U.S. says will push hard for Palestinian statehood,” but how hard is hard?
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WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama’s administration announced Tuesday it will run in May for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council – a body shunned by his predecessor.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said the United States wanted a seat to help reform the body from within. Conservatives, who say the Geneva-based body routinely demonises Israel but ignores human rights abuses elsewhere, were quick to criticise the move.
UN chief: UN chief Ban Ki-moon hailed the new administration’s decision as “an important step toward realising the goal of an inclusive and vibrant intergovernmental process to protect human rights around the globe.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“”Human rights are an essential element of American global foreign policy,” Clinton said in a statement.”
No wonder Obama has been consulting with Jimmy Carter.
So, Hillary has suddenly and finally developed a fondness for human rights- how nice. Now let’s see that put into action.
hmmmm. What, specifically, is the “reform” they are looking for, I wonder? Ignoring Israel’s horrific human rights record and putting more effort into demonizing Palestinians instead, perhaps?
The real test of change will or will not happen at the level of the UN Security Council, where in the past the US has consistently blocked resolutions condemning Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians. IMO.
I agree. And if the U.S. gets back onto the Human Rights Council, their conduct there could give us some indication of that.
In all reality, though, the U.S. has no place on the Human Rights Council until and unless they really clean up their own act. So far the Obama administration has been a disappointment. We have seen mainly cosmetic changes for PR purposes while they continue to grievously violate the most fundamental human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else.