Never Trust Netanyahu
The Israeli prime minister’s last-minute
political ploys prove that he’s an
opportunist of the worst kind. And the U.S.
has to stop enabling his bad behavior.
By Lisa Goldman
March 21, 2015 "ICH"
- "FP"
- In recent weeks, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has shown once again that
he will do pretty much anything it takes to
stay in power. If that means weakening
Israel’s relationship with the United
States, its most important ally, he will do
that. If it means sinking to the level of
crude, Jim Crow-like race-baiting, he will
go there. If it means telling a huge whopper
of a lie that anyone with a reasonable level
of intelligence can see through, he will
tell that lie. The key to understanding
Netanyahu’s personality is to take it as
self-evident that he cares about only two
things: staying in power and maintaining
Israeli control over the Golan and the
occupied Palestinian territories.
March 17’s
electoral victory for Netanyahu shocked
both Israeli liberals and foreign observers.
The received wisdom throughout the campaign
was that ordinary people were more concerned
with pocketbook issues than security and
that Bibi’s controversial March 3 address to
the U.S. Congress had not only failed to
garner him a bump in the polls, but had
actually elicited a backlash for his having
damaged relations with the United States. It
seemed that Netanyahu’s practiced “shtick,”
as one colleague called it, wasn’t working
anymore. According to the final poll taken
before election day, Netanyahu’s Likud party
stood to win 20 seats, while its main
rival, the Zionist Union, was holding steady
at 24. Perhaps Netanyahu had been in power
so long that he no longer understood his
voters?
It turned out, of course,
that Bibi understood them far better than
anyone.
During the days immediately
before the election, he basically went to
the mattresses with the most vulgar, racist
crude populism imaginable.
He appealed to voters’ fears and to their
need to belong to a tribe — the tribe of
Likud supporters, who are as unquestioningly
loyal to their party as an Englishman is to
his soccer team.
In a
video interview with NRG, the Israeli
digital news site owned by American casino
billionaire Sheldon Adelson, Netanyahu
explicitly said that he would
never allow the establishment of a
Palestinian state on his watch. On his very
active Facebook page and
via Twitter, SMS messages, and robot voice
mails, he exhorted Israelis to vote for
him because he was all that stood between
them and a left-wing government that would
divide Jerusalem and withdraw to the 1967
boundaries, leaving the West Bank open for
the Islamic State to establish an outpost
overlooking Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport.
Most notoriously, on
election day itself he recorded a
30-second video for Facebook that shows
him standing in front of a map of the Middle
East as he says urgently, as though calling
up the army reserves for a national security
emergency, “The government of the right is
in danger. Arabs are coming out in droves to
the polling stations. Leftist NGOs are
busing them in.” He even used the term “Tzav
8,” which refers to an emergency army
call-up notice.
As one prominent Israeli
journalist, Hanoch Daum, noted in a widely
shared Facebook status, if one were to
subtract the ultra-Orthodox voters and the
votes of the Palestinian citizens of Israel,
one in three Israelis voted for Likud. And
the majority of the Knesset seats went to
parties that were in the right-wing,
nationalist camp.
The rest of the world was
shocked, but the fact is that Israel has
become a right-wing society where nakedly
racist language is common. “Arab taste” is a
well-known term for vulgar, ostentatious
style, for example. Right-wing legislators
have in recent years
physically
assaulted Arab Knesset members while
they were giving speeches. There are many
examples that would shock Western liberals
but are shrugged off in Israel. Members of
the Knesset have given speeches in which
they
referred to migrants from Sudan as “a
cancer in our body.”
Similarly, the
international media has worked itself into
quite a tizzy over Netanyahu’s repudiation
of the establishment of a Palestinian state.
But last July, when he
said in a speech that he would never
allow a Palestinian state without an Israeli
military presence on its territory — which
is just another name for military occupation
— that speech went almost unremarked upon in
the international media and was barely
mentioned by Israeli media. It seems that
the blunt phrasing Netanyahu used in the
NRG interview, coming on top of his
having blithely insulted U.S. President
Barack Obama with his March 3 speech to
Congress, proved to be a sort of tipping
point.
The
White House indicated that Israel would
face consequences in the diplomatic arena
for having repudiated the two-state
solution. A few months ago, Haaretz
reported on a leaked European Union document
that specified sanctions to be imposed on
Israel in the event it officially rejected
negotiating a withdrawal from the West Bank
and the establishment of a Palestinian
state. Suddenly it seemed that Netanyahu
might have gone just a bit too far.
But then, another
volte-face: On Thursday, March 19, just two
days after the election, Netanyahu calmly
told a reporter for MSNBC that he had
not, in fact, repudiated the idea of two
states. Rather, he said, the reality had
changed. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
refused to acknowledge Israel as the Jewish
state, and furthermore he had made a pact
with Hamas to destroy Israel.
Both statements are, in
effect, lies. It was Netanyahu who changed
the situation in 2009 by imposing upon Abbas
the condition of acknowledging Israel as a
Jewish state. This was an entirely new
condition that had never been part of
previous negotiations with the Palestinians.
As for the alleged Hamas-PLO pact, there is
no such thing. Netanyahu simply made it up.
But his delivery is very convincing, and he
is poised beyond measure when he speaks to
the American media and answers their
softball questions. No wonder he has all but
boycotted the Israeli media for years, while
giving regular interviews to American
networks.
The question now is whether
the United States will continue to be
Netanyahu’s enabler.
Two days after he said in Hebrew, very
clearly and without any equivocation, that
he would never allow a Palestinian state to
be established on his watch, he calmly told
an American journalist in English, which he
speaks fluently and without a foreign
accent, that he had not meant what he said.
Israel has occupied the
West Bank for nearly 50 years now. It has
maintained its military closure on Gaza for
nearly a decade, with no indication that it
is even considering a change in policy. This
is not a sustainable situation. Almost 13
million people are living on territory
controlled by Israel, but only 8 million
have the right to vote. At some point,
Americans who talk about shared values are
going to have to ask whether Jim Crow is one
of those values. Given the emotional
outpouring to the speech Obama gave on the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, on the 50th
anniversary of the Selma freedom march, I
would say probably not. The Obama
administration should stop pretending it
doesn’t quite see that Netanyahu is lying to
it and that it doesn’t know he can’t be
trusted. The best thing this administration
could do would be to declare that the prime
minister is persona non grata.