Peace in the Middle East no closer with Netanyahu
The speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu was eagerly awaited to see how Israel would respond to President Obama’s insistence that Israel actually live up to the repeated commitments it has made, in writing, to stop all settlement activity. A commitment which only Israel even pretends it has not flagrantly broken even before the ink on the commitments were dry.
Well, we got our answer today. Which is to say, Netanyahu, as expected, basically flipped off the rest of the world.
Aside from using the word “state” to describe the possible status of lands occupied by Palestinians, there is nothing new in what Netanyahu said. Frankly, it’s the same double-talk and hypocrisy. Some would call them lies.
If you read the BBC article and watch the clip of the speech, it’s breathtaking the extent of confabulation Netanyahu engages in. Or it would be if it was not standard operating procedure for Israelis.
He urges talks without preconditions. Well, except Israeli preconditions. They don’t count. And of course all sides should live up to existing commitments. Except any commitments Israel has made, and consistently ignored. That doesn’t count either.
And most importantly, Israel and Israelis want peace. Except what they want isn’t peace at all. What they want is victory. What they want is to win and to dictate terms to the Palestinians. So I suppose to the extent that Israel wants to dictate peace to the rest of the Middle East, they want peace.
To be fair, it is not clear that this is what the majority of Israelis want. There are many who believe that the majority wants actual peace as much as anyone. To the extent that they are unable to reign in the extremist fringes of their polity, they are held as much captive as the rest of us. Of course, to the extent that they allow the extremists to hold the reigns of power in Israelis politics, they are not really captives at all.
Which is true of American support of Israeli policies. During Bush’s presidency, there was blind support of anything Israel wanted to do, to the detriment of everyone’s interest in true peace. Now is the time when we will see if the Obama administration will allow Israel to hold their foreign policy hostage as well.
