This is the man calling for the re-occupation of Gaza to 'liquidate' its elected government
Friday, 6 February 2009
Israel is about to make a misjudgement as disastrous – and deadly – as the attack on Gaza. In a few days, it looks as if it could elect Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister once again.
This is a man calling for the violent re-occupation of Gaza to "liquidate" its elected government. This is a man who says he will "naturally grow" the West Bank settlements. This is a man who says he will "never" negotiate over Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights, or control of the West Bank water supply.
This is a man who says establishing a Palestinian state would leave Israel with, "an existential threat and a public relations nightmare reminiscent of 1938 Czechoslovakia". This is a man who Yitzhak Rabin's widow said helped create a climate of hate that led to his murder.
The political beneficiaries of Operation Cast Lead have been Israel's hard-right. The opinion poll numbers have surged for Netanyahu's Likud and for the even more extreme Avigdor Lieberman. They say the only problem with the 23-day bombing of Gaza – killing 410 children, and hugely strengthening support for Hamas – is that it did not go far enough. The world urgently needs to look at these individuals – and ask how this came to pass.
The key to understanding Netanyahu lies with his father, Benzion. He is a distinguished scholar of medieval history who believes the world is eternally and ineradicably riddled with genocidal anti-Semitism. When he arrived in British Mandate Palestine, he declared that the majority of Jews there were naïve and idealistic. They had to immediately seize the entire Biblical land of Israel – taking all of the West Bank and stretching right into present-day Jordan. There could be no compromise, ever, with the Arabs, who only understand force. The man he calls his mentor, Abba Ahimeir, described himself proudly as "a fascist".
Today, Benzion's son routinely compares dealing with the Palestinians to dealing with the Nazis. He can only understand their anger as a resurfacing of Europe's irrational, murderous hate. He insists they have no right to a share of the land because they "stole" it – in 636AD. Accordingly, Netanyahu rubbishes every peace initiative offered by Israel. His reaction to Yitzhak Rabin's decision to sign the mild and moderate Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat reveals the depth of his opposition to compromise. He warmly addressed crowds that chanted "Rabin is a Nazi" and "through blood and fire, Rabin shall expire". He called the former prime minister "a traitor", shortly before Rabin was murdered by a Jewish fundamentalist who agreed.
The other person who has surged ahead in the polls – and looks likely to be Netanyahu's coalition partner – is Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian ex-nightclub bouncer who says the model for dealing with the Palestinians should be Vladimir Putin's 1990s bombardment of Chechnya, which caused the death of a third of the entire population. He wants the political parties elected by Israeli Arabs to be criminalised, snapping that they should be dealt with "like Hamas".
Perhaps even more depressing than their rise is the flat and flat-lining response form the other parties. Both Kadima and Labour militantly defend the blockade and bombing of Gaza, not least because their leaders – Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak – led the charge in Cabinet. Even Barak has picked up the comparison to Putin and started approvingly quoting the new Tsar of Russia. The brave pro-peace parties like Meeretz are shunted far to the margins of the debate.
How did this happen? It is essential to remember that the Israelis didn't end up in the Middle East out of a wicked desire to colonise and kill, as some people now gleefully claim. They are there because they were fleeing genocidal Jew-hatred. That doesn't justify a single crime against a single Palestinian – but if we forget this, and the unimaginably vast trauma that lies behind it, we cannot understand what is happening now.
Over the past few months, I keep returning to an extraordinary essay written by the great Israel novelist Amos Oz in 1982. The Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin had compared the Palestinian leadership to Adolf Hitler, so Oz wrote: "You display an urge to resurrect Hitler from the dead so you may kill him over and over again each day... Like many Jews, I feel sorry I didn't kill Hitler with my bare hands. But there is not, and there never will be, any healing for the open wound. Tens of thousands of dead Arabs will not heal that wound. Because, Mr Begin, Adolf Hitler is dead. He is not hiding in Nabatiyah, in Sidon, or in Beirut. He is dead and burned to ashes."
Israeli society consists, Oz says, of "a bunch of half-hysterical refugees and survivors". The 2,000-year trauma of the blood libel, the Inquisition, the pogroms, Auschwitz and Chelmno and the Gulag Archipelago, have produced a distorted vision, where every shriek of pain directed at Israel can sound like the rumble beginning in the massed crowds at Nuremberg.
This means that Israel is missing opportunities for peace. Even much of Hamas – an Islamist party I passionately oppose – is amenable to a long ceasefire along the 1967 borders. That isn't my opinion; it is the view of Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet. He told the Israeli Cabinet before the bombing of Gaza that Hamas would restore the ceasefire if Israel would only end the blockade of the Strip and declare a ceasefire on the West Bank. Instead, they bombed, and the offer died.
The former head of Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, says that Hamas, "will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original goals" if only Israel will begin the path of compromise. This would drain support for rejectionists such as Osama Bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and make it easier to build international coalitions.
Instead, too many Israelis – imprisoned by their history – seem determined to choose the opposite path: of Netanyahu and Lieberman and ramming an endless alienating boot on to the throat of the Palestinians. It doesn't have to be like this. We can only say to them with Amos Oz, as urgently as we can: Adolf Hitler is not hiding in Gaza City, or Beit Hanoun, or Hebron. Adolf Hitler is dead.
Hard man of the right is Israel's kingmaker in waiting
The settler politician dubbed 'Le Pen of the West Bank' wants Israeli Arabs to swear loyalty to the state – or lose their vote
Friday, 6 February 2009
AFP
Avigdor Lieberman once suggested that Arab Knesset members who had talks with Hamas representatives should be executed
Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right politician campaigning on a platform that Israeli Arabs should pledge loyalty to the state or lose their right to vote, has become the pivotal figure in next week's election after two polls showing his party has overtaken Labour.
The Yisrael Beiteinu party headed by the Moldovan-born Mr Lieberman, who lives in a West Bank Jewish settlement and has been depicted by his critics as an Israeli version of Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jorg Haider, is in third place with a projected 19 or 17 seats in two newspaper polls yesterday.
If the party did take that number of seats, it would mean it has performed well beyond its original base among immigrants from the former Soviet Union and is in pole position to emerge as the kingmaker determining whether Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu or Kadima's Tzipi Livni can best form the next coalition government
The poll results underline the growing appeal of Mr Lieberman's hardline nationalist policies, which beside his "no loyalty, no citizenship" demand also includes a plan to redraw the country's borders to make more than 100,000 other Israeli Arabs citizens of the West Bank as part of a land "swap" in which Israel would annex the territory occupied by most West Bank settlements.
Nowhere do Mr Lieberman's bitterly controversial proposals touch a rawer nerve than in the northern Arab hill city of Umm el Fahm, at the heart of the Wadi Ara triangle. At a stroke, residents would lose their status – and voting rights – as Israeli citizens.
Said Abu Shakra, director of the town's well-known art gallery, and a long time promoter of co-existence between Jews and Arabs, said he now felt "depressed and frustrated" in the face of the ascendancy of Mr Lieberman, who once proposed the bombing of Egypt's Aswan Dam and suggested that Arab Knesset members who had talks with Hamas representatives should be executed.
Mr Abu Shakra, who is proud that a Jewish Israeli architect, Amnon Bar On, has won an open competition to design the gallery's new premises, recalled that in 1998 Yoko Ono staged a successful exhibition in the town entitled Open Window – dedicated to the idea of inter-community dialogue.
This spirit had been broken once by the outbreak of the second intifada, he said. "It took us eight years' work to build dialogue again and now it is being destroyed, this time by Lieberman." Seeing similarities in Mr Lieberman's rise to that of Hitler in pre-war Germany, Mr Abu Shakra added: "I have many Jewish friends who know that Lieberman is very destructive for all people, Jews as well as Arabs."
Umm el Fahm's sense of becoming a target for the extreme right has been compounded by the provocative plans of Baruch Marzel, an extremist Hebron settler who has criticised Mr Lieberman for not being right wing enough. Mr Marzel intends to spend election day here as a teller at a polling station. Mr Abu Shakra warned: "My own view is that the best thing to do with [Mr Marzel] is to ignore him, but not everybody here thinks like me."
Afo Agbaria, a local surgeon who is a candidate for the Communist joint Arab-Jewish Democratic Front – or Hadash – said that Mr Lieberman's success was a "danger not for Arabs only but for democracy in Israel", adding that history showed that "those fascists that got to the leadership got there by election". But Dr Agbaria insisted that the impact of Mr Lieberman would be to increase voting for the Arab parties – including his own, which he predicted would add a fourth seat in the Knesset. He said a campaign by the Islamic Party to boycott the election would be largely ignored.
Evidence to support this was mixed in the town yesterday. Coffee shop owner Mohammed Jabarin, 50, said that while he would be voting for the Democratic Front and thought Knesset representation was important, public "depression and frustration" because of the war in Gaza and Mr Lieberman's rise would reduce the turnout. He said of the "loyalty" demand: "Arabs in Israel will be loyal when we get our rights." Repeating widespread complaints of anti-Arab discrimination, he added: "This means better job opportunities and rights to own land."
Meanwhile, Farid Juma Agbaria, 63, was – unusually – more sanguine about Mr Lieberman. "He is shouting slogans now but he will stop when he gets to power," he said.
Amal Mahajne, 38, said that, although she was not an Islamic Party member, she would boycott the poll. She said this was not really because of Mr Lieberman: "He may kill us but we are not afraid. We will not get out of our land", but because of Israel's invasion of Gaza. If Labour – led by Defence Minister Barak – "can do this when it pretends to believe in peace, what will the other parties do?" She said that whether she would vote in any subsequent election depended on how the Arab parties performed.
Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, has along with the former Likud MP Uzi Landau helped to lend Mr Lieberman an air of establishment respectability by joining his campaign. Mr Ayalon stopped short this week of saying that the "loyalty test" for Israeli Arabs – under which they would pledge allegiance to the Jewish state and agree to take part in civilian national service – was a precondition for joining other parties in a coalition. He said that it would be "very important" in any talks with potential partners after Tuesday's poll.
He said the loyalty test was a "response" to the fundamental criticisms of Israel levelled over the past 20 to 25 years by "some in the Arab community, basically its leaders, who are the ones inciting the population".
Avigdor Lieberman: In his own words
"If it were up to me I would notify the Palestinian Authority that tomorrow at 10 in the morning we would bomb all their places of business in Ramallah."
"World War Two ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in [the Knesset]."
"We'll move the border. We won't have to pay for their unemployment, or health, or education. We won't have to subsidise them any longer."
"When there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important."
"A real victory can be achieved only by breaking the will and motivation of Hamas to fight us, as was done to the Japanese in the last days of World War Two."
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