BIBI'S BROADSIDE: REQUIEM FOR THE PEACE PROCESS

By Alan Sabrosky

The only thing surprising about Netanyahu’s speech Sunday is that some people profess to have been surprised by what he said, and that the US sees “progress” in it, as if something real can be crafted out of arrogance and duplicity.

I suppose it was only to be expected from an Israel that is the triumph of the somewhat odd but very real concept of democratic fascism – a witch’s brew of militarism, xenophobia, racism, imperialism, and (among many observant Jews) theocratic orthodoxy, something akin to the worst aspects of Deuteronomy exhumed from a political sarcophagus.

Netanyahu tossed a verbal scrap to Obama, who will undoubtedly accept it gracefully, knowing the Jewish lobby’s lock on the Congress and the mainstream media in the US would not allow him to do much else. The truly sad thing is that only Americans are largely unaware of this unpleasant reality.

Back to the Future

So this is Netanyahu’s implicit vision of a Palestinian state: fragmented; riddled with armed settlers, check-points and IDF patrols; surrounded by the Israeli Iron Curtain, every bit as noxious as that Joseph Stalin threw down in Europe; and utterly vulnerable to the inevitable onslaughts from the IDF – apparently even the poor Palestinian policemen in Gaza put up too much resistance for Bibi to stomach, before they were slaughtered.

We have now a de facto Israeli declaration of war on the whole house of cards so carefully put in place from Oslo onwards. When one cuts through the verbiage, the real message is all too clear. There will be no Palestinian state, only an impotent and short-lived Bantustan of sorts. The settlements stay and will grow, although a few minor so-called outposts may be temporarily abandoned. Gaza will be blockaded, starved and periodically bombarded into submission or exile. The Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria are there on borrowed time, and the Israelis will call in that account very soon.

Netanyahu’s views of peace and the ill-fated “peace process” are like Hitler’s during the Czech crisis: one could have what the British prime minister then called “peace in our time,” but only on Hitler’s terms. It is a depressingly accurate parallel, reflected in the prevailing Israeli view of the peace process as a diplomatic treadmill in which there is a lot of action but no movement.

I suppose we should all be grateful to Netanyahu and his cohorts for making explicit what has been implicit in their words and deeds since forming the latest Israeli government. It isn’t that Israeli policy or goals would be markedly different under a government led by Labor or Kadina – it was, after all, the Olmert-Barak-Livni regime that savaged Gaza a few months ago. But Kadina and Labor are much better about putting a gloss of respectability over their actions and intentions, and especially using all the right words – empty as they may be. Netanyahu and Lieberman at least make no bones about their vision, something akin to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s reply to a question about his country’s goals in 1939: “We want war.”

“Bibi’s boy” and Beyond

One can only wonder what “Bibi’s boy” in the White House is making of this. He cannot be happy. All he needed from Netanyahu was a fig leaf of quasi-respectability to allow him to proceed with some hope, however dim, of progress. What he got wasn’t even a poor picture of a fig leaf, shredded and unfocused.

And will the US Government accept this? Absolutely, despite some inevitable verbal and diplomatic gymnastics. General Jones in the NSC is reportedly under political siege, and he is the only one of Obama’s senior defense and foreign policy advisers who is not either Jewish and in lock-step with Israel, or an Israeli partisan, and his departure will end what little open policy debate on this issue occurs within the Administration. Policy, after all, is people, and if the senior people are singing essentially the same pro-Zionist song, Netanyahu and company won’t have to worry about anything more substantial than slaps on their collective wrists with verbal wet feathers, and the Palestinians won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of achieving anything substantial – and that includes an end to the appalling suffering in Gaza.

Should others accept this? Absolutely not, and those “others” include American citizens, including Jews. Israel has demonstrated time and again that it is perfectly willing to kill, or see others kill, Americans in pursuit of its policy objectives. It cannot be forgotten that the Jews of the Diaspora, especially in the US – overwhelmingly liberal, progressive, Reform (if observant) and strongly supportive of civil liberties and civil rights – have consistently been the first and most important target of the propaganda campaign waged by Zionists, who are largely none of those things. Since the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in 2006, and especially since the ravaging of Gaza in 2008-2009, a small but growing and increasingly influential number of American Jews have been speaking out against “business as usual” in dealing with Israel. And without their support, the whole AIPAC-contrived edifice crumbles.

For their part, neighboring states should understand that Israel is working incrementally on three tiers of enemies: the Palestinians (and probably Arab citizens of Israel as well), “border enemies” (such as Syria and Iran, not all contiguous), and more distant adversaries to be dealt with later (including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and even Egypt – remember Israel’s claims on the Sinai). It isn’t quite divide and rule, but one of mollifying or at least not outraging more distant victims until closer ones are finished. An attack on Iran coupled with the dispersal of the Palestinians will free Israel’s hands greatly – just think of the military resources it will have at its disposal, if it no longer has to hold down the West Bank and blockade Gaza. Does anyone else really think it is a good idea to give the likes of Netanyahu and Lieberman that latitude?

________________________________________________________________________

*Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College. He can be contacted at docbrosk@comcast.net

Source: Khaleej Times – Dubai

If you liked this article, please consider making a donation to Intifada Palestine by clicking on the following PayPal link. Thank you!