FOR THEIR OWN SELF-ESTEEM...:

A Man, A Plan (David Remnick, March 21, 2011, The New Yorker)

The stubborn ideological legacy that, in part, blocks such a transformation runs deep. During Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister, in the late nineteen-nineties, I met with him in his office, in Jerusalem, and he fondly recalled how his father encountered David Ben Gurion, in 1956, not long after Israel captured the Sinai. Ben Gurion had vowed to keep the Sinai for a thousand years, but Benzion was convinced that he would lose it. Why? Ben Gurion asked.

“Because the U.S. will force you to,” the elder Netanyahu said.

“Of course, he was right, unfortunately,” the son said. “That was the first and last time an Israeli Prime Minister succumbed to an American diktat.” This ingrained wariness toward Israel’s most stalwart ally and benefactor is just part of Netanyahu’s inheritance. On that same trip to Israel, Benzion, who is now a hundred and one, invited me to his house for lunch, and I am not sure that I have ever heard more outrageously reactionary table talk. The disdain for Arabs, for Israeli liberals, for any Americans to the left of the neoconservatives was chilling. The bitter ideological resentments were deepened by genuine loss: another of Benzion’s sons, Yoni, was the Israeli commando killed in the extraordinary rescue of the hostages at Entebbe, in 1976. In books, speeches, and action, Benjamin Netanyahu has proved himself his father’s son.

Now in his second term and ruling in a coalition government that includes anti-democratic, even proto-fascistic ministers, such as Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu has stubbornly refused the appeals of Washington and of the Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, who have shown themselves willing to make the concessions needed for a peace deal. In the midst of a revolution in the Arab world, Netanyahu seems lost, defensive, and unable or unwilling to recognize the changing circumstances in which he finds himself.

The occupation—illegal, inhumane, and inconsistent with Jewish values—has lasted forty-four years. Netanyahu thinks that he can keep on going, secure behind a wall. Late last month, he called the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to register his displeasure that Germany had voted for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Jewish settlements. According to an account in the Israeli daily Haaretz, a German source said that Merkel could hardly contain her outrage. “How dare you?” she said. “You are the one who has disappointed us. You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.” The U.S. vetoed the resolution, but sources in the Administration say that the vote was debated intensely.

...it's actually better that the Palestinians declare their state unilaterally than that they accept it as a product of negotiations with Israel.

Posted by oj at March 14, 2011 6:13 AM
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