Posted on 02/11/2009 4:09:32 PM PST by Nachum
US officials are publicly taking a wait-and-see approach to the formation of a new Israeli government, but privately many have expressed concern that Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu might preside over a right-wing coalition.
Arabs see little hope for peace from whatever government emerges
"There would be great unease" at the prospect of such a government, said one Capitol Hill source.
He predicted that a governing coalition of parties from the Right could embolden the left flank of the Democratic party and turn up pressure, particularly in the US Congress, to pass measures that made clear demands on Israel.
He distinguished, however, between a Netanyahu-led right-wing coalition and Netanyahu-led national unity government.
Despite the Likud's second-place finish to the centrist Kadima party, parties on the Right won more of the vote, which means Netanyahu might have an easier time forming a hawkish coalition but could try to work out a formula for a unity government, as could Kadima head Tzipi Livni.
The Capitol Hill source, who didn't want to be identified speaking about another country's internal politics, noted that Netanyahu had made a strong effort to reach out to the Obama administration and made the case to the US and the Israeli public that he could work with the White House.
US President-elect Barack Obama and opposition leader Binyamin Netnyahu in Jerusalem, July 2008. Photo: AP
He said that attitude could help assuage US concerns when presented in a national-unity package, whose positions - whether under Netanyahu or Livni - would be more in line with the US's own policies of engagement on Arab-Israeli reconciliation.
"The hope is that there is a government that is really committed to peace with the Palestinians," The Washington Post quoted one senior administration official saying.
Even if Netanyahu prevails, the official added, "he's grown over the years. Getting back to the talks with the Palestinians is really the only solution."
Ron Dermer, a senior adviser to Netanyahu, said Wednesday that the Likud leader strongly preferred to put together a national-unity government that looked toward the center of the country's political spectrum rather than a right-wing coalition.
"He's said his biggest mistake when he was prime minister last time was not reaching out to Shimon Peres," who then headed the Labor party, Dermer said on a conference call with the United Jewish Communities and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. "I do not believe he will make the same mistake this time.
"I very much hope that Tzipi Livni will put politics aside" to sit in a Likud-led government, Dermer added.
Still, many political analysts say there's no doubt the Obama administration would prefer to see a national-unity government headed by Livni.
"The impression in Israel is that the Obama administration has already made its preference known and that its preference is for Kadima - and that impression isn't going anywhere," said Georgetown University professor and Israel expert Michael Oren.
"They'd rather work with a centrist government than a right-wing government."
He added that the preference of the Obama camp, with its interest in intensive diplomacy, was "legitimate," noting that many Israelis preferred Republican presidential candidate John McCain because they observed a greater alignment of views.
When it comes to Livni, the administration sees someone who has spent the last year working with the Palestinians as part of a negotiating process and made the two-state solution an important part of her campaign, while Netanyahu has been much more circumspect on the extent of his support for that formulation, focusing his campaign on the need for security.
And while Netanyahu did sign agreements that gave control of West Bank areas to the Palestinians as prime minister in the late '90s, he had a troubled relationship with many of the American officials who served under then president Bill Clinton, several of whom are returning to office under Obama.
Dennis Ross, Clinton's Middle East envoy and likely to be a top regional representative, described Netanyahu as "overcome by hubris" after his first election to the premiership and recalled him being "nearly insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs" in his book on the Oslo peace process.
Still, publicly US officials are welcoming the Israeli democratic process and indicating their readiness to work with whoever becomes prime minister.
"This is a choice these Israeli people will have to make. Once that new government is formed, regardless of who is in that government, we will work with that government," said US State Department Acting Spokesman Robert Wood on Wednesday.
"We look forward to working with that new government once it's formed. We have a robust agenda with the government of Israel, as you know. And so we're looking forward to getting down to business with the new government."
When questioned about whether a government with right-wing leadership would hurt American peace efforts, Wood responded, "We certainly hope that a new government will continue to pursue a path to peace. I see no reason to think that a new government would do something otherwise."
He added that he knew of no change to Middle East envoy George Mitchell's plans to make his second visit to Israel at the end of the month.
"The administration is being very cautious," said an Israeli official about the silence from US officials right now.
He noted that regardless of their views, they understood that they could have to work with both leaders and didn't want to prejudice either relationship.
Oren said the US leadership had done better at keeping a lid on its feelings than many previous US and Israeli governments.
"This administration is more constrained and more controlled in saying whom they prefer," he said.
He added that if the US expressed its preference for Livni too loudly, it could backfire and hurt her position. He compared the situation to the boost in the polls Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman received from the police's pursuit of corruption charges, since some of his supporters felt he was being unfairly targeted.
"It could boomerang, just like Lieberman picked up [support] from the police investigation," he said.
To talk about what?
From what I've heard, it's quite apparent that Netanyahu is virtually certain to be the next Israeli PM, whether the Dems in Washington like it or not.
Who Won in Israel’s Elections?
by Daniel Pipes
Wed, 11 Feb 2009
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/02/who-won-in-israels-elections.html
Tzipi Livni, the head of the Kadima party, can credibly claim victory in the elections on Tuesday because her party won the most seats. Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud party can also claim victory as the head of the largest party in the larger of the two coalitions, the national camp.
Both Livni and Netanyahu can plausibly claim “I won” the elections this week - but neither did.
But the real winner was the politically and personally unpredictable figure, Avigdor Lieberman, 50, of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. A Moldovan immigrant who started his career in Likud and as then served as director-general of Netanyahu’s prime ministerial office, he founded Yisrael Beiteinu in 1999.
Lieberman has introduced a new issue into Israeli domestic politics – the place of the country’s Arab citizens. Noting their increasingly public disloyalty to the state, he has argued that they should lose their citizenship and their right to live in Israel unless they declare their loyalty to the Jewish state.
This topic has clearly struck a nerve among the Israeli Jewish electorate and prompted responsible Arab voices to acknowledge that Israeli Arabs have “managed to make the Jewish public hate us.” As I wrote in 2006, Israel’s “final enemy” may finally, be joining the battle. The consequences of this for the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole could well be profound.
Couldn’t have said it better.
Thanks, but you’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.
You can bet that such a phenomenon has been present in at least some of the Jewish public since before the official founding of Israel. But the Arabs in recent years have done much to intensify it.
The latter part was merely a declaration as to where I stand. I find it sad as a non-Jew, I feel more supportive of the Jewish homeland than many of their own people. Voting for these left-wing and pro-Arab parties in Israel is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.
FACT
Arab leaders have repeatedly made clear their animosity toward Jews and Judaism. For example, on November 23, 1937, Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud told British Colonel H.R.P. Dickson: “Our hatred for the Jews dates from God’s condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa (Jesus) and their subsequent rejection of His chosen Prophet.” He added “that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew ensures him an immediate entry into Heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty.”3
When Hitler introduced the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, he received telegrams of congratulation from all corners of the Arab world.4 Later, during the war, one of his most ardent supporters was the Mufti of Jerusalem.
Jews were never permitted to live in Jordan. Civil Law No. 6, which governed the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, states explicitly: “Any man will be a Jordanian subject if he is not Jewish.”5
The Arab countries see to it that even young schoolchildren are taught to hate Jews. The Syrian Minister of Education wrote in 1968: “The hatred which we indoctrinate into the minds of our children from their birth is sacred.”6
After the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis found public school textbooks that had been used to educate Arab children in the West Bank. They were replete with racist and hateful portrayals of Jews:
“The Jews are scattered to the ends of the earth, where they live exiled and despised, since by their nature they are vile, greedy and enemies of mankind, by their nature they were tempted to steal a land as asylum for their disgrace.”7
“Analyze the following sentences:
1. The merchant himself traveled to the African continent.
2. We shall expel all the Jews from the Arab countries.”8
“The Jews of our time are the descendants of the Jews who harmed the Prophet Muhammad. They betrayed him, they broke the treaty with him and joined sides with his enemies to fight him...”9
“The Jews in Europe were persecuted and despised because of their corruption, meanness and treachery.”10
A 1977 Jordanian teachers’ manual for first-graders used on the West Bank instructs educators to “implant in the soul of the pupil the rule of Islam that if the enemies occupy even one inch of the Islamic lands, jihad (holy war) becomes imperative for every Muslim.” It also says the Jews plotted to assassinate Muhammad when he was a child. Another Jordanian text, a 1982 social studies book, claims Israel ordered the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila during the Lebanon war, but does not mention the Christian Arabs who were the perpetrators.11
“We have found books with passages that are so anti-Semitic, that if they were published in Europe, their publishers would be brought up on anti-racism charges.”
— French lawyer and European Parliament member Francois Zimeray
commenting on Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian texts
Jerusalem Post, (October 16, 2001).
According to a study of Syrian textbooks, “the Syrian educational system expands hatred of Israel and Zionism to anti-Semitism directed at all Jews. That anti-Semitism evokes ancient Islamic motifs to describe the unchangeable and treacherous nature of the Jews. Its inevitable conclusion is that all Jews must be annihilated.”12 To cite one example, an eleventh grade textbook claims that Jews hated Muslims and were driven by envy to incite hostility against them:
The Jews spare no effort to deceive us, deny our Prophet, incite against us, and distort the holy scriptures.
The Jews cooperate with the Polytheist and the infidels against the Muslims because they know Islam reveals their crafty ways and abject characteristics.13
An Arabic translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has been distributed in East Jerusalem and territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and became a bestseller.14
Occasionally, Arab anti-Semitism surfaces at the United Nations. In March 1991, for example, a Syrian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission read a statement recommending that commission members read “a valuable book” called The Matzoh of Zion, written by Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas. The book justifies ritual murder charges brought against the Jews in the Damascus blood libel of 1840.15 (The phrase “blood libel” refers to accusations that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for the ritual of making matzoh at Passover.)
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia uttered a similar slander in a 1972 interview:
Israel has had malicious intentions since ancient times. Its objective is the destruction of all other religions....They regard the other religions as lower than their own and other peoples as inferior to their level. And on the subject of vengeance — they have a certain day on which they mix the blood of non-Jews into their bread and eat it. It happened that two years ago, while I was in Paris on a visit, that the police discovered five murdered children. Their blood had been drained, and it turned out that some Jews had murdered them in order to take their blood and mix it with the bread that they eat on this day. This shows you what is the extent of their hatred and malice toward non-Jewish peoples.16
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf15.html
Israel has had malicious intentions since ancient times. Its objective is the destruction of all other religions....They regard the other religions as lower than their own and other peoples as inferior to their level.
Pathological pot/kettle externalization by the "Religion of Peace" ping!
Of course, you can.
From a position of overwhelming strength, negotiations can be surprisingly successful.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/129907
Shevat 18, 5769 / February 12, ‘09
Published: 02/11/09, 9:17 PM
“Netanyahu: Rotation with Livni is Not an Option”
by Gil Ronen
(IsraelNN.com)
SNIPPET: “U.S. will work with whoever leads
The U.S. State Department is looking forward to working with whatever new government is formed in Israel, State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters on Wednesday.”
Thanks for the ping!
It was not my intent to imply that Jews were the only people who allowed themselves to be lolled into their own demise. That another group or groups did it does not in any way, shape or form negate the validity of the question.
As I have said, I’m not an antisemite. I understand talking about this issue may be distressful to some people, however that in and of itself does not mean it must be taken off the table for discussion.
In any case, it is a fact that no Israeli government has made a meaningful commitment to take out Hamas and its ilk forever. In my opinion that’s like the moth flying around a light bulb. I exclude the Ben Gurian government because it was not able to fight anything but a defensive war given the youth of the country. Since that time Israel has become very powerful militarily. However, without the will to use that power to achieve a a decisive purpose it is worthless.
US is just the same. Our politicians are adverse to decisive victory because someone will be mad at us. Heck, if you believe The Marxist Onada and his crowd, they’re already mad at us. Personally, I find death by small cuts unacceptable excruciating.
The Warsaw Ghetto Jews were the exception to the rule. They do not change the fact that arguably 6 million Jews more or less marched themselves to the gas chambers.
I apologize if talking about this is distressful. Books have been written about this phenominon. Exactly why do you believe I should not wonder how the Germans were able to manage their geneocide with little meaningful resistance from the vast majority of people they were killing?
Don’t you think it important that Israel not be lulled into that mindset again?
Ooo, good one. I’ll add that response to my repertoire of responses to this repeated claim.
As to walking to the gas chambers, Jews weren't any different than Christians. There's not a lot individuals can do when there's no where to flee. Most of Germany's Jews fled, only to get rounded up later when all of Europe fell. I was struck by a comment in a Christopher Buckley column which I didn't bother to post about his visit to Auschwitz in 2001. He attributes it to his guide
We pass under Arbeit Macht Frei. He indicates a grassy strip. "Here is where they gave the welcome speech. They said, 'You dirty Poles, this isn't a sanatorium. There's only one way out - through the chimney of crematorium. Jews, you have three weeks. Priests, one month. Three months for the rest of you.'"
At it's inception it was primarily POWs and political prisoners walking to their deaths.
Books may have been written, but the koran is also written. So what?
The meme of Jews peacefully marching to their death (in contrast to anyone else) is simply not a truthful story.
IMHO, it came about because: (1) at the time, the Jews (stupidly, but that’s another post) aligned themselves with communists, so the fact of their resistence was not a popular one to promote in the West and (2) the Nazis were much more subtle that people recall. For example, they had people in camps write letters about how wonderful the “new homelands” were and send them back.
Thanks for the relevant history.
Thanks for the relevant history.
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