Counter Punch - July 22

The Bibi & Obama Show

By SHELDON RICHMAN

I presume Barack Obama's Likud membership card is in the mail. No doubt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has seen to it. After all, Obama has now paid his dues. After a few idle negative statements about expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank/East Jerusalem, Obama caved at the slightest push-back from the Israel lobby -- election year, you know -- and now he's apparently fine with them. He went from saying the settlement expansion "could end up being dangerous [!]" to saying, "I think that he [Netanyahu] is dealing with a very complex situation in a very tough neighborhood." We can be sure that Netanyahu will not permanently stop the expansion and Obama will not take any action -- such as cutting off the money -- to bring that about. (Even Gen. David Petraeus fears the lobby.) "[T]he pace of settlement building in the West Bank has been barely affected by the 10-month freeze, due to end in September," Jonathan Cook of The National writes.

Obama also quickly folded on the matter of Israel's signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. ("Israel has unique security requirements.") Everyone knows Israel has upward of 200 nukes, but the official position is to neither confirm nor deny their existence. That's known as "nuclear ambiguity."

The security relationship between the Obama administration and Israel is said to be stronger than ever -- the Pentagon, the Israelis, and at least some neoconservatives agree. More military aid is in the works, on top of the annual $3 billion transfusion.

Netanyahu has expressed concern that U.S. forces may someday leave Iraq but he need not worry: That day is no doubt far off. Even after "withdrawal" there still will be 50,000 troops, bases, and an embassy the size of a small country.

The one thing Netanyahu apparently hasn't gotten (yet) is Obama's promise to bomb Iran back to the stone age because of its nonexistent nuclear weapons program. (Iran, unlike Israel, is regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.) Thanks goodness U.S. military leaders are reluctant to take on another mission, which would kill many innocent people and perhaps light up the rest of the Middle East. The military is stretched rather thin after all.

Netanyahu applauded the new UN and U.S. sanctions against Iran -- isn't that an act of war? -- so that probably means any attack has been postponed for a year or more.

What's remarkable is that the President and Prime Minister managed to keep straight faces when they said a nuclear Iran would be intolerable. Is hypocrisy no longer a vice? The allegations about an Iranian weapons program are completely unsupported, but still I have to wonder: Is it so mysterious that Muslim countries are uneasy with Israel as a nuclear monopolist? You'd think that Israel had never launched a war against a neighbor. And last I checked, the U.S. military had Iran virtually surrounded. But never mind.

So far no word from Obama about the continuing brutality against the Gazans in their open-air prison camp (oh sure, he's pleased a few more goods are getting in, as if that addresses the matter), the death of the American citizen on the Mavi Marmara at the hands of Israeli commandos, or the wall being built through the West Bank that divides Palestinian homes from Palestinian farmlands and creates myriad other hardships.

Obama praised Netanyahu for his alleged willingness to negotiate with the approved Palestinian "leaders" (Hamas excluded, of course). But you have to keep in mind that when Israeli politicians say they favor a two-state solution, or "land for peace," they do not mean a real independent homeland for the long-abused Palestinians but rather a series of Bantustans within an essentially apartheid state under Israeli control. This is the point of the wall and the expansion of settlements. Obama seems okay with that.

In regards to Netanyahu's true views on dealing with the Palestinians and the United States, see Jonathan Cook’s article on this site today. The video of Netanyahu proves, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy said, that he is a "con artist … who thinks that Washington is in his pocket and that he can pull the wool over its eyes."

So the "special relationship" endures. And yet, is all that talk about shared values really valid? In theory America belongs to all Americans, all its citizens. But Israel -- in theory and practice -- belongs not to all holding Israeli citizenship (which includes Arabs) but only to the "Jewish people" wherever they may be -- which means (according to Israel's view of things) I -- born in Philadelphia, residing in Arkansas -- have a better claim to full Israeli citizenship than a Palestinian whose family has lived in Jerusalem for a millennium or more. How can that make sense?

(The Knesset has given at least preliminary approval to a bill to make denying Israel's status as a Jewish State a crime punishable by imprisonment. The cabinet will consider a resolution to force new citizens to take a loyalty oath to Israel as the Jewish State.)

Let's not forget that the American taxpayer is the enabler and underwriter. None of this could be going on without massive U.S. infusions of money.

And some people think "they" hate us for our freedoms (sic).

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org)

Source : http://www.counterpunch.com/richman07192010.html

Counterpunch - July 19

Netanyahu: I Deceived the US to Destroy Oslo Accords

By JONATHAN COOK

There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles. To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10.

Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only  Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama.

The film was shot, apparently without Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada.

At the time  Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join  Sharon’s government as finance minister.

On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd”.

He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel’s harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats.

All of these claims have obvious parallels with the current situation, when  Netanyahu is again Israel’s prime minister facing off with a White House trying to draw him into a peace process that runs counter to his political agenda.

As before, he has ostensibly made public concessions to the US administration -- chiefly by agreeing in principle to the creation of a Palestinian state, consenting to indirect talks with the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, and implementing a temporary freeze on settlement building.

But he has also enlisted the powerful pro-Israel lobby to exert pressure on the White House, which appears to have relented on its most important stipulations.

The contemptuous view of Washington  Netanyahu demonstrates in the film will confirm the suspicions of many observers -- including Palestinian leaders -- that his current professions of good faith should not be taken seriously.

Critics have already pointed out that his gestures have been extracted only after heavy arm-twisting from the US administration.

More significantly, he has so far avoided engaging meaningfully in the limited talks the White House is promoting with the Palestinians while the pace of settlement building in the West Bank has been barely affected by the 10-month freeze, due to end in September.

In the meantime, planning officials have repeatedly approved large new housing projects in East Jerusalem and the West Bank that have undercut the negotiations and will make the establishment of a Palestinian state -- viable or otherwise -- far less likely.

Writing in the liberal Haaretz newspaper, the columnist Gideon Levy called the video “outrageous”. He said it proved that  Netanyahu was a “con artist … who thinks that Washington is in his pocket and that he can pull the wool over its eyes”. He added that the prime minister had not reformed in the intervening period: “Such a crooked way of thinking does not change over the years.”

In the film,  Netanyahu says Israel must inflict “blows [on the Palestinians] that are so painful the price will be too heavy to be borne … A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority, to bring them to the point of being afraid that everything is collapsing”.

When asked if the US will object, he responds: “America is something that can be easily moved. Moved to the right direction … They won’t get in our way … Eighty per cent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd.”

He then recounts how he dealt with President Clinton, whom he refers to as “extremely pro-Palestinian”. “I wasn’t afraid to maneuver there. I was not afraid to clash with Clinton.”

His approach to White House demands to withdraw from Palestinian territory under the Oslo accords, he says, drew on his grandfather’s philosophy: “It would be better to give two per cent than to give 100 per cent.”

He therefore signed the 1997 agreement to pull the Israeli army back from much of Hebron, the last Palestinian city under direct occupation, as a way to avoid conceding more territory.

“The trick,” he says, “is not to be there [in the occupied territories] and be broken; the trick is to be there and pay a minimal price.”

The “trick” that stopped further withdrawals,  Netanyahu adds, was to redefine what parts of the occupied territories counted as a “specified military site” under the Oslo accords. He wanted the White House to approve in writing the classification of the Jordan Valley, a large area of the West Bank, as such a military site.

“Now, they did not want to give me that letter, so I did not give [them] the Hebron Agreement. I stopped the government meeting, I said: ‘I’m not signing.’ Only when the letter came … did I sign the Hebron Agreement. Why does this matter? Because at that moment I actually stopped the Oslo accords.”

Last week, after meeting  Obama in Washington, the Israeli prime minister gave an interview to Fox News in which he appeared to be in no hurry to make concessions: “Can we have a negotiated peace? Yes. Can it be implemented by 2012? I think it’s going to take longer than that,” he said.

There must be at least a very strong suspicion that  Netanyahu is as firmly committed today as he was then to destroying any chance of peace with the Palestinians.`

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National ( www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

Source : http://www.counterpunch.com/cook07192010.html