Revive the peace process before it’s too late
Just when one might have thought that Israel’s far right was as repugnant as it
could get, leave it to Benjamin Netanyahu to establish new standards in boorishness. The
Jewish state’s answer to French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen badly upstaged Ariel
Sharon on Sunday night by winning a vote in their Likud Party’s central committee
that rejects even the possibility of Palestinian statehood. But Sharon was not the only
one who received a slap in the face: Apart from demonstrating their usual hatred for the
Palestinians themselves, Netanyahu and his legion of lackeys also served notice of their
profound contempt for the international community in general and for the United States
and the European Union, both of which envision Palestinian independence as a necessary
ingredient in any peace agreement, in particular.
The decision is not binding on the Israeli government itself, but it certainly threatens
to pose a major obstacle if and when the badly mauled peace process gets under way again.
The policy in question was not adopted by a weak movement consigned to the fringes of
Israeli politics but by the leading component of the country’s coalition government,
a group that boasts 19 members in the 120-seat Knesset. It is therefore essential that the
regional conference planned for the summer be expedited and that its agenda be
radically revamped to include the all-important “road map” toward that happy day
when Palestinians and Israelis are able to live side-by-side in separate states and
start replacing enmity with respect.
It should also serve as an alarm bell like that sounded when Joerg Haider’s racist
Freedom Party won a share of power in Austria after the October 1999 elections. The
European Union used sanctions to indicate its displeasure over that debacle, and while it
is unlikely to do so in this case, it should make it very clear that the Jewish state
cannot continue to thumb its nose at the civilized world and expect forever to go
unpunished.
Netanyahu reserved some of his most excoriating remarks on Sunday for those outside
observers whom he knew would disapprove of the party’s noxious decision, asking:
“Did the world lift a finger to prevent the Holocaust?” The answer, of course,
is that “no, it did not,” but this is no reason to turn a blind eye on new
crimes committed by Jews rather than against them. On the contrary, it imposes a special
responsibility to ensure that similar philosophies are never again allowed to massacre
and/or otherwise disenfranchise entire peoples.
Netanyahu wants his old job as prime minister back, envisioning the day when someone will
write that “if the Israeli people had not recovered their senses at the last moment,
and if they had not had a leader named Benjamin Netanyahu who recognized the danger and
woke the Israeli people, we would have fallen into slavery. As we have already
noted, the Palestinian has always known how to rouse sympathy when things were rough for
him.”
Read “German” for “Israeli,” “Adolf Hitler” for
“Benjamin Netanyahu” and “Jew” for “Palestinian,” and you
are looking at an excerpt from a 1934 Nazi pamphlet entitled Why the Aryan Law?
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