Showing posts with label benjamin netanyahu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label benjamin netanyahu. Show all posts

Monday, January 8, 2024

A Failure Of Leadership

No matter where you stand on the Israeli war against Gazans, undeniable is the fact that many, many innocent lives are being lost. One report estimates that 100 children a day are killed, and that 70% of the casualties are women and children. And the war shows no sign of ending.

According to two respected journalists, there is little doubt that the responsibility for this ongoing carnage rests on the shoulders of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister. 

Thie Star's Martin Regg Cohn sees personal self-preservation as the key to understanding Netanyahu's merciless war of retribution for the October Hamas attack on Israel. Speaking of the unseemly coalition of reprobates with which the leader has allied himself, he writes,

That he should consort with so dishonourable a cabal of cabinet ministers — renegades who violated the law, racists who breached human rights, radicals who scorned democratic norms — could only be explained by Netanyahu’s utter desperation. When I interviewed him as prime minister in the late 1990s, he was consumed by fear of losing political power; today, he worries about losing his personal freedom.

Netanyahu stands accused of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three ongoing cases. His best defence was to go on the offence, perpetrating a constitutional coup to perpetuate his grip on power and protect him from the judicial process. 

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? One only need look to the U.S. and Trump's attempt to subvert justice by getting re-elected. Before that eventuality, he is doing everything he can to get all charges against him dismissed. Netanyahu has followed similar tactics.

Emboldened and empowered, Netanyahu attempted to jury-rig the judicial process by directing his coalition of lawbreakers to undermine the legal system at its core. His government spearheaded the gutting of the Supreme Court’s traditional powers, curbing its authority to review the “reasonableness” of any legislation rammed through by his parliamentary majority while protecting him from being unseated by the attorney general.

Well-respected journalist Gwynne Dyer has a similarly withering assessment of the Israeli leader.

The people around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly describe the war in Gaza as "existential," but that’s nonsense. The "existence" of Israel is in no danger whatever. The only thing facing an existential risk is Netanyahu’s government, which would immediately collapse if the shooting stops.

The extreme right-wing and religious nationalist parties who made Netanyahu’s coalition possible are hoping that prolonged fighting will drive the Palestinians (22,000 dead so far) out of part or all of the Gaza Strip and/or the West Bank.

As national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir put it, the war presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza.”

They want that land for more Jewish settlements, and if Netanyahu made peace they would instantly abandon him.

Even worse than that, from Netanyahu’s point of view, is the fact that a return to "normal" would allow his trial on corruption charges to resume. That could ultimately send him to jail, and anything is better than that. Even endless war.

Is endless war what Netanyahu is counting on? Given that he has no strategy, Dyer offers this:

Why else would Netanyahu now be preparing for a backup war with Hezbollah in Lebanon? He and his ministers are constantly warning that such a war may be "necessary" — “the situation on the Lebanese front will not be allowed to continue,” one said — even though it is obvious that Hezbollah does not want a war now.

Hezbollah is a formidable organization that fought the Israeli army to a standstill in their last major confrontation in 2006. Deliberately going to war with it when Israel is already fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip makes no sense in terms of the country’s interests — but in terms of Netanyahu’s personal interest, it makes perfectly good sense.

Potentates of old were always willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of lives in pursuit of their reprehensible self-interest. In that, it would seem Benjamin Netanyahu has been a very apt student of history. 

 

 

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

The Obscenity Called Gaza

The New York Times' columnist, Richard Cohen, offers some brilliant insights into the Gaza conundrum, a place he calls, "an open-air prison for 1.8-million people."

"...more than 300 children are dead, killed in a month-long Israeli bombardment. Each of those children has a name, a family. Several were killed in a recent shelling of a United Nations school, an act that the United States called 'disgraceful.' The many civilian casualties in Gaza cannot be waived away as 'human shields' of Hamas. They were not human shields. They were human beings."

Cohen doesn't spare Hamas of its responsibility either. He condemns Hamas for manipulating and subjugating the Palestinians it governs as it goads Israel into attacking through its endless, if ineffective, rocket campaign all in pursuit of a fantasy of wiping Israel from the face of the Earth.

Cohen also offers a scathing rebuke for the global community for failing to enact UN resolution 181 that calls for the creation of two nations in the Holy Land, one Jewish, the other Arab. Since 1947 just one of those nations has been created. The other has been ignored. The job stands unfinished.

"Without two states, Israel will lurch from one self-inflicted wound to the next, growing ever angrier with its neighbors and a restive world from which it feels alienated."

In other words, Israel's legitimacy is inexorably tied to the creation of the Palestinian state envisioned by the UN in 1947 when it created Israel. The state of Israel is a creature of the United Nations, not some supposed deity, something it has for too long ignored.

The international community has failed the Palestinians by failing to create their state, the companion of Israel. We know where that state was intended to exist. We know the borders that were established in creating Israel. Unpopular as it would be with the Knesset, it's time the community of nations went back in to complete their obligations under UN resolution 181.

Netanyahu has fought Palestinian statehood all his life. But it is the only way out of his labyrinth. In the end his sound bites yield to reality. That reality is bitter indeed.

We need to go back into the Palestinian homeland. We need to clean up the mess and restore the borders between Israel and the Palestinian state envisioned by Resolution 181. That will probably take muscle, plenty of it, not only to restore the borders but to establish and occupy a suitable buffer zone for a substantial period (40-years perhaps) to enable the creation of a viable, democratic and peaceful Palestine capable of engaging its neighbour, Israel, in normal relations.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib


Monday, November 25, 2013

In His Master's Voice?

I didn't realize that John Baird and Benjamin Netanyahu were so close:

The 2:20 mark especially shows their affinity: