ISRAEL:
Whose Election Was it Anyway?
The strangest thing
about the Israeli elections – from a US perspective – was not its outcome but
the obsessive volume of press coverage here and around the world. The balloting
in a smallish country thousands of miles away, was treated as though it were a
crucial event in our own political life and dominated the headlines all over our
mainstream media. Nothing could better illustrate the bizarre influence of
Israeli politics on our domestic scene.
Of course, this
shouldn’t come as a great surprise, given the interpenetration of US and Israeli
policies for decades and the weight of pro-Israel lobbying in our country.
Recently, it was regarded as an expression of great political courage – and risk
– for Democratic members of Congress to abstain from cheering a partisan attack
on the president of their own party orchestrated by the Prime Minister of a
state which has received hundreds of billions of dollars in US aid. Nearly all
of the 60 or so Democrats who skipped Netanyahu’s Congressional address were at
pains to justify their stand with undying loyalty to Israel. Meanwhile, the
Republican Party has become a virtual subsidiary of Israel’s Likud, financed to
a large degree by US billionaires who profess loyalty to Israel. The last two
“Israeli” ambassadors to the US were in fact American-born immigrants who gave
up their US citizenship to represent Israel.
Almost none of the
vast commentary about the Israeli elections as an expression of “democracy”
pointed out this simple fact: Of the 12 million or so people who live under
Israeli sovereignty around 4.5 million of them in the Occupied Territories had
no vote whatsoever in the outcome – and another 1.5 Palestinian citizens of
Israel could vote, but were effectively shut out from any real decision-making
in the state and retain a permanent second-class status.
As to the Israeli
election itself, despite all the hype about policy differences, in fact there was
very little practical dispute among the parties as to maintaining this status
quo. Netanyahu’s statements about “a
two-state solution” are endlessly parsed in our media, but the truth is that
the Likud Party platform explicitly opposes a Palestinian state.
And, with the possible exception of the tiny leftwing Meretz Party (4 seats out
of 120 in the new Israeli Knesset), none of the Zionist parties is ready to offer conditions remotely acceptable to
the Palestinians for a meaningful sovereign state in “the Land of Israel”. The
difference is mainly in how they talk about it.
“TWO-STATE
SOLUTION”?
Some commentators
noted the “clarifying effect” of the Israeli elections. At least now there will be no liberal Zionist façade, camouflaging
Israel’s unwillingness to dismantle its colonial project. (Israel,
like the US, doesn’t have a colonial project – it is
a colonial project). It may be harder now for US constituencies – and the Obama
administration – to close their eyes to the on-going reality that has existed
for 50 or 80 years, depending on how you count. And indeed, the White House has
been hinting at some changes in “the special relationship” between our two
countries. That would be all to the good. The reality is that there will be no
self-determination for the Palestinians unless and until the US first declares
its independence from Israel.
Obama
says US rethinking Palestinian policy?
Obama
also told Netanyahu that the US is reassessing its approach to
Israeli-Palestinian peace in light of Netanyahu’s pre-election comments
rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state, a White House official said…
According to the White House, Obama “emphasized the importance the United States
places on our close military, intelligence, and security cooperation with
Israel, which reflects the deep and abiding partnership between both
countries.”
More
A roundup of some US commentary here.
(More on Israel
below)
*
* * *
Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had this warning for a Joint Session of Congress:
“If this regime [Iran] …were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage
catastrophic consequences… the deadline for attaining this goal is getting
extremely close… ladies and gentlemen, time is running out.” That was
nineteen years ago.
For almost two
decades, the Israeli Prime Minister has sounded the same alarm and urged the
same US response: ever-harsher sanctions backed by military threats and a policy
that treats negotiation as appeasement.
Some critics of his
latest address contend that the intended audience was actually the Israeli
electorate; others say it was conceived as a rebuke to the Democratic
Administration. One audience was almost certainly the handful of US
senators, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who will be called on to
vote for the Republican Senate’s two attempts to undermine the hard-won
diplomatic progress made by the P5+1 in keeping Iran’s nuclear program in
check.
Too
Clever by Half: Netanyahu Strengthens Obama’s Hand
It’s
still unclear whether the negotiators in Switzerland can decide on a “framework
agreement” by the March 31 target date, presaging a finished document by the
June 30 deadline. But if an agreement is reached, President Barack Obama is now
in a far better position to carry it into effect than he was just a few days
ago. To use another metaphor, Netanyahu has shot himself in the foot. The big
guns were supposed to be directed elsewhere. With the help of House Speaker John
Boehner, Netanyahu spoke before a rapturous joint session of the U.S. Congress
to urge rejection of an agreement with Iran even before it was completed. And he
pulled out all the stops in citing his version of historic parallels. He even
used Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who did so much to make the world
aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, as a stage prop. Then 47 Republican
members of the Senate wrote an open letter to Iran’s leadership, lecturing them
that any agreement that President Obama concluded with Iran could be revoked
“with a stroke of a pen” by the next president. To say that this was irregular
is an understatement, and it offended a lot of Americans who pay little or no
attention to the Iranian nuclear issue but who do believe in the US
Constitution. More
DRAFT
AGREEMENT CUTS IRAN'S NUCLEAR HARDWARE
The
United States and Iran are drafting elements of a nuclear deal that commits
Tehran to a 40 percent cut in the number of machines it could use to make an
atomic bomb, officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. In return, the
Iranians would get quick relief from some crippling economic sanctions and a
partial lift of a U.N. embargo on conventional arms. Agreement on Iran's
uranium enrichment program could signal a breakthrough for a larger deal aimed
at containing the Islamic Republic's nuclear activities. More
Poll:
Iran negotiations popular
Direct
diplomatic negotiations with Iran are broadly popular, 68% favor them, while 29%
oppose them. That support cuts across party lines, with 77% of Democrats, 65% of
Republicans and 64% of independents in favor of diplomacy between the U.S. and
Iran in an attempt to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
More
One
Neocon uncensored. . .
War
with Iran is probably our best option
Sanctions
may have induced Iran to enter negotiations, but they have not persuaded it to
abandon its quest for nuclear weapons… Does this mean that our only option is
war? Yes, although an air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would
entail less need for boots on the ground than the war Obama is waging against
the Islamic State, which poses far smaller a threat than Iran does.
More
Big
Bank’s Analyst Worries That Iran Deal Could Depress Weapons Sales
The
possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles
Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call
this past January 27th. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of
Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in
foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings
calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about
issues that might harm profitability… DefenseOne reports that over the next five years, “Saudi Arabia, United
Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan are expected to spend more $165 billion
on arms.” And in the U.S., concerns over ISIS and Iran have prompted calls for an increase in the defense budget.
More
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