[E-rundbrief] Info 829 - Uri Avnery: Netanyahus plan

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 829 - Uri Avnery: The Emperor’s Old Clothes (on 
Netanyahu's plan).

Bad Ischl, 8.5.2009

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Uri Avnery
2.5.09

			The Emperor’s Old Clothes

EVERYBODY IS talking about the first 100 days of Barack Obama. And 
there’s a lot to talk about.

Like a young bull he stormed into the arena. A deluge of new ideas in 
every direction, a tsunami of practical initiatives, some of which have 
already begun to be implemented. Clearly he had been thinking about them 
for a long time and intended to put them into practice from his first 
moment in office. He put his team together long ago, and his people 
started to act even before his triumphal entrance to the White House. 
During the first days he appointed the ministers, most of whom he had 
designated long before - this seems to be an effective cabinet, whose 
members are up to their tasks.

Everything according to a rule that was laid down long ago: what a new 
president does not initiate in his first 100 days, he will not 
accomplish later on. In the beginning everything is easier, because the 
public is ready for change.

An Israeli cannot, of course, resist comparing Obama to Binyamin 
Netanyahu, our old-new Prime Minister, who did not exactly storm into 
the arena. He crawled into it.


ONE COULD have expected that Netanyahu would trump even Obama in this 
respect.

After all, he has already been there. Ten years ago he was sitting in 
the Prime Minister’s chair, gathering experience. And from experience – 
especially bad experience – one can and should learn.

Moreover, Netanyahu’s victory was no great surprise. The only unexpected 
part of the election results was that his opponent, Tzipi Livni, won 
slightly more votes than he, but not enough to prevent him from 
attaining - together with his partners - a majority.

He had, therefore, a lot of time to prepare for his ascent to power, 
consult experts, perfect plans in every field, choose his team, think 
about the appointment of ministers from his own and allied parties.

Yet, incredibly, it appears that nothing, really nothing, of all this 
happened. No plans, no assistants, no team, no nothing.

To this very minute, Netanyahu has not succeeded in putting together his 
personal team – a fundamental precondition for any effective action. He 
does not have a chief of staff, a most important position. In his 
office, chaos reigns supreme.

The choice of ministers threw up one scandal after another. Not only did 
he put together a hideously bloated cabinet (39 ministers and deputy 
ministers, most of them flaunting fictitious titles) but almost all the 
important ministries are stuck with totally unsuited persons.

At a time of world-wide economic crisis he appointed to the Treasury a 
Minister who has no idea about economics, apparently thinking that he 
himself would manage the treasury – quite impossible for a man who is 
responsible for the state as a whole. The Ministry of Health got an 
orthodox rabbi as Deputy Minister. In the middle of a world-wide 
epidemic, we have no Minister of Health, and according to law the Prime 
Minister has to exercise this function, too. In almost all the other 
ministries – from Transportation to Tourism – there are incumbents who 
know nothing about their fields of responsibility and don’t even pretend 
to be interested in them – they are just waiting for an opportunity to 
move on to higher and better things.

No need to waste many words on the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman to 
the Foreign Ministry. This professional scandalmonger provokes a daily 
scandal in this most sensitive area of government. The bull in the china 
shop has already succeeded into turning all the diplomats into small 
bullocks, each of which is running about and smashing the dishes in his 
vicinity. At the moment, they are busy messing up Israel’s relations 
with the EU.

All these appointments look like the desperate efforts of a cynical 
politician who does not care about anything other than returning to 
power, and then quickly putting together a cabinet, whatever its 
composition, paying any price to any party prepared to join him, 
sacrificing even the most vital interests of the state.


AS FAR as plans are concerned, Netanyahu does not resemble Obama either. 
He has come to power without any plans in any field. One gets the 
impression that he has spent his years in opposition with his head in 
hibernation

A week ago he presented a grandiose “economic plan” for saving our 
economy from the ravages of the world economic crisis. Economists raised 
their eyebrows. The “plan” consists of little more than a collection of 
tired old slogans and a tax on cigarettes. His embarrassed assistants 
stuttered that it was only a “general outline”, not yet a plan, and that 
now they would start working on a real plan.

The public did not really worry about the lack of an economic plan. They 
have faith in improvisation, the wondrous Israeli talent that makes up 
for the inability to plan anything.

But in the political field, the situation is even worse. Because there 
the unpreparedness of Netanyahu meets the overpreparedness of Obama.

Obama has a plan for the restructuring of the Middle East, and one of 
its elements is an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on “Two States for 
Two Peoples”. Netanyahu argues that he is not in a position to respond, 
because he has no plan of his own yet. After all, he is quite new in 
office. Now he is working on such a plan. Very soon, in a week, or a 
month, or a year, he will have a plan, a real plan, and he will present 
it to Obama.

Or course, Netanyahu has a plan. It consists of one word, which he 
learned from his mentor, Yitzhak Shamir: “NO”. Or, more precisely, NO NO 
NO - the three no’s of the Israeli Khartoum: No peace, No withdrawal, No 
negotiations. (It will be remembered that the 1967 Arab summit 
conference in Khartoum, right after the Six-day War, adopted a similar 
resolution.)

The “plan” which he is working on does not really concern the essence of 
this policy, but only the packaging. How to present to Obama something 
that will not sound like “no”, but rather like “yes, but”. Something 
that all the serfs of the Israeli lobby in Congress and the media can 
swallow painlessly.


AS A taster for the “plan”, Netanyahu has already presented one of its 
ingredients: the demand that the Palestinians and other Arabs must 
recognize Israel as “the State of the Jewish People”.

Most of the media in Israel and abroad have distorted this demand and 
reported that Netanyahu requires the recognition of Israel as a “Jewish 
State”.  Either from ignorance or laziness, they obliterated the 
important difference between the two formulas.

This difference is immense. A “Jewish State” is one thing, a “State of 
the Jewish People” is something radically different.

A “Jewish State” can mean a state with a majority of citizens who define 
themselves as Jews and/or a state whose main language is Hebrew, whose 
main culture is Jewish, whose weekly rest day is Saturday, which serves 
only Kosher food in the Knesset cafeteria etc.

A “State of the Jewish People” is a completely different story. It means 
that the state belongs not only to its citizens, but to something that 
is called “the Jewish People” – something that exists both inside and 
outside of the country. That can have wide-ranging implications. For 
instance: the abrogation of the citizenship of non-Jews, as proposed by 
Lieberman. Or the conferring of Israeli citizenship on all the Jews in 
the world, whether they want it or not.

The first question that arises is: what does “the Jewish People” mean? 
The term “people” - “am” in Hebrew, Volk in German – has no accepted 
precise definition. Generally it is taken to mean a group of human 
beings who live in a specific territory and speak a specific language. 
The “Jewish People” is not like that.

Two hundred years ago it was clear that the Jews were a religious 
community dispersed throughout the world and united by religious beliefs 
and myths (including the belief in a common ancestry). The Zionists were 
determined to change this self-perception. “We are a people, one 
people”, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote in German, using 
the word Volk.

The idea of “the State of the Jewish People” is decidedly anti-Zionist. 
Herzl did not dream of a situation in which a Jewish State and a Jewish 
Diaspora would coexist. According to his plan, all the Jews who wish to 
remain Jews would immigrate to their state. The Jews who prefer to live 
outside the state would stop being Jews and be absorbed into their host 
nations, finally becoming real Germans, Britons and Frenchmen. The 
vision of the “Visionary of the State” (as he is officially designated 
in Israel) was supposed, when put into practice, to bring about the 
disappearance of the Jewish Diaspora – the Jewish people outside the 
“Judenstaat”.

David Ben-Gurion was a partner to this vision. He stated that a Jew who 
does not immigrate to Israel is not a Zionist and should not enjoy any 
rights in Israel, except the right to immigrate there. He demanded the 
dismantling of the Zionist organization, seeing in it only the 
“scaffolding” for building the state. Once the state has been set up, he 
thought quite rightly, the scaffolding should be discarded.


NETANYAHU’S DEMAND that the Palestinians recognize Israel as “the State 
of the Jewish People” is ridiculous, even as a tactic for preventing peace.

A state recognizes a state, not its ideology or political regime. Nobody 
recognizes Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the Hajj, as “the State of the 
Muslim Umma” (the community of believers.)

Moreover, the demand puts the Jews all over the world in an impossible 
position. If the Palestinians have to recognize Israel as “the State of 
the Jewish People”, then all the governments in the world must do the 
same. The United States, for example. That means that the Jewish US 
citizens Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s closest advisors, are 
officially represented by the government of Israel. The same goes for 
the Jews in Russia, the UK and France.

Even if Mahmoud Abbas were persuaded to accept this demand – and thereby 
indirectly put in doubt the citizenship of a million and a half Arabs in 
Israel – I would oppose this strenuously. More than that, I would 
consider it an unfriendly act.

The character of the State of Israel must be decided by the citizens of 
Israel (who hold a wide range of opinions about this matter). Pending 
before the Israeli courts is an application by dozens of Israeli 
patriots, including myself, who demand that the state recognize the 
“Israeli nation”. We request the court to instruct the government to 
register us in the official Population Registration, under the heading 
“nation”, as Israelis. The government refuses adamantly and insists that 
our nation is Jewish.

I ask Mahmoud Abbas, Obama and everyone else who is not an Israeli 
citizen not to interfere in this domestic debate.

Netanyahu knows, of course, that nobody will take his demand seriously. 
It is quite obviously just another device to avoid serious peace 
negotiations. If he is compelled to drop it, it will not be long before 
he comes up with another.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “This is my pretext. If you don’t like it, 
well, I have a lot of others.”

-- 

Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
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