Netanyahu's 'Ethnic Cleansing' Video Pushes Obama Closer to UN Security Council
White House was again reminded that Netanyahu has no qualms about
attacking them, even when he needs them. PM's comments were almost
word-for-word on hasbara talking-points penned by far-right political
strategist.
A video Netanyahu released in which he says Palestinian
leaders want their future state to be ethnically cleansed of Jews.
On Friday afternoon, when senior White House and U.S. State Department officials saw the public diplomacy video Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had posted on YouTube and his Facebook page, they were livid.
One
of Netanyahu’s main arguments was that enlightened countries that
oppose Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and call for
settlement evacuation as part of a peace agreement are, in effect,
supporting what he termed the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews.
Senior
administration officials said they viewed the remarks as directly
targeting them. There is no other way to interpret the comments, they
said.
By
the way, someone in Washington found that the source for large swaths
of Netanyahu’s remarks and arguments were taken from a 2009 document put
together by Frank Luntz,
a prominent U.S. political consultant who is identified with the
Republican Party and those in the American far-right. Israel’s
ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, who is a close associate of the prime minister, worked with Luntz in the early 1990s.
Luntz developed the public diplomacy document for the Israel Project,
a pro-Israel organization that in the past was bipartisan, but has in
recent years shifted to the right. Page 62 of the document states in
part that ethnic cleansing is the best argument in response to the
settlement issue when it comes to the U.S. public. In his video,
Netanyahu repeated Luntz’s text almost word-for-word.
The
Prime Minister's Bureau said that already in a book he had published in
1993, Netanyahu expressed his opposition to the Palestinian and
international demand that the West Bank be devoid of Jews. However, in
his book, Netanyahu didn’t use the "ethnic cleansing" argument.
For
the umpteenth time, senior Obama administration officials were caught
by surprise by the fact that Netanyahu has no qualms about attacking
them, even during a highly sensitive period when he needs U.S. diplomatic and military assistance.
In recent months alone, the Israeli premier has sought repeated favors from the administration: softening the content of a report by the Middle East Quartet; assistance in halting anti-Israel moves at the United Nations; and killing the French Middle East peace initiative. In addition to all this, there’s the pending agreement to provide nearly $40 billion in military aid to Israel, which is close to being signed.
Senior administration officials view the video as part of a trend that began after the July publication of the Quartet’s report,
which criticized Israel but could have been much more critical had it
not been for the U.S. insistence on balancing and softening it.
Officials
at the White House and State Department have sensed that, since the
report, Netanyahu has been ridiculing them and, in the worst case
scenario, actually spit in their faces.
The
Israeli government is accelerating construction in the settlements,
stepping up demolition of Palestinian homes, legalizing illegal West
Bank outposts and finishing it off with stinging videos that go viral.
Senior
administration officials don’t understand why now, of all times,
Netanyahu is coming out with such a media campaign in defense of the
settlements.
Why,
they wonder, is he taking a gamble on an issue on which there is
international consensus against Israel and that, one way or another,
could land in the UN Security Council in November, right after the U.S.
presidential election? Netanyahu should have avoided such a thing as
much as possible, but his conduct is actually inviting a Security
Council resolution.
It’s
not clear that President Barack Obama would undertake such a step at
the Security Council at the end of his term. It’s also not certain if he
would refrain from vetoing any settlement resolution, for example. What is clear, however, is that Netanyahu’s video only encourages Obama to take a step in that direction.
The
person behind the “ethnic cleansing” video, like other videos Netanyahu
has posted recently, is his new foreign media adviser, David Keyes, who
has strong ties with the U.S. right wing. Keyes was brought into the
Prime Minister’s Office by none other than Ambassador Dermer, whose
total identification with the Republican Party is well-known on the U.S.
East Coast. In recent weeks, Netanyahu seems preoccupied with filming
public diplomacy videos and counting how many “likes” they get on
Facebook.
When
it comes to the substance of the most recent video, Netanyahu is
turning the debate from one about territory to one about rights. But if
the Jews have the right to live anywhere in the West Bank, including
areas that would be part of the nation-state of the Palestinians, why
don’t the Palestinians have the right to return to Haifa or Jaffa and
live in the Jewish nation-state? After all, they also claim there was
ethnic cleansing in 1948.
Finally,
if the evacuation of settlements is ethnic cleansing, as Netanyahu
claims, what does that say about his Likud party and him personally?
Likud didn’t propose leaving the Yamit settlement in Sinai in Egyptian
hands when Israel withdrew, instead setting the precedent of evacuation
to the very last Jew.
And
it was Likud that evacuated all of the Jews from the Gaza Strip just
over a decade ago. Netanyahu voted for the disengagement four times.
Does that mean he was also involved in ethnic cleansing? There’s a limit
to such demagoguery, even when it comes to Netanyahu.
Barak Ravid
Commenti
Posta un commento