Likudniks

Max Blumenthal posted this vid on Huff-Post. His commentary follows the vid. As Chomsky says, with his customary gentle irony, the best thing about a "peace process" is that the parties never really need make peace, as long as the "process" continues. Max's language is consciously provocative.

Yitzhak Rabin's Killers Target Obama

In October 1995, Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu appeared before thousands of right-wing demonstrators in Jerusalem's Zion Square to deliver a stinging denunciation of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords he had signed two years earlier. "Death to Rabin! Nazis! Judenrat!" the demonstrators chanted. Many waved signs depicting Rabin dressed in Nazi regalia.

Concerned that Netanyahu would inflame an already dangerous climate, Israeli Housing Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer warned the hyper-ambitious politician, "You'd better restrain your people. Otherwise it will end in murder. They tried to kill me just now... Your people are mad. If someone is murdered, the blood will be on your hands... The settlers have gone crazy, and someone will be murdered here, if not today, then in another week or another month!"

Netanyahu ignored Ben-Eliezer, striding to the podium to chants of "Bibi! Bibi! Bibi!" and an eerily prescient introduction as Israel's "next prime minister."

One month later, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing radical and student at Bar-Ilan University, the ideological training ground of Israel's religious-nationalist front. Rabin's wife, Leah, refused to forgive Netanyahu, insisting he was at least as responsible for her husband's murder as the extremist who pulled the trigger.

With Netanyahu back in the prime minister's office, Avigdor Lieberman's proto-fascist party in control of several top government posts, and the Israeli peace camp Rabin once inspired in a state of near-permanent marginalization, an emboldened settler movement has turned its wrath on Barack Obama. Obama has aroused the setters' ire by calling for a construction freeze in the West Bank and a halt to Israeli housing projects intended to Judaize Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

On July 23, thousands of Jewish settlers and their right-wing allies in the Knesset gathered in front of the American consulate in Jerusalem for a torchlight rally against Obama's proposals. My friends Joseph Dana and Mairav Zonszein were there with a video camera to document the demonstrators' histrionics. According to Dana, no other journalists shot video of the event.

"Saddam Hussein Obama! Saddam Hussein Obama!" the settlers chanted. "Piss off, you little shit!" a young radical growled when asked if he had a message for the American president.

"I believe if Barack Obama manages to hurt Israel they will be punished," said another twenty-something rightist. "At some point Israel will survive and America will fall."

The most remarkable comment came from a demonstrator who claimed that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a former civilian volunteer for the Israeli army and the son of a former member of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, is a self-hating Jew.

Emanuel "is an auto-anti-Semite," the protester said. "He is a Jew that has something against his Jewishness."

In another era, it might have been possible to dismiss such a remark as paranoia from the far-right fringe. Unfortunately, Netanyahu is reported to have said the very same thing in private discussions with his top advisers. According to Ha'aretz correspondent Barak Ravid, the Israeli Prime Minister has routinely referred to Emanuel and David Axelrod as "self-hating Jews." Like the settlers whose rhetoric he apparently emulates, Netanyahu has become unhinged by Obama's interference with Israel's ongoing colonization of the West Bank.

Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, will hold several meetings this week with top members of Netanyahu's government. Seeking to tamp down on the growing rancor between Tel Aviv and Washington, Mitchell called the meetings "discussions between friends."

But who are the Israeli Prime Minister's real friends? The settlers who cheered Rabin's murder and now inveigh violently against Obama, or the American administration that has pledged to ship his country advanced weaponry and billions in loan guarantees? The White House must force Netanyahu to decide.

Sadly, of course, there is no way that "the WhiteHouse" is gonna show that much spine with Bibi. Obama, et al, must recognize, tacitly, at least, that Israel has (comprehensible, and in the manner of "real-politik," natural) "territorial ambitions" between the Jordan and the Sea. These require the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the land. This unspoken, but obvious, imperative underwrites all Israeli domestic policy with respect to the folks whom Israel MUST dispossess, erase, and exclude to ensure its local hegemony.

Israel is no different in this regard than their sponsors, the manifest-destiny-driven USofA of the 19th Century, which more or less totally expunged the Native Americans from the landscape, and settled the remainder who the State was unable to kill, in camps or reservations, where they pose no significant danger, even with the grant of (nominal) autonomy. Israel, qua State, cannot permit the establishment of a rival, equal Palestinian State within the borders of Palestine. The Israeli State will never negotiate in good faith with Palestinian Arabs for the water of the Jordan River, for example.

Why?

Ask Ytzak Rabin...