[THS] Justin Raimondo: Bibi Unmasked

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25961.htm

Bibi Unmasked
Caught On Tape: What The Israelis Really Think Of Us

By Justin Raimondo

July 19, 2010 "Antiwar" -- In 2001, Bibi Netanyahu paid a condolence call on a group
of Israeli settlers in the village of Ofra, widows whose husbands had been killed in the
Intifada: the videotaped conversation has just been leaked, and broadcast by Israel’s
Channel 10, and it is a blockbuster. At one point, Bibi is telling the widows that the
Palestinians “think they will break us,” but don’t worry, ladies, Bibi has a plan:

“To hit them. Not just one blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be
too heavy to be borne. The price is not too heavy to be borne, now. A broad attack
on the Palestinian Authority. To bring them to the point of being afraid that
everything is collapsing


“Woman: Wait a moment, but then the world will say ‘how come you’re conquering
again?’

“Netanyahu: The world won’t say a thing. The world will say we’re defending.

“Woman: Aren’t you afraid of the world, Bibi?

“Netanyahu: Especially today, with America. I know what America is. America is
something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction.”

A child speaks up, and, surprisingly articulate, avers: “They say they’re for us, but,
it’s like
”

Yes, even the children are little ideologues. Today that boy is a teenager on the
verge of adulthood, and likely a fervent supporter of Israel’s ultra-rightist
government, led by Bibi, who, back then, quickly assured him: “They won’t get in our
way.” The child, hardliner that he was and no doubt still is, seemed doubtful: “On
the other hand,” the kid ventured, “if we do some something, then they
”

That’s when Bibi really let his hair down:

“So let’s say they say something. So they said it! They said it! 80% of the Americans
support us. It’s absurd. We have that kind of support
. Look. That administration
[Clinton] was extremely pro-Palestinian. I wasn’t afraid to maneuver there. I was not
afraid to clash with Clinton.”

Of course he wasn’t, because he knew he’d win, what with the Republicans in
Congress passing resolutions unconditionally supporting the Israelis and AIPAC and
the rest of the Lobby going all out to mobilize their fifth column against Oslo and the
very idea of a rapprochement. Oslo was a dagger placed against the throat of the
hard-line Likud movement, which explicitly embraces the rather nutty idea of a
“Greater Israel,” and there was no way Netanyahu or his party could accept it
without betraying who and what they were and are. So when one of the women
denounced the Accords as “a disaster,” Bibi agrees with her – and takes “credit” for
neutering them:

“What were the Oslo Accords? The Oslo Accords, which the Knesset signed, I was
asked, before the elections: ‘Will you act according to them?’ and I answered: ‘yes,
subject to mutuality and limiting the retreats.’ ‘But how do you intend to limit the
retreats?’ ‘I’ll give such interpretation to the Accords that will make it possible for me
to stop this galloping to the ’67 [armistice] lines.’ How did we do it?”

Easy: the Accords had a loophole big enough to drive an IDF tank through,
premising the handover of “land for peace” on the condition that the land in question
encompassed neither settlements nor military sites, as Netanyahu explained to his
adoring fans:

“No one said what defined military sites. Defined military sites, I said, were security
zones. As far as I’m concerned, the Jordan Valley is a defined military site.

“Woman: Right [laughs]..

“Netanyahu: 
 How can you tell. How can you tell?”

Bibi goes on to boast of how he stood up to Clinton, insisting that it would be the
Israelis, and not anyone else, who defined where and what was a “military site.”
When the US balked, Bibi refused to sign on to the Hebron Agreement, stopping the
peace process in its tracks: “Why does this matter? Because at that moment I actually
stopped the Oslo Accord.”

The settler comes back at him, however, interrupting Bibi’s self-congratulatory
rapture by reminding him of Hebron, and other concessions embodied in the Accord.
Netanyahu’s answer sums up the current position of his government. He cites his
father (“Not exactly a dove, as they say”) who advised him:

“It would be better to give two percent than to give a hundred percent. And that’s
the choice here. You gave two percent and in that way you stopped the withdrawal.
Instead of a hundred percent. The trick is not to be there and be broken. The trick is
to be there and pay a minimal price.”

This limns the current state of the current political dialogue in the Jewish state: the
debate is between those who want 98 percent and those who demand 100 percent.
(The only difference today, as opposed to 2001, is that the latter seem to have the
upper hand: witness the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his party of nutcases, who
are the Israeli equivalent of Al-Qaeda.)

What’s interesting – and embarrassing – about this leak isn’t the “revelation” that
Israel’s amen corner in America exerts a decisive influence on US policymakers: who
didn’t know that? The Israel lobby constantly boasts of it, while critics of US
subservience to Tel Aviv consistently decry it. What we didn’t know, however, is how
much the Israelis disdain us for it: “It’s absurd,” avers Bibi, and the settler lady,
laughing, agrees with him. She, being an ardent nationalist, cannot conceive of a
government that puts the interests of another nation over and above its own.
Perhaps Bibi has a better idea of how the Israelis pulled that particular rabbit out of
Uncle Sam’s hat, but emotionally it’s clear that he, too, finds the weakness of the
Americans incomprehensible.

After all, it’s odd when you think about it: why would the mightiest empire the world
has ever seen – a nation that spends more on its military establishment than all other
nations of the world combined – kowtow before a country barely the size of
Delaware? How is it that every attempt to heal this breach in our national security
armor and our interests in the region – the running sore of the Palestinian question –
has ended in utter failure, due entirely – as Bibi boasts – to the efforts of the Israelis
to undermine it? How does the prime minister of a dinky little country almost entirely
dependent on American largess stand up to the Emperor of the World – and win?

The answer is that American imperialism has spawned a global hegemon quite unlike
the empires of the past: the British, the French, the Romans, the Macedonians, and
as far back as it’s possible to know, all planted their flag on foreign soil to the glory
and in the name of the nation. That is, they were nationalists, albeit of the dangerous
outward-looking sort (as opposed to the inward-looking, contemplative variety that
held sway in the US until the turn of the last century, commonly derided by our elites
as “isolationists.”)

We, on the other hand, have a different self-conception. By no means do we ever
acknowledge that we are indeed an empire, except when someone is trying to be
provocative (or unless he’s a foreigner). We are supposed to be different from all the
rest, because, you see, America – according to both neoconservatives and liberals –
is a nation founded not on a sense of place, but around an abstract idea. To the
neocons, it’s the idea of meritocracy (which, they figure, puts them on top), to the
liberals it’s “equality” (which, they figure, puts them on top).

What they have in common, in spite of their superficial differences, is their insistence
on deviating from the traditional concept of nationhood and, instead, conjuring up an
ideological construct to put in its place, just as the Jacobins tore down the religious
artifacts of Paris and erected in their place a statue to the Goddess of Reason.
Thousands of lives were sacrificed on that bloody altar before it was over, just as
many hundreds of thousands have been offered up to the American god of
“Democracy” over the years.

Yet this democracy we claim to practice is the fatal chink in our armor, the means by
which a much weaker enemy can easily manipulate and even fatally undermine us
from afar, without any show of force except political strength. And this strength need
not be derived from the support of the American majority. Since most could care less
about foreign policy matters, this indifference allows a weird coalition of pro-Israel
neocons, Democratic party “liberals” in debt to pro-Israel donors, and fanatical
Christian “Zionists” to dominate the debate, capture elite opinion, and set US policy
on a course Bibi admits is “absurd.”

What this conundrum underscores is the truth of the Paulian-paleoconservative
principle, repeated many times in many different ways in this space, that you can’t
have a republic and an empire: it’s one or the other. This is true not only because
empires are constantly defending and extending their frontiers, and are in a state of
constant warfare, which requires a centralized authority and the consolidation of
State power, but also due to the peculiar vulnerability of democratic institutions to
foreign subversion. An America that refused on principle to interfere in the affairs of
other nations would have little or nothing to fear from foreign lobbyists and fifth
columnists: on the other hand, a “democratic” empire in which the emperor is
subjected to all sorts of political pressures, including the necessity of raising obscene
amounts of money just in order to keep his throne, is indeed “something that can be
easily moved,” as Bibi put it.

Take, for example, this new “Emergency Committee for Israel,” chaired by Bill Kristol,
Christian nutball Gary Bauer, and Rachel Abrams, wife of neocon heavy-hitter Elliott
Abrams, which is running ads in Pennsylvania against Democrat Joe Sestak. Sestak’s
crime: insufficient subservience to the Lobby. As an article in Politico put it:

“The new committee declined to disclose its funding – as a 501(c)4 advocacy
organization, it isn’t required to – but said it had raised enough to air its first ad,
starting this week, on Fox and CNN and during a Philadelphia Phillies game. The ad
attacks Sestak for signing a letter criticizing Israel’s blockade of Gaza while not
signing a defense of Israel circulated by the group AIPAC, and for appearing at a
fundraiser for the Council on American Islamic Relations, which it describes as an
“anti-Israel organization the FBI called a ‘front-group for Hamas’.”

Of course the new committee refused to disclose its funding – for the simple reason
that a good deal of the money that fuels the pro-Israel lobby in this country comes
from overseas. This was true in the early days of AIPAC and its predecessor, as Grant
Smith’s invaluable research has underscored, and there is little doubt this tradition is
continued unto the present day, with such groups as the Foundation for the Defense
of Democracies, JINSA, and the American “Friends of the IDF” having open links to
the Israeli foreign ministry and the IDF leadership. Ostensibly “American” groups that
subsidize Israeli settlements in the West Bank enjoy tax exempt status, while pro-
Palestinian groups that try to operate similarly are shuttered and their supporters
jailed as supporters of “terrorism.” Of the billions we send every year in “aid” to the
Jewish state, a significant portion returns to us in the form of pro-Israel propaganda.

Legally, the “Emergency Committee” is not required to disclose its funding – but they
ought to anyway. Unless, that is, they’re content to leave the impression Israel is
directly intervening in American elections. Or maybe that’s precisely what they intend.

David Frum gleefully called the committee “The New In Your Face Israel Lobby.” As
in-your-face as the anti-Americanism and outright contempt for Washington
expressed in that candid video of Netanyahu. It’s as if they’re saying to this
administration: “Go ahead and go after us. We dare you!”
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000),
Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (ISI,
2008), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the
Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a senior fellow at the
Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises
Institute. He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.