The Netanyahu Speech In The Light Of
The Zionist Socio Political Culture
By Salim Nazzal
16 June, 2009
Countercurrents.org
While I was waiting to listen to what Netanyahu will be saying I tried to push away the thought that choosing the Bar Ilan University known as a fortress for the right wing ideology is not a promising sign at all. Old Greek logicians related between the form and the content.
Right wing ideology in Israeli politics is different than its European counterpart which is the adopting of liberal economics and the reduction of the state apparatus.
In Israel it basically means using the bible in modern politics to justify the Zionist policy which denies native Palestinians the right of self determination.
It has been strongly proven to the whole world that the denial of the Palestinian legitimate rights is the source of the wars in Middle East. The Obama speech in Cairo was a brave step towards acknowledging this fact and addressing the Palestinian issue with new spirit towards a just and lasting peace. Not unexpectedly Netanyahu comes with nothing new except surface flexibility to avoid or to reduce the American pressure while holding the same policy its essence is to draw together two contradictory things: to continue the occupation and to maintain peace at the same time. This policy did not work in any place in the world, it did not work in the occupied Palestine in the past 60 years, and there is no single indication it would work in the future.
Netanyahu wants the Palestinians to be satisfied with a Palestinian flag empty of all national and human rights a tactic 10 years old Palestinian would not accept. The native people of South Africa got Bantu “states” with flags and airports in the apartheid era (Palestinians do not have an airport until now). This “beautification” did not make the apartheid regime any better, and the rest of the story is known to everybody. The South African struggle continued until the dismantling of the apartheid regime which paves the way towards a democratic South Africa for All its citizens.
Nevertheless I was not disappointed at all after listening to Netanyahu speech simply because I do not believe that the Israeli society is capable in the time being of producing an Israeli De Klerk.
The Israeli society as the late election has plainly demonstrated has moved rapidly towards the far right thinking accompanied with a visible withdrawal of the Israeli secular and left wing forces from the political scene. This makes the far right Israel today the 1930s Germany when the Nazis party took power after the collapse of the Weimar democratic republic. And since the leadership mirrors for the most part the society which elects it the Israeli incapability to update their thinking to new changes reflects a serious crisis in the Israeli society which is not mature to meet the requirement of genuine peace.
The emergence of De Klerk in the apartheid South Africa was not an individual phenomenon but rather an expression towards abandoning the racists’ thinking in the white society after the realization that it is no longer possible to run a society based on oppressing the native population. It does not seem that the Israeli society tends towards a radical change which could break with the past thinking which brought only wars and conflicts.
Otherwise how could we explain that the majority of the Israeli society accepts stealing the Palestinian land, murdering Palestinian almost on daily basis, and experimenting all torturous methods on Palestinians and all this have become an ordinary thing for the Israeli masses?
How could we believe that the society which manufactures T shirts with pictures of the murdered Palestinians kids, trying everything in its power to break the will of the Palestinians by turning life to hell to 3 Palestinian generations is able to produce a brave leadership which breaks with the past policy?
I strongly doubt this is possible in the present time and I think Netanyahu speech confirms this fact. It is not without a reason that the Lebanese paper Al Safir considers the speech a declaration of war.
Therefore the problem is not only related to a good or bad leader despite the significance of a brave leadership in the critical times .It is a problem related to century of Zionist political culture based on the principle of the might makes right. And since this principle has become the core of the Israeli collective thinking the talk about just peace at the present time is no more than wishful thinking. Some might argue that the American possible pressure can play a decisive role in changing the attitudes of the political class in the state of Israel. In that regard they got a point and I absolutely think that a strong joint Us European step is needed to set Obama speech into action but I doubt the Israeli society changes its politics without radical change in the core of the Zionist violent culture.
To end the article the conclusion which must be stated that the nature of conflict is obvious now to anybody with the minimum knowledge about the conflict in Palestine: it is a conflict between modernity with its values of self determination, human rights, equality and the pre modern Israeli thinking which still wanting to use God as a Land broker. This type of thinking which the world needs to stand firmly against, because it diverge the nature of the conflict from the occupied challenging the occupier into a conflict feeding the notion of cultural conflicts which might lead to a first world war between Muslims and Jews.
Dr. Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian-Norwegian historian in the Middle East, who has written extensively on social and political issues in the region. - [email protected]
