A
Jewish Hitler?
By Justin Raimondo
28 October, 2006
Antiwar.com
With
the entry of Avigdor Lieberman into the government as deputy minister
for "strategic threats" – essentially in charge of preparing
for war with Iran – Israel makes a qualitative step toward a regime
that increasingly resembles, in all its essentials, a rogue state, and,
I might add, potentially a very dangerous one.
Lieberman's views are notoriously
racist, and his rhetoric is invariably violent. He called for the execution
of Israeli Arab members of the Knesset who met with Hamas or didn't
celebrate Israel's Independence Day. His party, Yisrael Beytenu ("Israel
is our Home"), accuses Israeli Arabs of "dual loyalty"
on account of their ethnicity, and advocates the complete separation
of the Israeli and Arab populations in Palestine – in effect,
forced transfer. Lieberman and his followers vehemently oppose the peace
process, support the militant settlement movement, and are proud partisans
of ethnic cleansing.
In 2002, Lieberman averred
that he wouldn't flinch at ordering the IDF into the occupied territories
on the West Bank for 48 hours, an operation designed to "Destroy
the foundation of all the [Palestinian] authority's military infrastructure
… not leave one stone on another. Destroy everything." Civilian
targets included: that same year he also argued the Israeli air force
should bomb all Palestinian commercial centers, including banks and
even gas stations.
Lieberman's portfolio as
minister in charge of strategic threats allowed the editors of Ha'aretz
to quip "Lieberman is a strategic threat!" Here, after all,
is a man who has threatened to bomb Tehran, the Aswan Dam, and Beirut.
His entry into the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in coalition
with Kadima and Labor, marks an ominous shift in the stance of the Jewish
state. As Ha'aretz put it:
"The choice of the most
unrestrained and irresponsible man around for this job constitutes a
strategic threat in its own right. Lieberman's lack of restraint and
his unbridled tongue, comparable only to those of Iran's president,
are liable to bring disaster down upon the entire region."
Up until this point, the
stance of the government has always been set forth in the context of
the American plan for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state,
the so-called road map, which includes a freeze on Israeli settlements
and the return of some land claimed by the settlers to the Palestinians.
No more. With the inclusion of Lieberman in the governing coalition
– and in such a key post – the Israelis are signaling that
they've had enough of being dictated to by the Americans. This also
dramatizes a sea-change in Israeli politics: ideas that were generally
considered out of the mainstream – and out of the question, as
far as actual implementation – are now up for consideration.
Yet the line that separated
Lieberman, the Jewish equivalent of David Duke, from the Israeli "mainstream"
has been increasingly hard to discern for quite some time. As Arthur
Neslen put it in the Guardian recently:
"The most worrying thing
about Lieberman is not that his ideas exist on a plane outside Israel's
political continuum but that, in many ways, they are close to its dead
center. The proposal to transfer 'the triangle,' an area around Um al-Fahm
where 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently live, was first
brought into the press spotlight at the end of 2000 at Israel's most
prestigious annual policy-making forum, the Herzliya conference.
"The then prime minister
Ariel Sharon publicly floated the idea again in February 2004. Opposition
from Washington to a de facto violation of international law reportedly
took the plan out of the headlines, but it remained in the comment pages.
"In December 2005, Uzi
Arad, a former Mossad director, government foreign policy adviser and
current head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy, which organizes
the Herzliya conference, resurrected the idea in an article for [The]
New Republic."
I have covered the growing
influence of Israeli extremism for years, and worried over the rise
of what seems, at first, a hopeless oxymoron: Jewish fascism. That an
ideology that has proved so harmful – indeed, near fatal –
to the Jewish people should gain a foothold in the Jewish state seems
too bizarre even for a post-9/11 reality that increasingly resembles
Bizarro World. Yet here we are, confronted with the specter of Avigdor
Lieberman, the would-be Hitler, currently the second most popular politician
in the running for prime minister, right behind Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Jerusalem Post reports
Lieberman originally pushed for the internal security post, but this
was vetoed by Israel's Attorney General, who told Olmert that Lieberman
must be kept entirely out of the realm of law enforcement. The Russian
immigrant, a former bouncer in a bar, is being investigated for his
ties to Russian underworld figures: money funneled into his political
activities from abroad apparently came from some pretty dubious sources.
That a gangster of Lieberman's
ilk is now a serious contender for the post of prime minister and his
fascist party is rising in popularity are measures of how the Israeli
settler colony, originally designed along left-wing Zionist-utopian
lines, has hardened into a national socialist Sparta.
Lieberman's prominent position
in the Israeli government raises some new considerations when contemplating
the future of the long-standing "special relationship" between
the U.S. and Israel – and at least one very disturbing possibility.
To begin with, if Lieberman's
views now represent those of his government, at least when it comes
to matters related to his portfolio, then it seems clear Tel Aviv is
bent on war with Iran. The Europeans are already reacting with distaste
to the prospect of having to deal with him: before meeting with him,
Javier Solana, the EU negotiator, declared he disagreed with Lieberman
about "everything." One presumes the U.S. State Department
holds similar views, but others in the Bush administration might prove
more tolerant of Lieberman and even sympathetic. In any case, the War
Party in the U.S. is likely to find him very useful: Lieberman's fiery
rhetoric is sure to set off sparks in a very volatile region of the
world, one that is just waiting to explode.
Secondly, what does Lieberman's
ascent tell us about the future of Lebanon and the prospects for another
Israeli invasion? The minister in charge of strategic threats will not
be restricted to just making threats, but will be at least partially
empowered to carry them out. If I were a resident of Beirut, I would
start packing.
Finally, it must be remembered
that Israel is a member of the nuclear club, with at least 400 nukes
and perhaps more at its disposal. The chilling question is this: do
we really want to see Israel's nukes fall into the hands of a madman
like Lieberman?
The image of the "mad
mullahs" of Tehran brandishing a nuclear scimitar is routinely
conjured to frighten Westerners into supporting military action against
Iran, and there is some legitimacy to this fear, although not nearly
as much as the War Party would have us believe. After all, Iran doesn't
have nukes, yet: Israel, however, does have them, and we have to wonder
what use Prime Minister Lieberman will make of them.
Not that I am predicting
Lieberman will achieve that office – although I wouldn't rule
it out, either. The point I'm making is that Israel is moving in a new
and very disturbing direction, one that requires us to take a fresh
look at U.S.-Israeli relations and reevaluate our level of financial
and political support. If the Israeli government is going extremist,
the moral and strategic implications of our continued assistance are
grave: will we be complicit as Israel "transfers" hundreds
of thousands of Arabs, many of them Israeli citizens? As hard-right
ideologues embark on a campaign of aggression aimed at creating a "Greater
Israel," will U.S. tax dollars continue to fuel the Israeli war
machine?
The U.S. has made no comment
on Lieberman's elevation. How long we can keep up our embarrassed silence
is going to be the measure of the Israel lobby's strength. Their power,
once without serious challenge, is waning. As the ongoing investigation
into spying on behalf of Israel by AIPAC uncovers the shocking extent
to which our "ally" has penetrated our security and probed
our deepest secrets, the Israel lobby is facing a major crisis. They
aren't just facing a legal challenge, but also an intellectual one from
professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of the University of
Chicago and Harvard respectively, whose now famous study of "The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is proving almost too much
for them to handle. However, what's really undermining the formerly
impregnable position of "the Lobby," as Mearsheimer and Walt
call it, is the sudden outbreak of honesty, and a growing refusal on
the part of many in the intellectual community to kowtow to threats
and smears. This has caught the Lobby off guard, and now they are confronted
with the horribly unattractive figure of Lieberman, who makes Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – often likened to Hitler by Western
commentators – seem relatively reasonable. What a public relations
headache!
Oh, but don't worry: they'll
think of something. You can't prettify a man like that, so the strategy
will be to downplay Lieberman's importance. Yet his entry into the government
is quite significant, for Israel and for the world, in that it marks
the end of the honeymoon era in relations between Israel and the West,
particularly the United States. Israel and its Western amen corner have
always insisted that the Jewish state is part of the West, yet the rise
of Lieberman tells us something quite different.
Lieberman's appeal is directed
at the large Russian immigrant population: these people are poor, resentful
of their low status, and imbued with the same receptivity to authoritarianism
that has long afflicted their Russian motherland. The rapid rise of
Lieberman's political fortunes means that Israel is turning away from
the West and asserting its Asiatic identity. It is no more a Western
democracy than, say, Turkey or Lebanon – and, if Lieberman rises
all the way to the top, considerably less so.
Copyright 2006 Antiwar.com
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