Earlier today we asked how Obama will respond to an Israeli government that includes a fascist party that ran on a racist anti-democratic platform. The answer in one word - favorably. From Ha'aretz:
U.S. State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters that the U.S. was looking forward to working with whatever new government is formed in Israel.
At a Washington press conference, Wood said that the Obama administration will not speculate on what kind of government will be formed. Wood called Israel a thriving democracy and said the administration intends to pursue a robust agenda once the new Israeli leadership is established.
"The government needs to be formed. We will hold discussions with the government once it's in place. The important thing is we're looking forward to working with whoever heads it. It's up to the Israeli people, not the Israeli government, who will be in it," he said.
Referring to the possible inclusion of anti-Arab right wing Yisrael Beiteinu in the future coalition, Wood said "It's not for the U.S. to make this kind of characterization, it's the choice the Israeli people made.
And just as a reminder, here's what the US had to say after Hamas was elected by the Palestinian people in a transparent and democratic election:
Yes, Hamas was elected, but Hamas was also elected to act responsibly, and Hamas has not acted responsibly,” says Secretary Rice. “They have refused important international agreements that Palestinians signed and have held to for more than a decade. They have refused to renounce violence. It’s very hard to imagine a partner for peace that refuses to renounce violence and refuses to recognize the right of the other partner to even exist.
Lieberman ran on a platform that openly threatened to expel over 20% of Israel's citizens based on a loyalty oath. I honestly wonder what Lieberman would have to do before a US administration accused him of "not acting responsibly." I wonder what any Israeli politician needs to do to not be considered a "partner for peace." (Adam Horowitz)
I don't think there's anything Israel can do that would cause the US not to support it. As Ariel Sharon once told Shimon Peres when he expressed fears of American pressure, "we the Jewish people control America."
The faster the real Obama, heavily influenced by AIPAC, shows itself to all the goodwilling people who cheered him on, the better. It's just as Walt and Mearsheimer said: Even between candidates who are polar opposites on every other issue (think Obama and Bush), when it comes to Israel, they're all the same.
The truth about this is coming out slowly, but it's coming out. Thanks to Adam, Phil et al.
Let's just hope that is standard diplomatic happy-talk. Israel is in the middle of forming a government and I doubt if anything the US says unfavorably about a certain party would be very productive.
The following article about the rise of the post-1978 settler Lieberman in Israeli politics by Ben Lynfield appeared in a December 2006 issue of The Nation, and it might be worth re-reading in 2009:
When the Galilee town of Sakhnin's predominantly Arab soccer team was awarded the Israel Cup in 2004, Avigdor Lieberman was not in the mood to bestow congratulations. Instead, Lieberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) party, implied in a newspaper interview that the team, Hapoel Bnei Sakhnin, would one day be expelled from Israel to the West Bank. "Sakhnin will not play in the Israeli league and will represent the other [Palestinian] league. They may even call it Hapoel Shechem [Nablus]," Lieberman joked.
Far from his nakedly anti-Arab approach disqualifying him from the political mainstream, Lieberman is today its rising star. He was welcomed into the ruling coalition in October as "minister for strategic threats" and is now the main ally and crutch of faltering Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
An immigrant from the former Soviet Union who lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of Nokdim, Lieberman is stoking anti-Arab sentiment and exploiting insecurity and disillusionment after the fiasco of last summer's Lebanon war. Top office, or at least the Defense Ministry, is a realistic goal for Lieberman, a shrewd political tactician who helped Benjamin Netanyahu gain election as Prime Minister in 1996 and served in Ariel Sharon's Cabinet. "If elections were held now, based on the polls, he could presumably be either prime minister or demand any other ministry he wanted," says Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
If Lieberman's pronouncements are to be taken seriously–and there is no obvious reason they should not be–a Lieberman government would exclude some Arab citizens from Israel, would expel others who refuse to sign a loyalty-to-Zionism oath, would turn Gaza into Grozny and would execute Arab members of the Knesset who talk to Hamas or mark Israel Independence Day as the anniversary of the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948.
Many Israelis–and many Americans–are sleeping through the rise of Lieberman. Others are through their actions facilitating the ascendance of fascist ideas in Israel. Lieberman is more than kosher as far as Washington is concerned. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice welcomed him at the State Department on December 11, a day after he was featured at a forum, sponsored by the Brookings Institution's Saban Center, that also included Bill Clinton, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and several other members of Congress.
There have been voices of alarm inside Israel. The daily Ha'aretz has warned that the appointment of the "unrestrained and irresponsible" Lieberman "constitutes a strategic threat in its own right," and Hebrew University political scientist Ze'ev Sternhell says, "Lieberman is perhaps the most dangerous politician in the history of the State of Israel." Sternhell believes Lieberman poses a greater threat to democracy than previous far-right politicians because Lieberman has not been confined to the margins and because "he has a genuine social power base among the Russian immigrants and in the lower middle class among people who think the Knesset and Supreme Court have too much power."
Like Hamas, which swept the Palestinian elections last January, Lieberman, though striving for power through the ballot box, believes democracy is at best a secondary value. In a September interview he said: "The vision I would like to see here is the entrenching of the Jewish and the Zionist state. I very much favor democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important."
Lieberman has no tolerance for pluralism. In one of his first pronouncements as minister, he called for making Israel "as much as possible" a homogeneous Jewish state. His party's platform includes a plan under which some Arab areas of Israel would be transferred to the Palestinian Authority, albeit without consulting the Arab citizens. "In exchange" Israel would annex large West Bank settlements. In his book My Truth, Lieberman argues that the Arab minority poses the greatest threat to Israel's future. Ridding Israel of Arabs is necessary because they are disloyal, he says. Lieberman's platform could be used to disenfranchise the Arab minority, now one-fifth of the population, or pave the way for its expulsion.
Disenfranchising Arab citizens, whose votes are crucial to the Israeli left wing, would have the advantage of keeping the right wing in power for the foreseeable future. In some ways this would be a radical departure from a tradition of universal suffrage as old as the state itself. At the same time, however, the idea of stripping Arabs of the vote draws on concepts well rooted in the discourse of both the Israeli right and the left. In recent years Ariel Sharon advanced the idea of a "separation," in which Israel would solve the conflict with the Palestinians without any Palestinian input and by erecting a wall inside occupied territory that keeps West Bank Arabs out. The left wing, for its part, has for many years used the phrase "demographic problem" to describe Arabs.
Along with Netanyahu, Lieberman is the prime beneficiary of the sea change in Israeli politics after the Lebanon war. Israel's leaders rushed into the conflict without weighing alternatives and showed a disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians and even their own soldiers. Most Israelis cannot forgive Olmert or the hapless Defense Minister Amir Peretz–who just a year ago was the great new progressive hope of the Labor Party–for their inept handling of the campaign. In political terms, the major casualty of the war was Olmert's "convergence" plan to unilaterally withdraw from isolated West Bank settlements while annexing large settlement blocs. Olmert now has a void instead of an agenda. The entire power structure has been discredited–but not Lieberman, who was not associated with the Lebanon debacle and who unabashedly adheres to the same stances he held in opposition.
With no background in security and a record of threats against other countries, Lieberman is an unlikely choice for handling Israel's strategic challenges, including how to deal with Iran, or for joining in decisions about Israel's nuclear arsenal. But for Olmert, it seems, Israeli security comes second to political expediency. "What totally disgusts me is the fact that Olmert saw fit to create a security ministry for a man who is a security liability for Israel. He is prepared to use Israeli security as a political goodie," says the Jaffee Center's Alpher.
Democracy is also for sale in Olmert's Israel. Legislation Lieberman has prepared, for which Olmert mustered Cabinet approval, would transfer many of the Knesset's powers to the prime minister–powers that will be in Lieberman's hands if he is elected. The plan does away with no-confidence votes, calls for direct election of the prime minister and allows the prime minister to appoint a Cabinet without Knesset approval. The prime minister would not have to wait for Cabinet or parliamentary approval to promulgate emergency regulations that could overturn existing laws. "Lieberman wants a Putin-style regime here," says Tel Aviv University political scientist Yoav Peled. "I don't think it can happen under the current government, but it's very significant, because this is the plan he will implement when he has the power. And pretty soon he will have the power."
Well, at least we got some change up in Washington DC. Even if everything stays the same, at least we got that. We really gotta support our first black president. The color of his skin is a message to the whole world: it's not just whitey who's gonna screw you. Screwing you is a color-blind American principle. The only thing that changed is the sheets.
Blah: "The color of his skin is a message to the whole world: it's not just whitey who's gonna screw you. Screwing you is a color-blind American principle."
Well, you're right about that. The world gets its panties all wet over the color (or ethnicity or tribe) of anyone who wins the presidency or prime minister's job somewhere. It doesn't matter. Nothing really ever gets better. Pretty soon the attorney general will be pushing water-boarding as a harmless alternative to electro-shock therapy for terrorists. The only thing that really ever changes is the public's sense of disillusion. When you actually think that a politician might be different it hurts that much more when you realize that nothing changes, they all lie and we're all fools.
So, David Duke is not OK here, but he's kosher over there. Kosher is, as Kosher does. It' s all about rank separation, from food to animals, to humans.
Even between candidates who are polar opposites on every other issue (think Obama and Bush), when it comes to Israel, they're all the same.
For the record, Obama and Bush are hardly polar opposites on every other issue. The rhetoric is seemingly oppositional; the reality is much more closely aligned.
When it comes to Israel, there's absolutely no difference at all, and there hasn't been for a long time.
Update on the Cornell University demonstration, which students desecrated for a second time yesterday: it looks like overnight, someone came and rearranged all of the memorial flags for the dead gazans into a giant star of david. Pictures will probably make it to the web at some point today.
I'm sure the MSM will get right on it.
Oy, can't wait for these pictures!
So the flag now represent 1300 members of hamas leadership that is planning genocide. How interesting.
Gaza controversy continues, escalates as flags become giant Star of David
Giant star of david made by vandals reminded people of black swastika. Said people superimposed over said star a peace sign.