Avigdor Lieberman arrived today in the US today for his first visit as Foreign Minister. He is scheduled to cover all the bases over the next two days meeting with Hillary Clinton, National Security Adviser James Jones, Joe Biden and leaders in Congress.
We’ve been giving a lot of attention to the recent Israel Project poll which shows American support for Israel dropping like a rock, and Lieberman seems aware of the trend in general. Over on the Peace Now’s blog, Ori Nir quotes Lieberman as telling the Knesset’s Security and Foreign Affairs Committee that Israel “‘cannot continue with a successful foreign policy without changing the way we are perceived’ internationally. He lamented: ‘We have a fundamental problem: we are not perceived well.’”
Israel’s plummeting international support is contrasted to a new poll which shows rising Israeli support for the agenda Netanyahu laid out on Sunday. Ha’aretz reports:
Public support for Netanyahu’s speech is sky-high, even though Israelis do not have illusions about the prime minister’s motives, which they generally attribute to American pressure. But it turns out that Israelis prefer a prime minister who does the right thing even if he does it for the wrong reasons. And most of the public thinks the right thing is the combination found in Netanyahu’s address: right-wing rhetoric mixed with the desire for peace, an undivided Jerusalem, opposition to the return of Palestinian refugees, a demand for defensible borders, and the words that made the big headline – a demilitarized Palestinian state.
The article adds, “The public liked the speech not just because it was based on the Israeli consensus, but also because of its tone: moderate with a desire for peace and casting the blame for a lack of peace on the Arabs.”
Increasingly the Israeli consensus and US consensus are at odds. It is also easy to imagine that Lieberman’s visit will highlight the difference in Israeli tone as well. This will be the Obama administration’s first chance to offer a substantive response to Netanyahu’s policy speech and engage with Avigdor Lieberman, himself a settler. Hopefully they recognize that the pressure they are exerting is working – and that it’s not enough.
"Increasingly the Israeli consensus and US consensus are at odds." That's where the Jewish Zionist fifth column inside the Democratic Party comes in, to pooh-pooh the differences and piece together a plan to buy more time for Israeli expansionism…a bombing, a war, some domestic contretemps. These Zionists and their liberal imperialist collaborators have been able to do a bang-up job with the Iran contretemps thus far, haven't they? One would hardly even know that a blatantly fascist Jewish supremacist like Lieberman was even visiting the States. There's hardly been a peep out of the left-liberal mainstream media. “Avignor Lieberman? Never heard of him,” is the State media’s new line. But then again, the Democrats and their liberal media apparatus have always been highly adept at hiding their own dirty laundry and blaming the Right for misadventures like the Iraq war that were clearly Left/Right Statist-Plutocrat joint ventures undertaken in no small portion to appease the powerful Jewish Zionist wing of the Democratic Party.
A. Lieberman: "We have a fundamental problem: we are not perceived well." Isn't this just a continuation of the attitude that has been prevalent in the government of Israel for years? The problems cannot be attributed to the oppression, dispossession nad ethnic cleansing carried out by the state of Israel, rather we should blame it on the perception of Israel by the international community. This is the exact response of Israel after the IDF condoned and supported massacres by their proxies at Sabra and Shatilla, which gave birth to the hasbara program, with the intent of controlling and managing world opinion and perception. Look, Israel, at the plank of wood in your eye before you try to analyze the perception in the eyes of the rest of the world. Take the blame for your actions and change them; the hour is getting late. PM
A. Lieberman: "We have a fundamental problem: we are not perceived well." MY COMMENT: "What we've got here is failure to communicate." (or a failure of perception) "Cool Hand Luke" – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061512/
Israel massages the menu while it poisons the meat. It has the sense of responsibility of a dead cockroach in its own kitchen.
Ed, in all fairness, there is an equally powerful Zionist wing in the Republican Party, or have you forgotten the last 8 years already? These Democrat/Republican, conservative/liberal, left/right dichotomies are just an illusion to make us think that there is a debate going on and that there is an opposition party to the one currently in power. On the issues that matter, there is one party rule. I think it's best to go after the root of the problem instead of hacking away at the branches.
It's just a case of bad marketing. Reminds me of the problem the Republican party has; it's not 8 years of Bush Jr policy, just bad marketing.
"Avigdor Lieberman arrived today in the US today for his first visit as Foreign Minister." Interesting, I could have sworn that, as a member of a now-defunct Foreign Terrorist Organization (Kahane Chai/Kach), as defined by the U.S. State Department, Lieberman is inadmissible for entry into the United States. It's really great that our government is going through these pains to give a waiver to an unrepentant racist, fascist terrorist in the interest of… peace?
And bad marketing is the "only" reason you can't sell Jesse Helms any more….
We let Gerry Adams in, didn't we?
It isn't the Jewish Zionists that worry me. I guess I don't see a whole lot about them, but if my aunt is anything like normal – progressive on everything but Israel – the latest bloodbath in Israel is causing some moral qualms. Her faith is being shaken. Not so sure as she once was. It is the Christian Zionists that I worry about.
Mr. Lieberman, if you want to demonstrate a sincere interest in advancing the peace process in the region, why not take the opportunity while on this visit to your benefactor to announce the immediate dismantlement of Israel's illegal nuclear weapons arsenal. This is a surefire way to get yourself onto the top of Mr. Obama's list of potential Prime Ministers for Israel. If his regime change plan for Iran succeeds, the Blue Revolution won't be far behind it. The prize could be yours sooner than you think. :-) If there is a 1% chance that Israeli scientists are helping Israel build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis…. It's about our response. To put it another way, it's not about evidence, it's about suspicion. (With grateful acknowledgment to D. Cheney.)
"we are not perceived well.'" No shit Sherlock….on what planet do these people live? Could it possibly be because of what they have been doing? Boggles the mind.
I’ve always said the Judeo-Christian Zionists and GOP imperialists are corrupt, evil, and racist to the core, too. That’s what I meant in repeated references to “the two party regime.” But everyone knows the American Statist Right is racist; not everyone knows the Statist Left is racist (Jewish supremacist), too, because the Left has always hid its racism behind a lot of hollow “progressive” rhetoric about “social justice” and “equality” even as it pursues blatantly Jewish supremacist policies for decades like Zionism, the Iraq war, engineering hugely disproportionate Jewish representation in its ranks at the national electoral level in Congress (and discriminating against blacks and Hispanics), doling out favorable policy to the Jewish Plutocrats who help finance it…on and on and on. The fact that Jewish supremacist left-liberals talk a good game actually makes them more dangerous than the ham-fisted GOP, which is not as sophisticated at hiding its racism as is the Jewish supremacist Left.
I certainly wouldn't equate Gerry Adams to Avigdor Lieberman in ideology. Adams can indeed be classified as a nationalist… maybe even "unrepentant" ;) , but he's definitely not a racist or a fascist. That's not to say I'm a fan of Gerry Adams by any stretch, but I don't want to turn this into a treatise on Irish politics. I see your point, though; however, the Provisional Irish Republican Army was removed from the FTO list in 2000, and Kahane Chai/Kach is still on it, despite the fact that it no longer exists as a functioning organization. I don't know what specific visit you're talking about, though, so I apologize if I'm being a little anachronistic here.
If anything, Adams seems more relevant to the Palestinian cause than the Israeli cause: http://www.sinnfein.org/documents/gerry.html
He recently visited Gaza as well, in April.