A shocking interview of Netanyahu's national security adviser, Uzi Arad, by the excellent Ari Shavit in Haaretz. The most shocking thing to me is the tone. Arad speaks in a smugly eloquent manner reminiscent of colonialists of 100 years ago, as if Israelis are the true representatives of civilization and there are all these wogs underfoot. Notice the self-enamored flourishes in the following discussion of a very serious subject, Palestinian self-determination, and his patronization in the words "stamps, parades, carnival."
Will a Palestinian state be established on the watch manned by you and Netanyahu?
That is a different story. I don't see among the Palestinians a process of truly drawing closer to acceptance of Israel and peace with Israel. I also do not see a Palestinian leadership or a Palestinian regime but a disorderly constellation of forces and factions. But possibly someone might come along and say I am an engineer of events; the depth doesn't interest me – I am going to produce an event. And within three years – presto – four Annapolises, two disengagements, global pyrotechnics. And then suddenly, in 2015, there is a Palestinian state. Stamps, parades, carnival. That could happen. A fragile structure, yes; an arrangement resting wholly on wobbly foundations. But it could happen. There could be a Palestinian state.
What you are saying is that there will not be true peace, but there might be an American peace event with Hollywood trappings.
Everyone with eyes to see, sees that there is a failure of Palestinian leadership. There is no Palestinian Sadat. There is no Palestinian Mandela. Abu Mazen is not vulgar like Arafat and not militant and extreme like Hamas
I would just note: there are more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. Israel has decapitated the leadership in Palestinian politics, purposely. Now Arad becomes more direct and sincere. And notice the feeling of abandonment creep in.
Do you feel that as a result of Israeli mistakes, the international attitude toward Israel today is extremely unfair?
Completely unfair. I say this in English openly: "extremely unfair." If you want to enforce the clauses of the Road Map, you have to enforce all of them. And security violations are more serious than building violations: Qassam rockets kill people, settlements do not. But I am a formalist. I am in favor of formalism. The thing is, that if they come to us and count every settlement, they have to apply the same indices and the same principles to the Palestinians. Anyone who does not do this is behaving unfairly, but he is also behaving unwisely. He is not advancing the Israeli-Palestinian peace that he would like to see.
Maybe the real problem is the settlements have made Washington fed up with us. Maybe the problem is that Obama and Clinton have lingering issues concerning Netanyahu, hence their chilly behavior toward him.
Now Shavit asks a good question. Smart. And better than the answer:
Isn't the alliance between Rome and Jerusalem wobbly? Don't you have the feeling that just as de Gaulle terminated a 15-year French alliance with Israel after the war in Algeria, Obama will terminate a 40-year American alliance with Israel after the war in Iraq?
And another, which elicits a reference to old old Bernard Lewis:
Is the Holocaust relevant to our strategic thought in an era of a nuclear Middle East?
Look at the way memory guides people like Netanyahu, who refers time and again to the 1930s. Bernard Lewis also said a few years ago that he feels like he is in the late 1930s. What did he mean? On the one hand, an imminent threat, rapidly approaching, and on the other, complacency and conciliation and a cowering coveting of peace. When I visited Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem] not long ago, I could not bear the psychological overload and left halfway through. I don't think there is an Israeli or a Jew who can be insensitive to the Holocaust. It is a painful black hole in our consciousness.
When you look around today, what is your feeling? Are we alone?
We are always alone. Sometimes we have partners and lovers and donors of money, but no one is in our shoes.
I still remember Roosevelt and all the wise and enlightened types of the American security hierarchy in the period of Auschwitz, and I have retained the lesson. In Jewish history and fate there is a dimension of unfairness toward us. We have already been alone once, and even the good and the enlightened did not protect us. Accordingly, we must not be militant, but we must entrench our defense and security prowess and act with wisdom and restraint and caution and sangfroid. Never again.
And what was the Israel lobby period of the 70s to 2009, chopped liver?
Related posts:
- Defied by Netanyahu again, Obama expresses… appreciation!?
- Security boss: ‘Hamas wants an end to conflict.’ Netanyahu: ‘Shut up’
- The drumbeat: Netanyahu adviser fears ‘the West is in trouble’ under Obama
- Lawrence Summers to Stephen Walt: ‘You Could Have Been National Security Adviser, Now It’s All Over’
- Warm n fuzzy Netanyahu hugs Obama and peace, but nuthin about a Palestinian state
{ 19 comments }
These feelings are understandable given the current actions of the American administration.
But eitan, Phil hits it right on the mark with his very last sentence in that there's just no way Israel could have felt "alone" from the 1970's and right up until last January while Bush II was in office. So what did it do when it wasn't "alone"? It didn't take the advice of its greatest friend the U.S. and went on building those settlements, on which issue it is now at least more "alone." So what does Arad expect? That Israel be embraced even when doing something illegal? When doing something that it's closest friend is telling it is an "obstacle" to its peace and security? There's a self-fulfilling, near-psychological nature about all this with Israel; it takes actions it knows is going to lead to its estrangment, and then not only condemns its estrangement, but uses it as a reason to take further estranging actions. You can't have it both ways dude.
If you're feeling like this now, imagine how the Palestinians felt during the Bush-era
Has there ever been a group that has been as coddled, as catered to, as excused for their greed and self centeredness, given more privilages and more exceptions and had more trillions given to them than the holocaust zionist? And what has the world gotten in return? Ingraditude, betryal, more greed, more outlawism,more selfishness., more disrespect, subversion, corruption… I am sick of it …let them go. Leave them to themselves. Just wash our hands of them. The US had no responsibility in what Hitler did to the jews, we have no guilt to assuage. End this farce now, three generations of zionist demands on the US and the world is two too many.
Israelis want to feel alone. They create this 'aloneness' so that they can further the justification of their actions. When I went on Birthright Israel, they did everything they could to make me feel 'alone' in America, my country. This the world is against us mentality de-normalizes the country. If they tried to work with the world and work within the world and normalize into that community like most other countries, then perhaps they would release their hold on the Palestinians. Instead, all is well in the name of security.
I use to be an avid reader of WWII military history and had a great uncle who was vice consul to Great Britian before and during the outbreak of the war and his on the ground knowledge of all the events spur my interest in the diplomatic and military details. For anyone interested in the real facts and story of what Roosevelt, the US and the allies did and didn't do,could and couldn't do to save the jews and why it was a military impossibility to go hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines into Germany on a rescue mission and why the constant zionist whine about bombing the rail road tracks was also rejected as killing more jews in the camps then saving any…read two books..Eisenhower's and also Robert Rosens book on Roosevelt and saving the jews. The zionist myth of US and the allies responsibility needs to be buried once and for all.
American that is an important point. An even bigger distortion of history is the current dispiction of the Munich deal that resulted in the German annexation of Czechoslovakia. What is ignored in contempory accounts is that Britain was militarily powerless to do anything about it. Just like it was powerless to stop Germany from seizing Poland.
Exactly which actions of the Obama administration to you think justify these feelings, and why?
You know, while I think Arad's logic has holes in it and while I think somewhat of an "industry" has grown up around the Holocaust you can't deny there's something enormously admirable about jews and their dogged determination to "never forget." The world and its times have not only changed so much in the last half-century but then also moves so fast today, who really can applaud humankind's seemingly infinite ability to forget history's victims and heroes? The victims of Bolshevism and communism in general are occasionally mentioned in this thread, but except for what can seem a very tiny and utterly private bunch of people here and there in the former communist countries who there tries to remember the ones who died under the tortures of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and etc.? And who in the U.S. really truly makes an effort even on Memorial Day to think about all of those Americans who suffered and died so terribly in our past wars? Who can name even one or two Medal of Honor winners? Or one or two of the victims of 9/ll, or one or two of the heroes of that day, such as those guys who tried rushing the hjijackers on the plane over Pennsylvania? This isn't to endorse the fetishization of any past event; real wisdom can't come from any single narrow experience. But I am reminded of Milan Kundera's great quote which does seem to possess at least one sound bit of wisdom: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." A double-edged sword, memory is.
Uzi sounds just like Witty! Talk, talk talk—no substance, no meaning.
"When I visited Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem] not long ago, I could not bear the psychological overload and left halfway through." Well, that is the purpose of Holocaust museums, I guess. Keep it 1938 forever, and never dare to imagine that one might no longer be a victim.
"Never forgetting" is different from "memorializing". How? An example would be that the way Israel "never forgets" the Holocaust. The emphasis at Yad Vashem is on hero stories during the Holocaust. They focus on people who fought back (see Yom HaShoah is Holocaust Remembrance and Partisan Day (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising)) and the righteous. This makes sense considering Israel's national myth (I don't mean "not true", I mean a story that shows values) of the underdog in the midst of a hostile world. Conversely, the way Americans remember the Holocaust is by emphasizing the words "tolerance" and "liberation". This coincides with the American myth of a tolerant democratic nation which sees the Holocaust as a representation of the evils of racism and intolerance. "Liberation" is a common word used when describing the American role in the Holocaust, as liberator of the camps. Amidst the myth-telling you have to pay attention to what is de-emphasized or left out. Both the Israeli and American Holocaust histories play down the reality of the Holocaust. I personally think the contemporary German memory manifestation is important: The new Holocaust Memorial is a sea of gray stones that resemble graves and look uniform from the top. But when you start walking through it it dips and weaves and you are lost, bewildered, in a cold, inhuman space. It's placed next to Brandenburg Gate, showing that this bewilderment, this coldness that people experienced, which is unquantifiable, is part of the German psyche going forward.
Well all that is very informative and interesting. Very interesting indeed, especially how there's so much myth in memory too apparently. Thank you very much indeed.
Israel (and its enabler AIPAC and myriad of crony agencies) is exactly like the spoiled brat who killed his parents and then copped a plea with the judge, "But your (dis)Honor, I am a poor orphan!"
Here's the quote from Uzi Arad's interview that bugs me: "You are an advocate of brute force, I threw at him. Me? Brute force? He smiled. I thought I was actually sensitive. In national and international issues, force is also a language. But I do not like wars between Jews. I prefer to direct the brute-force energies within me at the goyim. " To me this is racism. As a non-Jew, I resent being lumped into this term, especially as an object of someone's brute-force energies. Is there a word, Goyimism, to describe this particular form of racism? There should be. Stop Israeli racism. Stop Goyimism. End it now. Stop giving people a pass for their racist comments just because they are Jews, or let them off because they deny them falsely "for the record" when we all know the racism is real and the denial is just a further insult to our intelligence, what we tell the Goyim, to whom we are free to lie.
A better memorial would have been a concrete slab of two "pages." Similar to the cartoon depiction of the Ten Commandments Moses holds. On one side a list of facts concerning Jewish influence and %s during Versailles negotiations and thereafter, during the Weimar regime, and on the other Nazi influence during Hitler's regime. A second slab could list the titles and names of the Bolshevik leaders during this period. A third slab could be an endless rotation device, always subject by computer to new input of any visitor's conclusions.
Not worthy of you, Citizen. I suspect that on reflection you'll withdraw it.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but I sense the cynicism.
Uzi "Machine Gun" Arad's remarks even made Bibi uncomfortable. The Israeli Prime Minister realizes that there is no point taunting the Americans in their efforts to broker a peace deal. "Netanyahu also responded to Arad's skepticism toward the peace process with the Palestinians, who he said were apparently not ready to make the historic moves necessary for an accord. " http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1099552.html
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