A friend writes:
Did you two see Benjamin Netanyahu’s Youtube interview posted yesterday? He claims again and again that Israel fully provides equal rights for Arabs in Israel. I wrote down the claim: “There’s only one country in the heart of the Middle East that has no tremors, no protests. That’s Israel. Because we’re the only one where we respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy full civil rights in Israel. It’s the only place in this entire vast expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete equality before the law.”
This is crazy stuff. No protests? What, then, were the two intifadas? How about protest within Israel? And a claim of full civil rights within a week of the vote on the Nakba and small communities of under 400 families in the Galilee and Negev? Does he think nobody’s paying attention? Harold Meyerson wrote about the latter piece of legislation on the op-ed page of the Washington Post today.
He consistently returns to this equality misrepresentation throughout the interview. But the first time is about 5:17 in.
About 8 minutes in he says, nobody expects us to dismantle these places (referring to some settlements); “fair-minded” people recognize Israel will keep these areas. In claiming this, he’s implicitly dismissing a large number of people who do, in fact, regard the settlements as illegal and if not to be dismantled then to be handed over to Palestinians as some form of compensation for decades of illegal occupation.
It’s probably worth checking out the claim (including from Netanyahu in the interview) that Palestinians never made settlements a pre-condition. I’d like to see what was said about Har Homa/Jabal Abu Ghneim in the mid-1990s. I remember enormous concern then.
About 8:15 in the (openly biased) interviewer says “Ban Ki-moon practically told Israel to surrender and give up all settlement activities.” Netanyahu responds, “I think anyone in his right mind knows that this is part of the ancestral Jewish homeland…but it can’t be that we kick out 350, 400,000 Israelis who live there.” Is he suggesting Ban Ki-moon isn’t in his right mind?
Later, he says, “Around us, you know, there’s a vast expanse of darkness.”Joseph Conrad couldn’t have said it better.
