Uri Avnery on former security chiefs Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin trying to stop the Netanyahu government-- goes from the failure to negotiate with Palestinians to the death of Netanyahu's father:
According to Diskin – and who would know better? – Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran is leading to a world-wide catastrophe. Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb, but, on the contrary, it will hasten this effort, this time with the support of the world community.
Going further than Dagan, he stated that the only factor preventing peace negotiations with the Palestinians is Netanyahu himself. Israel can make peace with Mahmoud Abbas at any time, and missing this historic opportunity will bring disaster upon Israel....
THE MAN accused by his security advisers[ ]of messianic tendencies was exposed to personal scrutiny by another event this week.
His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, died at age 102, having remained of clear mind to the end. At the public funeral, he was eulogized by Binyamin. As could be expected, it was a kitschy speech. The son addressed his dead father in the second person – (“You taught me”…”You formed my character” etc) - a vulgar practice I find particularly distasteful. He also shed tears on camera.
There is no doubt that the father had a huge influence on his son. He was a professor of history, whose whole intellectual life was centered on one topic: the Spanish inquisition – a traumatic chapter in Jewish history comparable only to the Holocaust.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu was an extreme rightist, obsessed by the idea that Jews might be exterminated at any moment, and therefore cannot trust any Goy. He held Menachem Begin in contempt, considering him a softy, and never joined his party. His intellectual attitude was reinforced by a personal trauma: his eldest son, Yoni, the commander of the spectacular Entebbe raid, was the only soldier killed in this operation.
It seems that he didn't have such a high opinion of his second son. He once remarked publicly that Binyamin was unfit to be prime minister, but would make a good foreign minister – an uncannily accurate judgment, if one sees the job of the foreign minister as marketing.
The home in which “Bibi” grew up was not a very happy one. The father was a deeply embittered man. As a historian, he was never accepted by the academic world in Jerusalem, who disavowed his theories....
All this shaped the character and world view of “Bibi” – the specter of imminent national annihilation, the role model of the fiercely rightist father, the shadow of the older and much more admired brother. When Binyamin now speaks endlessly about the coming Second Holocaust and his historical role in preventing it, this need not be just a ploy to divert attention from the Palestinian issue or to safeguard his political survival. He may – frightening thought!!! – actually believe it.
The picture that emerges is exactly that painted by Yuval Diskin: a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father – altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.
Yet this is the man who, according to all opinion polls, is going to win the upcoming elections, just four months from now.
So what else have you got to cheer me up?
An Alternative to Bibism
Well, that didn’t cheer me up at all. But thanks for trying.
Great another specialist psychologist Uri Avnery .
That is almost funny.
He was a professor of history, whose whole intellectual life was centered on one topic: the Spanish inquisition – a traumatic chapter in Jewish history comparable only to the Holocaust.
Historian Tom Segev writes about the entries in Ben Gurion’s diary about the Elder Netanyahu. Ben Gurion reveals that Netanyahu proposed that he be given a quarter of a million dollars to set-up a self sufficient covert propaganda campaign for the Prime Minister’s office in the USA. Netanyahu would have been ostensibly working as a university history professor:
And then, Netanyahu came to the heart of the matter, as Ben-Gurion wrote: “He believes that our public-relations mechanism in the U.S. is weak and he is offering his services. He will get a year’s leave from the encyclopedia. His cover will be that he will be lecturing at some university. His subject is Jewish history. He wrote a book on Abarbanel. We must set up a non-Jewish team: from among the most important authors, journalists, congressmen. We need to acquire those who hate us – or at least make them neutral. For the first half a year we might be called upon to provide about a quarter of a million dollars. Later he will find money in America itself. There is no value in appearances by Zionist Jews. American figures are needed, and it is necessary that it not be felt in the least that this entity has ties to the state of Israel, but in practice it has to answer to the Prime Minister’s Office, because propaganda has to adapt itself to policy.”
Ben-Gurion told his visitor that he did not agree with all of his comments. “A great deal has been done in terms of rallying public support,” he reportedly said, “and in fact the U.S. government has assisted us a great deal since the day the state was established,” but he concurred that propaganda must be strengthened. He promised to give him an answer within a week. After Netanyahu left, Ben-Gurion immersed himself in Spinoza’s writings about fear.
Ben-Gurion’s diary does not tell us whether the proposed mission was carried out. In those years Netanyahu frequently spent time in the U.S., and in the 1960s he became a lecturer in Judaic Studies at Cornell University.
In June 1968 Netanyahu paid another visit to Ben-Gurion, by then in retirement, and once again proposed a plan for Israeli propaganda in America. We must take action against the American left, he said referring to what was then called the New Left. Almost all are communist Jews, Netanyahu told Ben-Gurion, and once more proposed concentrating Israeli propaganda on the danger of Soviet penetration of the Mideast: If the Soviet Union takes over the Middle East, it will control the United Nations, he suggested arguing, and praised two of the Israel supporters he had found on the right flank of the Republican Party: Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.
link to haaretz.com
Uri Avneri is probably considered a Goy (by choice) in Israel since he doesn’t believe in Jewish-Israeli exceptionalism. I wonder why he hasn’t left Israel for good.
‘People think the Holocaust ended,’ said Benzion Netanyahu in 2009 to Channel 2’s political correspondent Amit Segal. ‘The Holocaust didn’t end. It continues all the time.’
link to haaretz.com
Oh yes we understand Benjamin Natanyahu’s pathology only too well.
so obsessed with the holocaust is the zionist entity’s prime minister that it’s difficult
not to associate him with dr strangelove’s “how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.” he’s long post-due being put away for safe keeping in some mid-atlantic site, the isle of saint helene, for example.
“Yet this is the man who, according to all opinion polls, is going to win the upcoming elections, just four months from now.”
In comments at a discussion at Wilson Center a month or so ago, Ephraim Sneh said he expected the leadership in Israel would change shortly. This was surprising; Sneh has been joined at the hip to Bibi — or joined at the guilt-trip, he attended but could not save Yoni Netanyahu at Entebbe.
Sneh made his mark in Israeli politics in 1992 when he hyperbolized Iran’s nuclear programs and made the Iran nuke file Target Number Uno for Israel, the USSR having faded.
Bibi said in 1998 that the Allies failed the Jews because they could have bombed the railroad tracks from Hungary to Auschwitz but did not. He came here this year and told us again we showed we did not care by not bombing Auschwitz. For this reason, he said, Israel must always exist as Israel, the safe haven for Jews against those Gentiles born each generation who are natural-born Jew-haters, just as they’ve been throughout recorded history all the way back to biblical days.
Remember all those standing ovations Bibi got from our Congress?
“Remember all those standing ovations Bibi got from our Congress?”
Yes, bought and paid for by AIPAC, et al.
Yeah…
“The picture that emerges is exactly that painted by Yuval Diskin: a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father – altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.”
…With Nukes.
I don’t know how much the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists factor actual crazy people being actually in charge of a few hundred nukes and long-range delivery systems, into their Doomsday Clock appraisal (5 minutes ’til at the moment), but they should.
link to thebulletin.org
Sent them this article link. A tick of the Clock in the wrong direction is a fairly significant thing. If Israeli nuke-amplified warmongering was the cause of such a tick, it would be significant PR setback for Israel’s self-perceived “interests.”
It is said that Israel could make peace with Abbas any time. Perhaps A would sign anything put in front of him, at least so long as it resembled the much-canvassed 2ss, but that is not altogether an encouraging fact. It’s not certain that his signature on a piece of paper could be converted into a really operative settlement in reality. Even if it could, the Israelis know that the standard 2ss, even with a few modifications, is so screamingly unfair that the mass of Palestinians could never accept it with long-term commitment and that once they were ‘independent’ they would set themselves to undo it.