Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: Platon)
Looks like Benjamin Netanyahu has been reading Nate Silver and is getting ready for life in with a second Obama administration. Netanyahu is making headlines from a bellicose interview he gave with Israeli television reiterating that Israel will attack Iran with or without American support.
From the New York Times:
“When David Ben-Gurion declared the foundation of the state of Israel, was it done with American approval?” Mr. Netanyahu asked in an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 on Monday night. “When Levi Eshkol was forced to act in order to loosen the siege before 1967, was it done with the Americans’ support?
“If someone sits here as the prime minister of Israel and he can’t take action on matters that are cardinal to the existence of this country, its future and its security, and he is totally dependent on receiving approval from others, then he is not worthy of leading,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “I can make these decisions.”
The same news program that featured the interview with Netanyahu also reported that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the Israeli military to “prepare for an imminent attack on the Iranian nuclear program” in 2010, but were rebuffed by the Israeli military and intelligence establishment who saw the two as over stepping their bounds and attempting to “steal a war.”
Meanwhile, perhaps taking advantage of the world’s eyes being focused on Dixville Notch, the Israeli government announced it is moving forward with construction on 1,200 new settlement homes in East Jerusalem and Ariel.
From the Associated Press:
The government announced late Monday that it was accepting bids from contractors to build the homes in two Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem, Ramot and Pisgat Zeev. It also reopened bidding for 72 homes in Ariel, deep inside the West Bank.
Anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now accused the government of issuing the tenders when the world’s attention is on the American presidential election. The projects were all originally announced months ago.
Daniel Seidemann posted a map of the building tenders on Twitter:
(h/t Ira Glunts)
I hope that tomorrow morning Obama,s first call will be to Niet-and yahu to lay out a few new rules of engagement in the coming 2nd term.
You can only get kicked in the posterior so many times before you kick back.
Show some cahones Barak.
Call me cynical but when even nutjobs like Dershowitz, who publicly calls Obama the new “Neville Chamberlain”, gets invited into the WH again and again and is consulted by Obama on the I/P then I don’t think Obama will change much, if anything.
Neither do I think that Ed Koch, Haim Saban and other neo-facists would support him unless they got pretty explicit guarantees from Obama not to actually try to do anything. Just like Romney gave explicit guarantees to Sheldon Adelson before Adelson took the plunge.
We’ll not know for sure before many years. Probably long after Obama is out of office and Apartheid is crumbling in Israel, decades ahead.
Either way, Obama will only try to prevent a war with Iran. Bibi knows he can approve as many settlements as he wants. And by going parabolic with 1200 new settlements on election eve he shows very clearly who’s boss and it ain’t Obama.
It’s all Zionist manipulation; the key is the increase in illegal Israeli settlements, more Jews on more land. Bibi knows the Jewish Israeli well and they like the settlements, and everybody can see neither Obama nor Mitt will do anything effective to end ever more land grabs, more “facts on the ground” that will determine Israel’s future, and as to that, Jewish Israelis long ago concluded more land is always better, both for basic strategic military reasons and to fulfill their biblical chosen dream of Greater Israel, as well as to provide negotiation pawns as if the Jews involved had a right to that land in the first place that’s been recognized by anyone except Israel and influential diaspora Jews.
“When David Ben-Gurion declared the foundation of the state of Israel, was it done with American approval?”
It was, indeed.
The decision to cover Israel’s whimpering ass in 1973 when supplies were running out was also American.
Over 50 UN vetos supporting Israel have been American
Figure shows the label “Terrestrial Jerusalem”. As distinguished, I suppose, from “Celestial”?
N’yahu is really pushing here. Doing what (as NYT says) Israel has always done, do for itself what it wants to do. First (against majority opposing local opinion but no particular military resistance) it created itself “vi et armis”. A criminal act in the usual circumstances of armed acts against the people and property of a place.
Thereafter, finding itself unloved and unwanted (as any criminal hoarding its violently acquired gains would naturally be), it fought war after war, occasionally in defense, mostly in offensive (aggressive and therefore illegal) wars. And now, more talk of doing it again. No end in sight. Indeed, Israel has never (I believe) had a politician who has spread before his countrymen a vision of long-lasting peace. Instead, its politicians have had only a vision of never ending warfare.
I wonder if that is where Bush got his idea for a war-without-end against “terror” (by which he meant endless USA attacks on people making armed resistance to the USA’s ever more fierce and ever more unwelcome world-wide imperium).
And I wonder if the ease with which the USA accepted aggressive war-without-end explains why the USA accepts the OIL and COAL and GAS war-without-end on the natural environment which produces and enhances Global Warming. All sense of caution, morality, and fear of blow-back is absent.
Can anyone suggest a live feed of US election reports, I would prefer it to watching it on our own two major public channels or the private one that will cover it.
Ideally with a link?
I would be very, very pleased.
@ LeaNder:
RT America is streamed live on the Internet.
link to rt.com
Also, Democracy Now! will cover the election night live.
link to democracynow.org
@ LeaNder:
It just occured to me. You can also watch the election coverage on CNN (Europe).
link to edition.cnn.com
Last night I talked to a somewhat tipsy Lufthansa stewardess. Suddenly she shifted the conversation to the US election and told me she votes for Obama.
I said: “but you don’t have American citizenship”. She replied: “that doesn’t matter, I vote with my heart.”
She replied: “that doesn’t matter, I vote with my heart.”
She sounds like a lovely woman. And I bet her heart is in the right place.
Thanks for the anecdote.
thanks, Lefty, I had a phone date but it seems “my girl” is busy. Maybe we do not need to listen to either US or German talking heads?
@ LeaNder:
Your girl? Does that mean you are gay/bi?
I am not going to follow any live election coverage. I opt for sleeping in my bed. That’s what people are supposed to do at night. During the last election night, I tried to stay awake until the winner was announced but I failed. At that time, I was still excited about Obama.
Ultimately, it won’t make much of a difference to us if Romney or Obama wins. Both love Israel and drone strikes very, very much. I wish Jill Stein had an actual chance. Then this US terrorism would finally end.
The next time Netanyahu comes into the USA, haul him in for questioning.
link to flickr.com
YESHA is like one of Galbraith’s Bezzles. It doesn’t matter how many Jews they shoehorn into YESHA at this stage. What matters is what happens when it all falls apart.
link to creditwritedowns.com
To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s business and banks. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.”
Would this help, LeaNder?
link to bbc.co.uk
Live Text
Reporters: Tom Geoghegan and Taylor Brown
For how much longer is the US and the international community going to appease this small, Zionist imperialist who is a politician of a small country but who sees himself as a world-class statesman?
However, this is not an attack on Binyam Netanyahu but a withering attack on those spineless congressmen & women who prostrate themselves before the greenbacks of the Israel lobby in order to swim in its curdled favor and to retain their questionable power, authority and salaries.
Whilst Netanyahu makes a complete mockery of any claims to democracy, justice, morality, human and civil rights and civilized decency, these minions in the House avert their faces and close their eyes to the flagrant injustice meted out daily, with the essential help of American supplied arms and money.
At least Neville Chamberlain was sincere in his belief and his gesture of appeasement.
But whilst Netanyahu runs rings around the United States government that funds him to the tune of $6 billion every 12 months in direct aid and loan guarantees, the House still looks the other way. That is being complicit in an overt, criminal land grab that will soon end in nuclear war. And still the House remains silent as it renews the aid, year after year and the monstrous blockade of 1.6 million in Gaza continues and the illegal settlements increase, and the world looks on impotently at these obscene activities that are supported and funded by America.
I have not witnessed such acts of cowardice in all the time that I served in the military in many parts of the world. The status quo in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem is uniquely abhorrent to democratic societies in this the 21st century.
The Israelis need everything to stay as it is for the next 50 years. Nobody gets old, nobody dies. No young people take over from their parents’ generation.
As long as this happens it is very hard to see anything changing.
“As long as this happens it is very hard to see anything changing.”
From what I understand, medical care for the affluent in Israel and America is exceptional, and lifespans are being lengthened unconscionably, as they said about King whoever-it-was. George III, wasn’t it?
If the dersh was cher he would look 30. But he’s old style and his teeth must be falling out by.now. And he is nowhere near the league of HL Mencken but even Mencken died and is forgotten. I am guessing that judaism only got into this eternal view with zionism. I see the dersh as more of a tibetan figure. It all goes in circles , even for israel. Dersh is like a panchen lama of hatred and will be reincarnated as a code pink baby.
Is there a Phrenologist in the house.
@Adam: Netanyahu on election eve:
Damn right! How dare Bibi take any action on election eve. What sacrilege. What disrespect for America and its great institutions.
The whole world is supposed to suspend everything it’s doing and sit in front of their TV’s on election eve, staring dumbly at the screen like 300 million Americans, as the results of the great American electoral process are presented by MSM pundits.
Shame on Bibi; has he no decency?? [Now, there's a trick: using "Bibi" and "decency" in the same sentence. I had to employ a semi-colon to pull that off.]
Morgan Bach is trying to go university to university and church to synagogue to mosque to explain settlements and demolitions in Area ‘C’ based on her year in the West Bank. Help her stay on the road, or offer her a house-party to explain “facts on the ground” to your friends and neighbors and a sofa to save travel money. It turns out the little guest house Morgan started in Al Aqaba means that Al Aqaba is on the couch surfing website, but NOT on Google Maps!
link to indiegogo.com
RE: “When Levi Eshkol was ‘forced to act’ in order to loosen the siege before 1967 . . .” ~ Netanyahu
MY COMMENT: Forced to act? By whom?
SEE: “Israel and the Neocons Mounting Pre-Emptive Strike on History”, by Ray McGovern, Common Dreams, 5/18/12
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to commondreams.org
P.S. ALSO SEE: “Six days in Israel, 45 years ago”, By Miko Peled, L.A. Times, 6/06/12
ENTIRE OP-ED – http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-peled-israel-palestine–six-day-war-20120606,0,3821348.story
“it would be simply too much to acknowledge, as former Israeli Prime Minister Begin did 30 years ago, in an uncommon burst of hubris-tinged honesty,”
Have read links as much as i can but dont see the real explanation for Begins remarks, I may have missed or i may just be wrong but i think I recall that it was part of the debate around the disastrous ’82 war and Begin attacked by Labour for starting a war of choice in ’82 reminded Labour that Israel had fought many wars of choice previously, and the war was only disaster in the fact that the lamentably slow learners to found at the back of the class in Europe and the USA couldnt process the images of Israeli murderous brutality with the figments that they had been harbouring in their heads about the ‘Light unto the Nations’ sunk amongst barbarous hordes up until then.
I thought all things considered that he acquitted himself tolerably well in the Knesset, Labour looked like idiots, recycling daydreams that were too much for an unsentimental terrorist like Begin, his appeal “we must be honest with ourselves” has a timeless quality, not restricted to Israeli’s.
So Israel burying the two state solution even further. How far down can they dig?
One quick glance at the map of the tender offer shows how Israel is using the settlement expansion as a means to seal off East Jerusalem from the rest of the WB. That has been Israeli policy for at least two decades. Surround, isolate and conquer. Those are classical military tactics. The Israelis know there is a war going on and they are using appropriate military tactics to consolidate their gains. While they are doing that the rest of the “liberal” Western world are arguing irrelevancies (we support the two state solution, but the Palestinians, but, but, but). And the US insists it supports two states but must veto this UN proposal or that one for what ever reason. All the time Israel creeps farther and farther into the WB.
As long as the world’s strongest nuclear power insists on supporting that annexation there is not a whole lot that the rest of us can do to stop it. US diplomats are quite skilled in denying the obvious. Until that day when it no longer works. Then what happens?