hard to read – a recent Israeli law prevented pollsters from earning their keep from Thursday on. This laid the ground for the speculative and daring, though Netanyahu’s opponents were taking stock about readings that showed up to 60 percent of Israelis did not want him to continue in office. Last Friday, it seemed that Yitzhak Herzog’s Zionist grouping would lead by four seats.
Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid provided the fiery summation prior to the polls. Netanyahu had acted in merciless self-interest, calling “unnecessary” early elections to spite the constituency. “Why? Because you are disconnected. You have no idea what it does to the citizens of Israel because you live in your aquarium and for a long time you don’t know who the people are and what really troubles them” (Jerusalem Post, Mar 12).
In an effort to push voters back into the Likud fold, Netanyahu of the aquarium employed rhetoric that was heated, spiced, and flamed. “It was,” observed Gaid Wolfsfeld of the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, “a scorched earth policy to stay in power” (New York Times, Mar 17).
It’s singeing character involved an assortment of nightmarish scenarios about race – what will those Arab Israelis do to the voting numbers? The main party representing Israeli-Arabs, United List, was condemned as an extremist outfit. Herzog’s grouping were excoriated as effete, cuddling up to sinister foreign forces.
Then came that most Machiavellian of plays – the issue of recognising a Palestinian state. For Netanyahu, pitching in those last desperate hours against the very idea was the gamble of gambles, suggesting that the peace process was not only a shambles, but a dead shambles.
The strongman was refusing to yield to any prospects that might let insecurity via Israel’s vulnerable backdoor – Palestinians could not be trusted with either sovereignty or security.
Having attained electoral victory, Netanyahu has demonstrated how the reptile in politics can go far, one whose embrace of an economic version of reality can profit. As Gigi Grinstein, founder of the Israeli strategy group the Reut Institute suggested, Netanyahu might well go “back to the two-state solution.”
He did the rounds on American television claiming that the Monday rubbishing of a Palestinian state was not intended as a repudiation of his 2009 stance taken at Bar Illan University. “I want a sustainable, peaceful, two-state solution,” proposed Netanyahu in an MSNBC interview. “But for that, circumstances have to change.”
Before Fox News, the new Netanyahu showed very much what the old Netanyahu thought. “I said we have to change the terms. Because right now, we have to get the Palestinians to go back to the negotiating table, break their pact with Hamas, and accept the idea of a Jewish state.” In an atmosphere of duplicity and pervasive double-think, a Likud deputy-foreign minister such as Tzachi Hanegbi can make a statement that Israel “would be very delighted to renew negotiations” with the Palestinians. Naturally, blame them for intransigence – they merely have nothing to negotiate with.
Even US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would say in a somewhat undiplomatic tone that the Israeli prime minister had chosen to remain vague and inconsistent on the issue. “If he had consistently stated that he remained in favour of a two-state solution, we’d be having a different conversation.”
The Obama administration has promised a strategic “rethink” regarding the two-state solution stance, but is hardly going to move beyond the state of current stagnation. Israel can’t be the ritual absentee in this matter.
The connoisseur of hopelessness won, but the costs of that victory will be telling. The insistence by Netanyahu to place Israel in a parallel stream of political consciousness, a garrisoned world ironically ghettoised and repellent of international convention and diplomacy, is finite in its realisation. It could also prove fatal.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org