Netenyahu is not amused: more bitter pills to swallow

Israeli right wing prime minister Binjamin Netenyahu is not amused. He’s given the Palestinian Authority a ‘choice’: side with us to work out a deal or nothing if you hook up with Hamas. After almost 20 years after the Oslo Accords, and Netenyahu’s moves to sabotage them, no Palestinian state is on the horizon. We only see the incessant illegal land grab of Israeli settlers, defying international norms and laws, by ‘manu militari’ conquering the lands of Samaria and Judea, based on hoary tales in the Old Testament.



Netenyahu’s ukase went so far as to insult Palestinian aspirations for a land of their own by referring to a portion of the West Bank as ‘Samaria’. Israel’s intentions are simple and clear, as if they ever were complicated and mysterious: it’s our way or the highway, no more, no less. In other words, he is giving the Palestinian the third finger!

The US which should have on the drawing board newer approaches to the rapidly changing geopolitics of the Middle East, has, as is its wont, backed up Netenyahu. For these two countries, Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and that’s that. So stuck is Washington in its mindset grown long in the tooth, and has become a relic worthy of veneration, history is passing it by.

‘The New Yorker’ and the ‘New York Times’ talk of heated discussion in the White House about a new direction for US Israeli policy, but little is readily obvious that change is underway.

Since the heave ho of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt things ain’t what they used to be for Israel, a majority of Egyptians think it worthwhile to keep the Israeli Egyptian peace treaty on track notwithstanding. Yet the relationship no longer suits the Egyptian condition: consider the interruption of national gas which Egypt supplies Israel for its needs, delivery is inadequate, and besides that fact, the pipeline delivery the gas was blown up, which will be a heavy drag on Israeli economic growth.

What’s equally obvious is that Israel is losing its patina in the world community, owing to its thumbing its nose at international law on at least two glaring occasions. One the preemptive war against Hamas, euphemistically dubbed ‘Cast Lead’, with its destruction of civilian lives and property and infrastructure under the guise of fighting Hamas. The other, its resort to piracy and murder on the high sea in the case of the ‘Mavi Marmara’ in effectively stopping the Peace Flotilla bound for Gaza with building supplies and medicine to succor the devastated Palestinians living in Gaza.

Yet, Netenyahu & co. maintain a set course to fulfill the goal of Revisionist Zionis: a Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, by seizing Palestinian land, driving the Arab population into what is without a doubt ‘Bantustans’ of recent South African history.

Netenyahu is not amused, the more especially his cover is blown. He’s a ruler without clothes. And even more galling is that a fellow Revisionist Zionist like Tzipi Livni recognises that time is no longer on Israel’s side. And it’s more and more evident, it is not.

It is likely that the UN General Assembly will recognise Palestine as a legitimate state with all the trappings that go with statehood despite Israeli illegal seize of Palestinian real estate. And will Netenyahu keep his smug complacency when the world community challenges Israel’s right to grab land which it does not own; to round up in sweeps thousands of innocents simply because they are Arab; to treat Palestinian Arabs and its own Israeli Arabs with the contempt of conquerers in the colonial mould of racialism, so on and on.

Netenyahu may not be amused but behind his smugness and arrogance is the bully’s fear that like Samson’s his locks will be shorn and he, too, will topple the Zionist pillars of expansion.