Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu would do anything to protect Israel—as long as he doesn’t have to believe in peace.
By Christopher Dickey | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Back when Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was elected Israel’s prime minister for the first time, in 1996, a Jordanian political scientist with a grim sense of humor said the only way to describe him was like a villain out of an old Western: “He’s a lyin’, cheatin’, deceitin’ son of a bitch!”
The Obama administration, without using quite such colorful language, might be inclined to agree. As Aluf Benn, the respected diplomatic correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper wrote in these columns recently, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel last week, he “had come to offer not just friendship, but support (and protection) against Iran—Israel’s greatest bogeyman—in exchange for a few concessions from Netanyahu. Instead, he got a finger in the eye.”
The announcement of government-approved plans to build 1,600 new Israeli homes in largely Arab East Jerusalem was a direct challenge to Biden’s efforts to move peace talks forward. The Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem as the capital of their state, accuse the Israelis of using such projects to create “facts on the ground” that vastly complicate future negotiations—and, indeed, that is precisely the intent of many Israelis who support the building program.
But the problem as Benn presented it was more complex than that: a combination of brinkmanship and blackmail in which Netanyahu’s government makes veiled threats to attack Iran, or not, depending on how much pressure it feels on the Palestinian issue.
U.S. military planners have little doubt that an Israeli air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities would provoke Iranian retaliation against Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers allied with the United States. American efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which border Iran, would come under threat. And there would be no way that any U.S. administration, after so many decades pledging undying support for Israel, could make a convincing claim in Muslim eyes that it was not complicit in the attack.
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The only way there will be peace in the middle east is when the Arab Empire relinquishes illegal occupation of all formerly christian, jewish, and pagan lands, this means from morocco to pakistan can no longer be muslim. In fact, even Saudi Arabia is occupied territory: pagans, jews and christians lived there before the time of the prophet. It’s time to wipe the scourge of Islam from the planet and establish the beginings of secular peace.