How Netanyahu wrecked the peace process

When Barack Obama said last week, “I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu wants peace,” the president either revealed himself to be a much bigger fool than he is generally regarded, or, thought he must be addressing fools if he imagined his declaration would be taken seriously, or and most likely, assumed everyone reporting his words would know they were horse shit yet no one would be so rude as to point out the fact.

When Netanyahu in 2001 said, “America is a thing you can move very easily,” he was speaking the plain truth that every Israeli leader knows and every American president is ashamed to admit.

Liel Leibovitz at Tablet Magazine reports:

A newly revealed tape of Netanyahu in 2001, being interviewed while he thinks the cameras are off, shows him in a radically different light [from the way he recently presented himself at the White House]. In it, Netanyahu dismisses American foreign policy as easy to maneuver, boasts of having derailed the Oslo accords with political trickery, and suggests that the only way to deal with the Palestinians is to “beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable” (all translations are mine).

According to Haaretz’s Gideon Levy, the video should be “Banned for viewing by children so as not to corrupt them, and distributed around the country and the world so that everyone will know who leads the government of Israel.”

Netanyahu is speaking to a small group of terror victims in the West Bank settlement of Ofra two years after stepping down as prime minister in 1999. He appears laid-back. After claiming that the only way to deal with the Palestinian Authority was a large-scale attack, Netanyahu was asked by one of the participants whether or not the United States would let such an attack come to fruition.

“I know what America is,” Netanyahu replied. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.” He then called former president Bill Clinton “radically pro-Palestinian,” and went on to belittle the Oslo peace accords as vulnerable to manipulation. Since the accords state that Israel would be allowed to hang on to pre-defined military zones in the West Bank, Netanyahu told his hosts that he could torpedo the accords by defining vast swaths of land as just that.

“They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords],” Netanyahu said. “I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”

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9 thoughts on “How Netanyahu wrecked the peace process

  1. Boycott Israel Today

    If you ever heard Netanyahu days before he became president, you would hear the hatred, terrorism within his speeches. He was a hard liner who wanted Palestine extinct.

    Now post election he has face paint on, but underneath its the same evil man.

  2. omop

    The super power controlled by Zionist thugs a true symbol of democracy for all.

    Can one venture saying “birds of a feather flock together”.

  3. Eleonora

    It’s amazing that you post in part Gideon’s article. I meant to refer to on your article “One state/two states: rethinking Israel and Palestine” but didn’t get around to it. I came accross the Haaretz article (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/tricky-bibi-1.302053) under the title “Tricky Bibi” and it’s quite amazing that such revelations go mainly unnoticed. By design I guess?

    It simply cements my believe in place in looking at the various agreements reached in the past: Israel never intended to have a meaningful, acceptable and, therefore, relative just peace. The simple fact that settlement activities never ever stopped for a minute since 1967 tells the whole story of how serious Israel is about true peace.

    “All we want is peace but we have no partner” is one of the most cynical statements I can remember.

    Israel doesn’t want peace because it has not partner for war – that’s the naked truth.

    Why can’t the real Jews who belong to the Middle East get rid of this Ashkenazy non-Jewish folks? Send them back home to where they belong and where they fit and leave the Middle Easterners of all creed alone!

    The first one to go should be Bibi Netanyahu, a.k.a. Benjamin Milikovski from Lithuania.

  4. Eleonora

    And as for “President” Obama – it seems the strings on this puppet have been considerably shortened since Netanyahu-Milikovsky visited him … and we will pay the price.

  5. Christopher Hoare

    It’s good to see our suspicions confirmed, but the real task is to ram this evidence down the throats of the corrupt media and politicians who also knew as much as we suspected and kept it secret.

  6. Mike 71

    A lot has happened since 2001, when Netanyahu made that statement; then Gaza was still dominated by Israeli settlers controlling some 42% of the strip; the Second Intifada had just ended and there were no substantive talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Since then Netanyahu has conceded the necessity of creating a Palestinian state, albeit under intense international pressure, if peace is to be achieved! Likewise, Reagan made a similar statement before an open mic that “I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes,” That was before he discovered that he could work with Premier Gorbachev and significantly reduce Soviet-American tensions. Today, the issue remains: What is Netanyahu doing to achieve peace currently? He has made commitments to Obama to take a more serious tack on talks with the P.A. and to “take risks for peace.” Whether that happens will be determined in the following months.

    Omitted from the discussion is the question of what the Palestinians are doing to advance the objective of peace. President Abbas has demanded that Israel must agree to international peacekeepers along the border, a reasonable demand not likely to be an issue with Israelis, and Using the 1967 borders as a baseline in determining the new borders. While violence has diminished markedly in the West Bank and many “checkpoints” have been removed, the issue of Hamas remains unresolved. Under its Charter, Hamas calls for the killing of Jews (Article 7), rejects all negotiated “peaceful solutions (Article 13),” and brands as traitors any Palestinians who negotiate peace with Israel (Article 32). The entire text of the Charter can be found at: http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.html As long as Hamas remains an impediment to peace, both with the Palestinian Authority, as well as Israel, Netanyahu’s admonition of 2001 to “beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until its unbearable,” may become a continuing reality! That is what happened in 2006, 2008 and likely to happen again again in the next year or two!

  7. Egbert

    It’s the whole enchilada. Derailing the peace process, control of the US, AIPAC etc as foreign agents (as they do the actual moving), war in Iraq for Israel, war to come in Iran for Israel. This is Bibigate.

  8. Mike

    I stopped trusting Israel after the deliberate and deadly attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. Israel knew what they were attacking and deliberately and methodically bombed and strafed and torpedoed an American Navy ship on the high seas. And the Johnson administration colluded with the Israeli government to continue the coverup.

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