Netanyahu Victory Lays Bare Israel as Racist, Colonial State
Everyone in the political system understands that this stage is coming. And that's one of the reasons why nobody really wanted to challenge Netanyahu so much and there was no real attempt to replace the government with a vision of a different kind of strategy, different kind of political horizon for Israel [...]
SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is elating after his right-wing Likud Party secured a firm victory in the Israeli elections on March 17. It was a very close race against the Zionist Union Party, led by Isaac Herzog. Our next guest, Shir Hever, in an interview he did with us last month, predicted that Prime Minister Netanyahu would win in spite of many strikes against him at the time. So, defying election polls leading up to the election, Prime Minister Netanyahu has won. To get his reaction to the results, I’m joined by Shir Hever. Shir is reporting from Göttingen, Germany. He is an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Center, a Palestinian-Israeli organization active in Jerusalem and Beit Sahur. Thank you so much for joining me, Shir.SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: Thanks for having me, Sharmini.PERIES: So, Shir, so let’s begin with your initial reaction to the results.HEVER: I have to admit, mostly relief. Of course, Netanyahu is nowhere near my political views. He is an extreme right-wing, racist, and neoliberal leader. But within the framework of the Israeli political system, the real danger doesn’t come from a head of state who embodies such opinions, but from a coalition that is compelled, in order to maintain its stability, to be extra aggressive against Palestinians and to go to wars. In fact, the most aggressive coalitions in the history of Israel were not the ones led by Likud, by the right wing, but by the so-called center or left, like the Labour Party, which is now calling itself the Zionist Camp. These governments have a right-wing opposition which will never criticize them if they use violence against Palestinians, and therefore they can go much further with their aggressiveness and brutality. But I want to correct you in one small thing. The race between Netanyahu and the Likud and the Zionist Camp was not very close, actually. It was only close in the polls. And then, when we finally get the actual result, we see that there’s quite a significant gap between the two parties. Likud has managed to get several seats in the parliament more than the Zionist Camp. And all of that was a big surprise for the various polling companies.PERIES: So then why were the pollings so wrong?HEVER: I think many people in Israel have completely underestimated Netanyahu’s skill and his deep understanding of how the political system in Israel works. Netanyahu is the master of short-term solutions, and he doesn’t have or hasn’t expressed any desire to have a long-term strategy to make Israel a better place to live in. But whenever it comes to political crisis, to political crises, he’s the master of getting out of it. And he has engineered, very, very cleverly, the situation that allowed him to appear as an underdog until the very last moment. In fact, he was the one who called for early election. And many people in the Israeli elite, in the newspapers, have said he’s made a terrible mistake, the public will punish him for calling for an early election, the election costs a lot of money, and they would punish them by voting for the opposition. But Netanyahu understood things much better. He understood that it’s not really an election about personalities. I think a lot of Israelis, probably the majority of Israelis, dislike Netanyahu on a personal level and see him as a corrupt person, as a very vain man who doesn’t care so much about their well-being. But Netanyahu understands that, on a deeper level, the Israeli society is very racist. And this racism he decided to exploit. On the very day of the elections, when the first reporting were coming out about turnout at the voting booths, they reported a slightly lower than usual turnout rate for the morning and afternoon hours compared to previous elections. At that moment, Netanyahu sent an SMS that reached many people in Israel–maybe most people in Israel got this SMS, in which he said uthe Arabs are voting in droves, the Arabs are rallying to vote in large numbers. And that caused–and he tried to create panic. I think he succeeded and convinced people to respond to that SMS. In fact, after that, the show-up in the polls has–in the booths have increased dramatically. And now, when all the votes are counted, it shows a higher voting rate than previous elections, because people wanted to make sure that the Arab parties, the Palestinian United Joint List, will not be represented in the parliament in a way that would give it significant strength.PERIES: And in addition, he also fueled those anti-Arab sentiment or anti-Palestinian sentiments here when he days before announced that he would not support a separate Palestinian state.HEVER: Yeah, because Netanyahu has already given his famous Bar-Ilan speech in which he said that he would accept a Palestinian state, a demilitarized Palestinian state, and that was used both by his critics and by his supporters to say that actually he’s compatible with the two-state solution. And he thought that before this election it would be a good chance to make it absolutely clear that he will not allow Palestinians to have their own state. I think this statement is beautiful, actually, I think it’s very good that he made that statement, first of all because it completely exposes the fact that there is no peace process, there is no two sides negotiating. This is just a state of occupation. Israel has no intention of recognizing the rights of Palestinians to freedom and independence. And everybody should know that. When the head of state says that openly, I think there is no more room for trying to cast any kind of illusions. The second reason that I find this statement encouraging is that in the history of Netanyahu’s political career, he has never made a single statement which didn’t turn out to be a lie. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I think when reality’s ridiculous, we have no choice but to acknowledge it. Every statement Netanyahu makes turns out to be a lie. And when he says he will not allow a Palestinian state, I am becoming quite encouraged. I think that we might see some real headway–not that Netanyahu will promote it, not that he would support Palestinians’ struggle for freedom, of course, but that he’s already realizing that when the time comes that Palestinians are going to raise their struggle to the next level with a lot of international support and solidarity, he will not be up to stop them. Everyone in the political system understands that this stage is coming. And that’s one of the reasons why nobody really wanted to challenge Netanyahu so much and there was no real attempt to replace the government with a vision of a different kind of strategy, different kind of political horizon for Israel. And that made it much easier for him to win.PERIES: So let’s look at how the Arab parties did in the election. And what was the Arab voter turnout like?HEVER: Yeah. So what every Israeli knows is that Palestinians are more than 20 percent of the population. There are 120 seats in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. So if all the Palestinians would vote for Palestinian parties–that is not, of course, what happens, because there are people with the political opinions, just like everybody else. But if that would happen, their representation would be 24 seats in the parliament. And yet, in reality we see that these parties only get ten to 12 seats, these Palestinian parties. And the reason for that is indeed that many Palestinians choose to vote for other parties, even for Zionist parties. But also the reason for this is that many Palestinians are very discouraged by the political system in Israel, which they see as an apartheid system in which they have no chance of influencing the political system. So they boycott the elections. They say, we are not going to legitimize the system that maybe gives us the vote, but creates various mechanisms to make sure that we will be completely marginalized and will not have a say in the political reality of Israel. Now, because there is now a new law to increase the minimum percentage for parties to enter the Knesset, the Palestinian parties had no choice but to unite, because otherwise they would all be wiped out by this minimum percentage. So they united. And they said, this is actually opportunity for us to call on the Palestinian people to change their historic tendency to boycott the elections and to vote in larger numbers. And they tried to convince people–especially Palestinian citizens of Israel, but there are also, of course, Jews that vote for this party, and they were expecting to get, to jump from 12 seats maybe as high as 15 seats. So they got 14 in the end. Fourteen is almost as high as what they expected, once seat short. However, what they did not manage to do is to get the second-largest party in the Knesset. It was not very likely that they would have succeeded. But what they thought they could do is, if there would be some kind of unity government between the Zionist Camp and Likud, then they would actually be heading the opposition. And that is a position that in Israel gives you some authority, some influence, to be the head of the opposition. That’s not going to happen, because Netanyahu has no reason now to take the Zionist Camp into his coalition. So the Zionist camp is going to head the opposition. And that puts the Joint List in a very disempowered position there. Now, they’re going to have very little impact within the upcoming Knesset. Now, they can try to have an impact anyway, they can try to use provocative measures and to show their solidarity with the Palestinians living under occupation, for example, and that would get a lot of noise in Israel, in order to try to convince their public that they didn’t make a mistake, but they shouldn’t have boycotted the elections. But if they don’t do that, then I think it’s very likely that many Palestinian voters in Israel would realize that within a Zionist political system, the participation is not going to lead to true equality.PERIES: What are the next steps, Shir, in terms of forming the government immediately and then also moving forward? What are some of the issues that Netanyahu promised his voters that he has to deliver on?HEVER: Well, according to the Israeli political system, the president, who doesn’t have a lot of authority–but in this case he has the right to choose which will be the first party that gets a chance to form the coalition. And traditionally he asks the biggest party. So he’s going to ask Likud. I think that’s quite obvious. And he tried to beg Likud and Zionist Camp to consider a joint coalition together, what is known in Israel is a unity government. I think that’s not going to happen, because the Zionist Camp are not willing to make the sacrifices to pay the price that Netanyahu will demand of them. And it will be rather easy for Netanyahu to assemble his coalition using parties that are anyway in his pocket and will not have any other options. So Netanyahu is actually going to have, probably, a very stable coalition. He’ll be able to cast aside various centrist parties that might still make demands of him and go for a very religious coalition using right-wing religious parties as the backbone of his coalition and leaving any party that could conceivably be considered a little bit lefty in the opposition. And I think that’s also not very bad, because when you have these lefties in the government, they are used as a fig leaf to try to legitimize the government, especially in the international community. It’s better not to have that. It’s better that everyone will see that the people who run the country are in fact the colonists from the West Bank, the commanders of the army who have attacked Gaza last summer. These are the people who run the country, and everyone should know this. So it’s going to probably be a relatively stable coalition. And, actually, a stable coalition has a very big advantage in terms of everybody living in that area, but it doesn’t have to prove itself. It’s not under a very strong political pressure, internal political pressure, to prove that it does something. So they can basically do nothing. And hopefully, that would mean that they will have less of an incentive to start additional wars and additional attacks against Gaza, or if they will start additional attacks against Gaza (because there is a pattern every two years, more or less, Israel does invade Gaza), that they will maybe do it on a smaller scale.PERIES: Shir, I thank you so much for joining us today.HEVER: Thank you for having me, Sharmini.PERIES: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
End
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary of the history that informs North Korea’s “relations with the United States” and “drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat”.Excerpts from Atwood’s summary are here used as a framework, with other sources where indicated.Atwood notes it is an American “myth” that the “North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders.” In fact, the North/South border “had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949.”Part of what ...
The dramatic developments surrounding the independence referendum in Catalonia, as well as the plebiscite for the self-determination of Iraqi Kurds, have once again raised the issue of the lack of clear criteria in international practice for allowing the self-determination of nations and territories. This creates a breeding ground for double standards and speculative political maneuvers. And although Catalan separatism has a long and unique history, an assessment of current events shows that there are links to other regional crises including in the Balkans, where the double standards and geopolitical games have become fully apparent.Richard Haass, president of the influential US Council on Foreign Relations, recently took ...
IntroductionToday it is quite obvious that the Western-backed process of creation of a Greater Albania is not any propaganda myth but rather visible reality. South Serbia’s province of Kosovo-Metochia is already, de facto, part of “united” Albania from June 1999 and current political situation in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is surely going to the direction of the separation of North-West Macedonia mainly populated by Albanians who succeeded with the crucial Western support to promulgate a new language law in Macedonia’s Parliament according to which, the Albanian language is going to be a second state language (i. e., together ...
The period in the world’s history from the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) to the beginning of the Great War (1914) is usually labeled as the “golden age” of the European imperialistic expansion and the making of the greater national states and overseas colonial empires in Africa and Asia. Nevertheless, in 1815 huge territories of the world still have been unknown to Europeans, and millions of people in Africa and Asia were living their lives not influenced by European civilization. Europeans even were not very familiar with China, one of the oldest, richest, and biggest civilizations globally. However, only ...
I don’t want to discuss the musical merits of who should have won the recent Eurovision amateur song contest in Stockholm. It’s brazenly clear that the Ukrainian ethnic Tatar Jamala won in a rigged contest to make a political intervention. As she subsequently openly admitted, it was between the actions of Stalin in World War II against Crimean Tatars and the actions of Moscow in 2014 in Crimea. The song of Jamala was blatantly political and by Eurovision, rules ought to be grounds to strip her of the title regardless of her singing talent or lack of the same. What ...
Chances are, if a story about Russia appears on the cover of a major Western magazine, it’s not good news. Most likely, there’s been an international scandal, a breakout of geopolitical tensions, the resumption of Cold War hostilities, or some nefarious Russian plot to bring the entire free world to its knees.Russophobia — or the unnatural fear of Russia — generally leads magazine editors to choose the most over-the-top images to convey Russia as a backwards, clumsy, non-Western and aggressively malevolent power. Unfortunately, that’s led to a few rules of thumb for anyone trying to create a magazine cover featuring ...
Destroyed Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo by local Muslim Albanians after 1999In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance ...
The war machine that is the United States of America, not content with threatening the world with its missile attack on a Syria airbase, not content with massing its forces around the Korean Peninsular and threatening to murder its leaders and massacre its people, not content with its escalating hostility towards Russia and China, decided the world needed one more demonstration of its power today, Thursday, April 13 by dropping its most powerful non-nuclear bomb on an Afghanistan saturated with its bombs.This demonstration, using a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Blast Bomb (MOAB), that the Americans like to call the ‘mother of ...
The Crimean Tatar writer and artist Diana Kadi recently wrote an open letter to Angela Merkel:“I am the author of a novel about the Crimea. Since an information war is being waged of such intensity that propaganda and lies have become the norm, I believe that it is important for me to set forth my views on the subject of the Crimea. Ukrainian politicians claim that Russia is the aggressor and that Crimean Tatars are oppressed, but that is simply untrue. My people have once again become an instrument of political manipulation. The alleged oppression of the Crimean Tatars is ...
This article was first published in November 2014.Recent developments confirm what is known and documented: Washington is behind the Islamic State (ISIS) and at the same time it is behind the moderate Al Qaeda terrorists, which the Obama administration is supporting as part of America’s campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). And they expect us to believe that they are committed to waging a campaign against terrorists.The Islamic State (ISIS) was until 2014 called al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).Al Nusra is an al Qaeda affiliate which has committed countless atrocities in Syria. It is now considered by the Obama administration as ...
To date, 62 Palestinians have been shot dead in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army and over 5,500 wounded by gunfire. Their crime: protesting the loss of their ancestral homes in the West Bank.Here was an example of Gandhi-style passive resistance that failed. Israeli sniper teams just fired at will at the protesters, some of who were throwing rocks or firing sling shots. High concentration tear gas was dumped by drones on the demonstrators. Israel claimed it was killing ‘terrorists.’The United States, Israel’s patron and financier, reveled in the move of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a ...
The interviews with three snipers of Georgian nationality, conducted by the Italian journalist Gian Micalessin and aired last week as a breathtaking documentary on Milan-based Canale 5 (Matrix program), still have not paved its way to the international mainstream media. That is hardly surprising taking into account the bombshell evidence against the real perpetrators and organizers of the 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev, generally known as the “revolution of dignity“.The documentary features Alexander Revazishvili, Koba Nergadze and Zalogi Kvaratskhelia, Georgian military officers who were recruited to carry out a “special mission” in Kiev by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a close aid of ...
June 5 marks the 50th anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War of conquest. Any objective examination of that war, and the events leading to and following it, make clear that the dominant narrative in the United States is reality turned upside down. It is “fake news” that is perpetrated on the public by the corporate media continually, right up to the present day.The Six Day War began on June 5, 1967. Israel launched the war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan with what could correctly called a “sneak attack,” although it is never referred to that way here. In the vocabulary of ...
The conflicts that engulfed the former Yugoslavia still remain unresolved in the political arena and open to Western political shenanigans and covert meddling from Turkey and Saudi Arabia in Bosnia and Kosovo. Orthodox Christianity faces many attacks and only a naïve individual would claim that America and the hands of Turkey and Saudi Arabia are clean.Central Bosnia in 2016: Flags of the ISISAmerica and other Western nations did little to stop Turkey invading Cyprus in 1974 and creating a de-facto nation and altering the demographics of northern Cyprus and using this area for military purposes.Irrespective of the rights and wrongs ...
The prophet Cassandra’s curse was that when she told the future, no one listened; history’s curse is that when it tells the past, no one does.The West has no shortage of charges it hurls against Russia, but most of them can be grouped into one of three categories: that Russia intervened in the American elections, that Russia is dragging the world into a new cold war, and that Russia is becoming increasingly aggressive and expansionist. Sometimes when charges are brought against you, the best witness you can call to your defense is history.Election InterventionThis history of Russia, America and political ...
The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. The scale of the bombing is indicated in a recent article by Felicity Arbuthnot – in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes, and 250 health facilities were destroyed or damaged. The stated aim of ...
The U.S. government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article’s two co-authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular ...
Like most Englishmen, I grew up with a natural dislike of “abroad” and a belief in the inferiority of all foreign things. I think it took me five visits to France before I began to regret leaving that lovely country rather than to rejoice at my return to our safe and familiar island.It often strikes me as quite funny that I spent so much of my life as a foreign correspondent, a profession for which I am so unfitted. When I went to live in Moscow in 1990, I felt that I had somehow betrayed my native soil. (I was ...
For many years, and despite all evidence to the contrary, the Western media has forwarded the inane idea that Vladimir Putin ranks in the same club with some of history's most loathsome creatures, up to and including Hitler.The reality is that the Russian leader has done more to promote the cause of global peace and security than any other Western leader in recent times. That explains why he is the object of such intense scorn.Putin's rise as a statesman of the first magnitude began, oddly enough, with the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on the United States. Since that day, ...
The Consequences of WWI and the YugoslavsThe end of WWI in November 1918 as a consequence of the military collapse of the Central Powers and the following series of peace treaties of Versailles on June 28th, 1919 between the Allies and Germany, of St Germain on September 10th, 1919 with Austria, of Neuilly on November 27th, 1919 with Bulgaria, and finally of Trianon on June 4th, 1920 with Hungary, produced major border changes in Central, South-East, and East Europe as the continent saw the emergence of several of new states and the enlargement of others fortunate enough to be on ...
