I've been offering the article below to MSM newspapers. Hasn't been published anywhere yet. My favorite venue the Seattle P-I is going under within days, so that one's gone.
Also, I think I'm a bit ahead of the American "Middle East" news cycle here. In America people are still not realizing that this guy, Avigdor Lieberman, may end up being Israel's next.... Foreign Minister. I repeat, Foreign Minister. Well, he's flexible. He's willing to settle for Finance or Defense instead.
From a pure bargaining perspective, he's entitled to one of them. From the perspective of where he's taken his election campaign, he should be repudiated by any sane democratic system. Well, I guess perhaps Israel is not quite the model democracy I was told it was ;)
From a corruption perspective, he may be a thievery-and-money-laundering defendant soon anyway.
Article follows, with some extra comments...
(cross-posted on the Wild Wild Left)
Don’t Put Lipstick on that Lieberman Pig
If you are still in denial about how Israel has changed in recent years, February’s election results bring the bitter smell of morning coffee. Israeli voters awarded 93 of their Knesset parliament’s 120 seats to right-of-center and hard-Right parties. The hard Right alone won a 65-seat majority. This is by far the most right-wing Knesset ever elected. The flagship left-of-center party, Labor - which held the Knesset’s largest faction from 1992 to 2003 - fell to fourth-largest with a pitiful 13 seats.
But the mess gets even worse. Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, nominated to form a government, can ostensibly do so using the 65 hard-Right seats. But six parties control these seats, and some of them make Netanyahu’s Likud (which rejects Palestinian statehood and settlement evacuation) look like a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals. The National Union, for example, maintains a perfect record of walking away from any government at the moment a concession is spotted on the horizon. One of its leaders is a professed disciple of the late fascist Meir Kahane.
Looking in the other direction, right-of-center Kadima commands the largest faction: 28 seats to Likud’s 27. Since Kadima is a somewhat more moderate Likud spin-off whose leaders were Netanyahu’s comrades until late 2005, a Likud-Kadima partnership may seem like a no-brainer. However, the personal animosity between Netanyahu and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni escalates by the day - and Livni’s increasingly moderate rhetoric is unpalatable to the hard Right.
For those of you without experience following parliamentary systems (Israel's is quite similar to Italy's or Germany's), here's an American analogy to what Bibi needs to do.
Suppose Obama, instead of winning the Presidency, would only win a sort of "voucher" to set up a coalition government, and then - by the power of this coalition - the Senate would elect him President. Suppose that, according to the size of the different factions, in order to build the coalition Obama would need the factions headed by at least 4 of the following 6 leaders: Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Lyndon LaRouche, Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Suppose further, than for any one of these six leaders, at least half of the others have some direct ideological or personal conflict with them.
Suppose further, that Hillary actually think she is the one who should have gotten the government-building voucher - or at least shared it with Obama - and suppose that unlike in the US, she would have some bragging rights because her faction is slightly larger than his. Israel's "Hillary", of course, is Tzipi Livni.
By the way, so far my hat is off to Ms. Livni. As a minister she hasn't impressed me so far - she went along with the wars and selling the usual Hasbara line abroad, and continued the use of diplomacy to circumvent the Arabs rather than engage them. However, during the coalition negotiations she has emerged as tough and principled. What cannot be said about Labor leader Barak (the "John McCain" from the analogy above), who is looking for any pretext to crawl into government. It seems that there is a quorom in Labor against doing this, though.
So back to our analogy: Livni's stance seriously narrows Bibi's options, and the attempts to bypass her by enlisting Labor are not successful either.
Enter Lieberman, stage right.
Poor Bibi’s salvation is the third largest party - yet another Likud spin-off relying on Russian immigrant votes. A solid alliance with this spin-off is politically easy and fortifies Bibi’s bargaining position.
This is Lieberman's party of course. The manuever is almost nearly complete. With Lieberman, Bibi has 42 seats in the bag. Shas - Lieberman's nemesis on each and every issue except hating the Arabs - is willing to sign on as well (ensuring that the government will be paralyzed on domestic matters, except perhaps continuing the neoliberal economics of the past 30 years). They will be followed no doubt by the smaller ultra-Orthodox party. So early next week Bibi will sit at 58, and hope to entice some Labor or Kadima defectors - or to mellow down enough of the 7 remaining ultra-wingnuts on the far Right (the "LaRouches" of our analogy).
Not quite there yet, but creating the right impression is also part of the game. Yet, here's another catch:
Alas, that party is a one-man show, and the man, Avigdor-Evet Lieberman – immigrant from Moldova, West Bank settler, and Bibi’s former right-hand man – has been attracting unwanted international attention. Immediately following the elections, two former US ambassadors to Israel warned against including Lieberman in any government. And if this comes from America, you can imagine what others think.
Thus, the renewed Bibi-Lieberman alliance which is emerging as the next government’s main power axis, may turn that government into an international pariah. So now the Israeli Right is enlisting its American friends for a propaganda offensive. Even before the elections, ADL’s Abe Foxman – self-appointed authority on racism – opined that Lieberman’s platform is acceptable. Last weekend, the Jewish Week published an op-ed signed by Lieberman himself, claiming that he supports "diversity" and "a viable Palestinian state". Meanwhile, Washington Post granted him a lengthy softball-question interview.
Let’s get the facts straightened out before this charade gets any further. Why the anger towards Lieberman? After all, he has been in the government before and was even Vice-PM for a while? Well, one reason is that during this election campaign Lieberman blatantly crossed some red lines. His party’s TV ads ended in a slide bearing the slogan, "Only Lieberman understands Arabic."
Here's the slogan:
This slogan has nothing to do with linguistics; from Lieberman’s track record of virulent anti-Arab rhetoric, it is clear what type of "understanding Arabic" is hinted at. The slogan is foul, openly racist incitement.
And Lieberman’s top agenda item, posted on huge billboards across Israel and now defended by him in the American press, is "No loyalty – No citizenship." The idea: demanding from Israel’s Arabs – i.e., ethnic Palestinians who hold an Israeli citizenship, numbering roughly 15% of Israel’s citizens – an oath of loyalty in order to retain their citizenship.
And here's this second slogan:
Before we fall into the well-laid trap of theoretical arguments and counter-arguments citing historical precedents (or wrap our brains around the Chutzpah of new immigrants demanding loyalty from those living in the country for centuries), here’s a simpler question: What the Heck?
Is this really Israel’s most pressing policy problem? What a joke. Israel’s major problems are with Occupied Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza; with Lebanon’s Hizbullah; with Syria; and – by extension – Iran which leverages these sore spots. There is also a range of domestic problems far more serious than this fabricated "Arab citizen disloyalty".
And - ironically enough - perhaps the top domestic item to deal with is the huge disparity and discrimination against the very same Israeli Arabs. The latest numbers show that over half of Israeli-Arab families live in poverty, compared with about 15% of Israeli-Jewish families. The top 10 or 20 unemployment hotspots are Arab towns. The average achievement of Arab-Israeli high school students is about two grade levels below their Jewish counterparts. This is the direct result of discrimination and neglect.
But yeah, they are not loyal enough. Talk about warped priorities.
So why does Lieberman pick on Israeli Arabs of all people? Because they are a weak and easy target. You see, there is a relevant historical precedent to Lieberman’s agenda this after all. By focusing his campaign on Israeli Arabs, Lieberman joins the great tradition of Anti-Semitic European politicians, who have conveniently distracted the masses from the real issues, and scapegoated the Jews instead.
I could rest my case here, but there's more.
(By the way: Lieberman is also currently facing a personal corruption investigation.)
The corruption scandal - with investigations right before the elections raising the usual cry of "political persecution" - is now getting bigger rather than smaller. In a nutshell, Lieberman's eldest daughter, now a 26-year-old mostly busy at getting married and going to college, opened five years ago (at age 21) a company for "business consulting and international ventures" or something like this. Within three years, the company made something like $2 million in profits. Nobody can really explain what's the nature of these profits, what kind of business generated them - but the money sure came in. And guess who was the biggest salary recipient from this nice little outfit? Yup, good old Papa Evet.
Btw, Lieberman already has one conviction under his belt. In 2001 he pled guilty to assaulting a minor in a plea-bargain (Hebrew link to the verdict). The story was that a couple of 12-year-old kids from his settlement beat his similarly-aged son up. Lieberman chased them, then cornered one of them, hit him in his face until he fell to the floor, then dragged him to his parents house. At the time (late 1999) Lieberman was already member of Knesset, a party leader and a former chief of staff to the Prime Minister. A fact that he actually tried to use as a leverage point in the case, along the lines of "they know they can hurt my good names by filing a complaint". In short, Lieberman has always been the same: thuggish, corrupt, cynical, and chock-full of Chutzpah.
A reminder to Israel’s American friends, especially the Jewish ones: Lieberman did not ask you how to run his campaign. Do not feel obligated to explain away his repulsive and shameful malice.
He also didn't ask you whether to teach his daughter how to do international business.
This is also perhaps the place to add that so far - after 15+ years on Israeli politics' national stage, including several years as minister - Lieberman does not have a single major legislative, executive or otherwise achievement to put next to his name. He has generated mostly hot air and hatred, and succeeded in cornering the Russian vote. But he hasn't done anything to benefit that constituency either. Not one piece of real work performed. Nada.
Israel’s other right-wing parties – yes, including Kadima – did not consult with you, when they provided the majority needed to pass Lieberman-initiated bans on two of the three Arab parties (luckily, Israel’s High Court decisively rejected the bans). Finally, Israeli Jews did not call you for advice, when some 85% of them voted for the Right shortly after American Jews voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
So the Israeli elections are actually a great occasion for you, to finally liberate yourselves from the burden of defending what has become increasingly indefensible, and to start thinking for yourselves what will be the best way to improve Israel’s future.
Let me put it this way: if indeed the government is set up with Lieberman in a key post, and they succeed in selling the guy to the American system as legitimate - then for all the nice and hopeful words post-Obama, the American discourse on Israel-Palestine has not changed one bit.
Dr. Oron is an expatriate Israeli living in Seattle since 2002. His maternal grandmother Lotte Lieberman passed away 20 years ago this month. If character has anything to do with blood relations, then there is absolutely no chance that she – the gentlest of souls, who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1931 out of disgust with European racism - was related to the racist bully of a politician bearing the same name, who is this article’s main subject.
Short Update:
Thanks everyone for the lively debate. I wanted to re-iterate a main point of this post. It is very tempting to fall into Lieberman's trap and start discussing the pro's and con's of his "no loyalty, no citizenship" crusade, and whether or not Israeli-Palestinians (referred to above as "Arab Israelis") deserve it.
Try to avoid the temptation. This faux crisis of loyalty is nothing but a diversionary tactic to draw cheap popularity in the Israeli street. It is tangential to Israel's major problems. The "Arab Israeli" situation as a whole is a worthy subject; examining it solely through the self-serving "loyalty" prism is a travesty.
And it is more than ironic, to hear the hue and cry for "loyalty" coming from a party based on the votes of those who immigrated to Israel in the 1990's (and received generous state subsidies and land allocation, largely at the expense of those "disloyal" Arabs).
What is worth repeating, and passing on, is that Lieberman's political strategy is classic European Anti-Semitic politics - only applied to Arabs instead of Jews.
Peace
