Pages

Search This Blog

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Netanyahu’s Latest Challenge to Obama

Netanyahu’s Latest Challenge to Obama

by Paul R. Pillar
Faced with an unexpectedly tough electoral challenge, (at least according to Israeli opinion polls, however unreliable they later turned out to be) Benjamin Netanyahu in the closing days of his campaign decided that his best chance to stay in power would be to tack firmly to the Right—the hardest, narrowest, most intractable, and most prejudiced Right. After all the alarming and scaring that this prime minister has done, one of his final scares was to warn that Arab citizens of Israel would actually—you’d better sit down before you read this—vote. This was an even more blatant, and openly racist, approach to the subject of voter turnout among opposing parts of the electorate than the enactment of voter suppression laws in the United States. But Arab citizens constitute only 20 percent of the Israeli population, so if there was any negative effect on Netanyahu’s re-election chances of this insult to those citizens it would have been less than the effect was, say, for Mitt Romney when Romney insulted 47 percent of the U.S. electorate.
In any event, Netanyahu’s political calculation was correct; he won.
For the United States, the most significant of Netanyahu’s statements in his appealing to the intractable Right of the Israeli electorate was to declare clearly and unequivocally his opposition to a Palestinian state. In so doing, and in affirming his determination to hold on to occupied territory, he offered no honorable alternative way to deal with the trilemma of how Israel cannot hold onto all that land and be a Jewish state and be democratic. Evidently he sees things the same way as his billionaire backer Sheldon Adelson, who said, “Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state—so what?”http://www.lobelog.com/netanyahus-latest-challenge-to-obama/#more-28500

No comments: