Paul J. Balles considers Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest ruse, launched last week in talks with European leaders and in off-the-record briefings to gullible and sycophantic news editors: concede a temporary hold on illegal settlements built on stolen lands in exchange for agreement to trample or desecrate Iran.
Havah Nagilah provides the background music for Binyamin Netanyahu's latest dance to America and Europe.
One of the problems with Israel seems to be that they can never do something because it's the right thing to do. They usually have to bargain for something in exchange.
Here's the way Netanyahu put it: “The continuation of unilateral withdrawal without receiving anything must stop. In business, there are no free lunches, and this also is true with politics. There can be no free withdrawals.”
Israeli maxim: Occupy a country and then make the people pay a price to get part of it back. When they object, accuse them of refusing to take advantage of opportunities for peace.
When their various ministers and prime ministers travel to the US or Europe, they claim to be interested in peace, but they're looking for a bargain.
Netanyahu has been touring to drum up support for his latest barter: concede a temporary hold on settlements in exchange for agreement to trample or desecrate Iran.
He's looking for what Hillary Clinton called "crippling sanctions" against Iran. In itself, that would be an act of war. A December deadline for Iran to "unclench its fist" has now been moved forward to September.
They always have a reason for not giving away anything. They bluster eternally about being fair, but they seldom do things out of compassion. Netanyahu does not intend to return lands stolen from the Palestinians. Here is his justification:
The connection of the Jewish people to the land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah – this is not a foreign land, this is the land of our forefathers. ...
What about the Palestinians? Netanyahu addressed that when he spoke to students at Bar Ilan University: "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
They have demanded much from the world because they suffered a holocaust over a half century ago. However, the world has paid dearly for Nazi crimes. Netanyahu would have the world pay more.
He says: "The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the ‘Land of Israel’, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People."
The talk of restraining settlement activity is nothing more than a ruse, a bargaining chip for Netanyahu's real goal – eliminate any possibility of Iran developing nuclear power in what Israelis like to call an "existential threat".
On 27 August, Peter Beaumont, writing in the Guardian, said: "...Netanyahu has always wanted: a link between Iran's nuclear programme and a very partial freeze on settlement building, offered in exchange for opening up an even more partial track of a peace process whose focus would be on the West Bank."
Of course, any settlement “freeze” will be like those in the past, ignoring their illegality and continuing their development when the West isn’t looking. Netanyahu would never give up Jerusalem.
The problem with the ruse? As Beaumont observes, it makes "Israeli-Palestinian peace talks contingent on progress in an unrelated and equally difficult issue. In that respect, it is nothing less than a grand act of displacement that makes the prospect of a final settlement more distant still rather than hauling it closer."
Israel's Zionist front men own the media, they own the Congress and the US administration, and they own major European leaders. The Zionist leaders will have greater difficulty owning Iran or the Palestinians.
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.
