The Parallel World of Benjamin Netanyahu

"In 1984 when I was appointed Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubavich. He said to me... you'll be serving in a house of many lies. And then he said, remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide." (Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking in the UN General Assembly on September 23)

So the UN, which devised the legal instrument by which the Palestinian people's homeland could be literally pulled out from under their feet, and one which Zionist propagandists never tire of referring to as their colonial project's stamp of approval (I speak, of course, of the partition resolution of 1947), is now apparently a palace of lies and a dark place which only ever sees the light of truth when an Israeli representative opens his mouth. Right.

Beware - you are now entering a parallel universe where everything you know to be right is actually wrong and everything you know to be wrong is actually right. Welcome to the parallel world of Benjamin Netanyahu:

"Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has extended its hand in peace from the moment it was established 63 years ago."

Cough! Splutter! Shit, I've spilt my coffee!

"The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace."

Nice? Well, what would you expect from the folk who gave us such clever bon mots as The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. (Abba Eban) Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us. (Golda Meir) If the Arabs put down their weapons today there would be no more violence. If the Israelis put down their weapons today there'd be no more Israel. (Shira Sorko-Ram)

"Without Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, Israel is all of 9 miles wide... Israel needs greater strategic depth... And to defend itself, Israel must therefore maintain a long-term military presence in critical strategic areas in the West Bank."

Hm... somewhat reminiscent of what an obscure German politician, who went on to bigger but hardly better things, wrote in 1926:

"In an era when the earth is gradually being divided up among states, some of which embrace almost entire continents, we cannot speak of a world power in connection with a formation whose political mother country is limited to the absurd area of 500,000 square kilometers." (Mein Kampf, ed 1971, p 644)

"The Jewish state of Israel will always protect the rights of all its minorities, including the more than 1 million Arab citizens of Israel. I wish I could say the same thing about a future Palestinian state, for as Palestinian officials made clear the other day - in fact, I think they made it right here in New York - they said the Palestinian state won't allow any Jews in it. They'll be Jew free - Judenrein. That's ethnic cleansing. There are laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of land to Jews punishable by death. That's racism."

After over 100 years of Zionist colonisation, resulting in Palestine getting progressively smaller and smaller, and Israel correspondingly bigger and bigger, and with most Palestinians living as stateless refugees outside Palestine, not to mention armed Israeli settlers running amok in the West Bank, cutting and burning their way through Palestinian orchards, the Palestinians have the gall to wish to protect what little they have left from marauding, land-grabbing Zionist settlers? The nerve of these people!

On the other hand (and in the very next paragraph as it happens), what's hilariously described as ethnic cleansing and racism in the case of the Palestinian Authority is simply routine when it comes to Israel, an entity which created its 'Jewish character' by violently dispossessing the majority of Palestinians from the territories overrun and occupied by its terror gangs in 1948, and maintains it today by adamantly refusing them their right of return and enacting apartheid legislation to keep the land forever in 'Jewish' hands:-

"Israel has no intention whatsoever to change the democratic character of our state. We just don't want the Palestinians to try to change the Jewish character of our state. We want them to give up the fantasy of flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians."

Fantasy? You want a flood fantasy, Fibi? Try this one on for size. Here's Chaim Weizmann, your great Zionist mover and shaker between Herzl and Ben-Gurion, speaking to British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour on December 4 1918:

"If we can say to the Jewish people that we shall be given the possibility of creating conditions in Palestine under which the development of a strong Jewish community may take place, we know that the mere existence of such a community would already raise the status of Jews in the world. Moreover a community of 4 to 5 million Jews in Palestine could radiate out into the Near East and so contribute mightily to the reconstruction of countries which were once flourishing... But all this presupposes free and unfettered development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, not mere facilities for colonisation, but opportunities for carrying out colonising activities, public works, etc., on a large scale so that we should be able to settle in Palestine about 4 to 5 million Jews within a generation, and so make Palestine a Jewish country." (Quoted in Palestine Papers: 1917-1922: Seeds of Conflict, Doreen Ingrams, 1972/2009, p 46)

But that was just to his none-too-bright British mate. What he had to say to the Palestinians wasn't quite so frank:

"... It is not our aim to get hold of the supreme power and administration in Palestine, nor to deprive any native of his possession. For Palestine is rich to the extent that it can contain many times the number of its present inhabitants, who will be comfortably accommodated... We all like to live under the rule of some just Government, and all other rumours and sayings contrary to this are false and unfounded... And although the Jews here number but a few, yet the 14 million extant in all parts of the world, agree with us and confirm our sayings." (Weizmann to a meeting of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa, May 1918, ibid, p 30)

Yes, the movement of lies and deception.

"President Abbas just stood here, and said that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the settlements. Well, that's odd. Our conflict has been raging for nearly half a century before there was a single Israeli settlement in the West Bank. So if what President Abbas is saying was true, then I guess that the settlements he's talking about are Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa, Be'er Sheva. Maybe that's what he meant the other day when he said that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for 63 years. He didn't say from 1967; he said from 1948. I hope somebody will bother to ask him this question because it illustrates a simple truth: The core of the conflict is not the settlements. The settlements are a result of the conflict."

Blimey, Fibi's a whizz when it comes to who exactly was roaming the hills of Palestine 4,000 years ago,* but his memory grows hazy the closer he gets to the present: Tel Aviv? Built on the lands and ruins of Palestinian villages such as Abu Kabir, Manshiyya, Summayl, Shaykh Muwannis and Salama. Haifa? An ancient Palestinian city, ethnically cleansed from December 1947 to April 1948. Jaffa? An ancient Palestinian city, ethnically cleansed from January to May 1948. Be'er Sheva? An ancient Palestinian town, ethnically cleansed in October 1948. So yes, maybe that's what Abbas meant. Oh, and also the kibbutzim and moshavim aka the settlements of pre-1967 Israel. As Moshe Dayan reminded the students at the Israel Institute of Technology (Techniyon) in 1969:

"We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state. In a considerable proportion of localities we purchased the land from the Arabs. Instead of the Arab villages Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of these villages and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only the books, but also the villages no longer exist. Nahalal was established in the place of Mahalul, Gevat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Hanifas and Kefar Yehoshu'a in the place of Tel Shamam. There is not a single settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village." (Quoted in Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, Uri Davis, 2003, p 36)

[* See my previous post.]