22 July 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
There
is one video
Benjamin Netanyahu,
the
Israeli prime minister,
must be praying never gets posted on
YouTube with English subtitles. To date,
the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in
Hebrew on Israel’s
Channel 10.
Its
contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not
only Mr Netanyahu but also the US administration of
Barack Obama.
The
film was shot, apparently without Mr Netanyahu’s
knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of
Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the
main cities of the West Bank
to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of
the
second intifada.
At the
time Mr Netanyahu had taken a short break from
politics but was soon to join Mr Sharon’s government
as
finance minister.
On a
visit to a home in the settlement of
Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences
to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian
shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded
admissions about his first period as prime minister,
from 1996 to 1999.
Seated
on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he
deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton,
into believing he was helping implement the Oslo
accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel
and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from
the West Bank while actually entrenching the
occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the
Oslo process.
He
dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right
direction” and calls high levels of popular American
support for Israel “absurd”.
He
also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel’s
harsh military repression of the
Palestinian uprising was designed
chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by
Yasser Arafat so that it could be made
more pliable for Israeli diktats.
All of
these claims have obvious parallels with the current
situation, when Mr Netanyahu is again Israel’s prime
minister facing off with a
White House
trying to draw him into a peace process that runs
counter to his political agenda.
As
before, he has ostensibly made public concessions to
the US administration -- chiefly by agreeing in
principle to the creation of a Palestinian state,
consenting to indirect talks with the Palestinian
leadership in
Ramallah, and
implementing a temporary freeze on settlement
building.
But he
has also enlisted the powerful pro-Israel lobby to
exert pressure on the White House, which appears to
have relented on its most important stipulations.
The
contemptuous view of Washington Mr Netanyahu
demonstrates in the film will confirm the suspicions
of many observers -- including Palestinian leaders --
that his current professions of good faith should not
be taken seriously.
Critics have already pointed out that his gestures
have been extracted only after heavy arm-twisting from
the US administration.
More
significantly, he has so far avoided engaging
meaningfully in the limited talks the White House is
promoting with the Palestinians while the pace of
settlement building in the West Bank has been barely
affected by the 10-month freeze, due to end in
September.
In the
meantime, planning officials have repeatedly approved
large new housing projects in
East Jerusalem and the West Bank that have
undercut the negotiations and will make the
establishment of a Palestinian state -- viable or
otherwise -- far less likely.
Writing in the liberal
Haaretz newspaper,
the columnist
Gideon Levy
called the video “outrageous”. He said it proved that
Mr Netanyahu was a “con artist … who thinks that
Washington is in his pocket and that he can pull the
wool over its eyes”. He added that the prime minister
had not reformed in the intervening period: “Such a
crooked way of thinking does not change over the
years.”
In the
film, Mr Netanyahu says Israel must inflict “blows [on
the Palestinians] that are so painful the price will
be too heavy to be borne … A broad attack on the
Palestinian Authority, to bring them to the point of
being afraid that everything is collapsing”.
When
asked if the US will object, he responds: “America is
something that can be easily moved. Moved to the right
direction … They won’t get in our way … Eighty per
cent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd.”
He
then recounts how he dealt with
President Clinton, whom he refers to as
“extremely pro-Palestinian”. “I wasn’t afraid to
manoeuvre there. I was not afraid to clash with
Clinton.”
His
approach to
White House demands
to withdraw from
Palestinian territory
under the Oslo accords, he says, drew on his
grandfather’s philosophy: “It would be better to give
two per cent than to give 100 per cent.”
He
therefore signed the 1997 agreement to pull the
Israeli army back from much of
Hebron, the last
Palestinian city under direct occupation, as a way to
avoid conceding more territory.
“The
trick,” he says, “is not to be there [in the
occupied territories] and be broken; the
trick is to be there and pay a minimal price.”
The
“trick” that stopped further withdrawals, Mr Netanyahu
adds, was to redefine what parts of the occupied
territories counted as a “specified military site”
under the Oslo accords. He wanted the White House to
approve in writing the classification of the
Jordan Valley, a large
area of the West Bank, as such a military site.
“Now,
they did not want to give me that letter, so I did not
give [them] the Hebron Agreement. I stopped the
government meeting, I said: ‘I’m not signing.’ Only
when the letter came … did I sign the Hebron
Agreement. Why does this matter? Because at that
moment I actually stopped the Oslo accords.”
Last
week, after meeting Mr Obama in
Washington, the
Israeli prime minister gave an interview to
Fox News in which he appeared to be in
no hurry to make concessions: “Can we have a
negotiated peace? Yes. Can it be implemented by 2012?
I think it’s going to take longer than that,” he
said.
There
must be at least a very strong suspicion that Mr
Netanyahu is as firmly committed today as he was then
to destroying any chance of peace with the
Palestinians.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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