There is one video Binyamin 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. [Editor’s note: A version of the Natanyahu video with English subtitles is now available and can be viewed, together with the translated English transcript, here.] 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.
When Ariel Sharon ordered the invasion of the West Bank, he wanted to destroy the Palestinian Authority as an entity. That’s why the Israeli troops removed all their computers and dismantled their police stations. They wanted to make it so that Arafat couldn’t govern effectively. For eight years the international community had worked to help Arafat build the tools he would need for eventual self-governance. After the invasion, almost all of that progress had been destroyed. This is one of the keys to understanding the behavior of Israel’s behavior under both Sharon and Netanyahu’s leadership.
The Second Intifada has a horrendous campaign, indefensible, in my mind, on any level. But the response to it was to destroy hope itself and leave the Palestinians with no path forward.
In this video clip, Netanyahu makes clear that he has no intention of making a peace that would be ‘a march to the 1967 borders’ or anything remotely resembling that. He also shows contempt for Americans, calling our 80% support of Israel ‘absurd.’
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario