NETANYAHU’S GOVERNMENT VOWS TO INCREASE NEW SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST BANK CONTRARY TO MUTUALLY ESTABLISHED AGREEMENTS
THE NEW PRIME MINISTER POSES A SERIOUS DANGER TO WHATEVER REMAINS OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN PEACE PROCESS AFTER BUSH NEGLECTED IT FOR EIGHT YEARS.
OBAMA MUST COME DOWN HARD ON ISRAEL’S INTENTION TO EXPAND SETTLEMENTS IF HE IS EVER TO MAKE THE PEACE PROCESS WORK
I have never been a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu because (like Bush) his religious beliefs always get in the way of making peace with the Palestinians.
Frankly, after sixty-one years of being forced to endure in dust covered refugee camps and filthy, fetid and mildew infested ghettos the Palestinian people deserve a state and they deserve the backing of the U. S. in that quest; because without their own state there will never be peace in the region. Suicide bombings will persist. Car and Truck bombs will continue to light the skies over Israeli cities and more people, Arabs, Christian and Jews will be unnecessarily slaughtered.
There will be no peace in Bibi’s [his nickname] time because like all Orthodox Jews he believes that “the land of milk and honey” was granted to “the chosen people” by Yahweh with the specific understanding that as long as the chosen ones obeyed the laws of Yahweh, the land was theirs and He would watch over them and protect them.
What the Israeli leadership has forgotten far too frequently is that nasty little phrase about obeying “the law of Yahweh” is a requisite to their mandate over “the land of milk and honey.” Israel has failed and continues to fail to understand the requisite of abiding by the law, to perpetually obey the law, to seek peace with their neighbors, and love their fellow men. Therefore, rather than ranting and raving about recapturing the land comprising the ancient Kingdom of David, they should be seeking the forgiveness of Yahweh for their sins of both omission and commission.
Netanyahu is no exception; in fact, because he is such an indefatigable hard-liner he may well lead the Israelis further away from the essence of the law of Yahweh than they have been under recent Prime Ministers.
Certainly, the territory that the United Nations determined to include both Israel and Palestine in 1948 is not the same land that the two inhabit today. Israel, in every war with the Palestinians has taken an impressive bite out of the land intended for the new Palestinian state. And now, they refuse to give it back which is one of the conditions of “peace,” for the Palestinians.
The Orthodox factions of the Netanyahu government insist that they are only taking back what was originally given them my God. If they insist that Yahweh granted the people of Israel what has become known as the Holy Land, they have forfeited their power over what they believe to be sacred soil by failing to obey the laws of Yahweh.
But Yahweh is not running the world, international organizations are making decisions and all countries that are members of those organizations are expected to abide by the verdict of those bodies. Israel is no exception.
Well over 200 times the U. S., over the loud and angry cries from critics, has vetoed resolutions condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, Israel’s violation of peace treaties, Israel’s calloused resolve to regain all of the land between the Euphrates and the Nile comprising the former domain of King David’s empire.
While true believers embrace the myth that antediluvian King is the Son of God, he was one of the most aberrant leaders in Israel’s bitter history, his vast empire is for the Orthodox advocates the quintessence of the Holy Land they seek to recover. Equally important this same faction of Judaism believes that out of the House of David in Bethlehem will come the next Messiah; a scion of David which is why the early Christians identified Bethlehem as the birth place of Jesus when in fact, more recent information tells us that it is more than conjecture that Jesus was born in Nazareth.
Because Jesus was commonly called “Jesus of Nazareth” it is now believed that the early followers of the Man from Galilee, in a desperate attempt to prove to the Jews that he was a “scion of David,” that they “edited” the very early manuscripts of the New Testament and identified Bethlehem as Jesus’ hometown.
Therefore Jesus, for some, was that new Messiah. But Jesus was not interested in becoming the Messiah in the political sense of the word; he was working to bring the kingdom of god, the law of love, the community of those who practiced the message that he fated to be the only law that mattered—“ God is Love,” to be the law of the land. The Kingdom of God to Jesus was the rule of love (agape).
Many believe that some of his disciples were sorely disappointed that He did not bring about the revolution they were apprehensively awaiting. They were frustrated by the fact that He went to the cross voluntarily and died voluntarily rather than fight to overthrow the tyranny of Rome.
At first, from Peter’s point of view, one had to be a Jew before he could become a Christian. Peter was trying to keep the Jewish myth together and simply added Jesus as the crucial addendum to their Old Testament writings.
Those who opposed the law and those who felt that Jesus was crucified because of the Jewish law, took the greenhorn church members toward Rome and Greece and to a new theology that in many ways detached its ties with the Old Testament and Judaism. I happened to concur with this perspective. I believe that Jesus made a permanent departure from the Judaism of his day.
In the long history of Israel’s struggle to establish a new state in the “land of milk and honey” we must not forget that the state of Israel was born out of the blood shed by a host of Jewish terrorists. Nearly every one of the early Prime Ministers of Israel was a terrorist long before a statesperson.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and one of the founding members of the state of Israel is reported to have said that the Jews and the Palestinians will never be able to live side by side in separate states. The implication here is that there is too much animosity, too much deeply embedded hatred, too many irreconcilable differences for the two peoples to be amicable, to be neighbors who live in peace with one another.
Ben-Gurion may be right. As I have argued before, it may take permanently stationed international armed forces lining the arbitrarily assigned boundaries for there to be any semblance of peace. If that it what it takes, so be it. If Netanyahu and his branch of Judaism cannot see their way fit to recognize a state for Palestine and live side by side in peace with the Palestinian people; and if Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians and, perhaps the Syrians, cannot resist their deeply felt belief that Israel must be pushed into the sea, then a peace must be forced upon this small piece of the Globe that has caused more trouble especially over the last sixty-one years than its land size and population warrants.
The Jews today are divided into three separate and distinct communities of believers—the Orthodox Jews who see themselves as the keeper of the law, the defenders of the land and “the decider” in matters religious; the Conservative Jews who still follow the main precepts of Judaism, but with less intensity and less rigidity; and finally, the Reformed Jews who are the liberal wing of this ancient faith and who are still at “war” with the Orthodox Jews over their antiquated view of the world and Israel’s role in it.
Netanyahu comes from the far right. He is the darling of the Fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and right wing Evangelical arm of the contemporary American Christianity. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell (prior to his death), the Southern Baptists, the above mentioned religious sects, all were big money raisers for Netanyahu because he most closely reflects their fundamentalist beliefs in the Old Testament.
It would be well for Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists and other conservative Christians take into account that up to 90,000 Christians live in the Palestinian territories including approximately 2,000 in Gaza the city Israeli forces eviscerated in its unnecessarily prolonged attack recently.
Up to 145,000 Arab Christians reside in Israel.
In other words, it would be well for right wing Christians to remember that this issue harmfully influences the lives of nearly 250,000 Christians who are located in the heart of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and suffer the same anxiety, fear and sense of abandon that penetrates the souls of both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Netanyahu’s policies that he overtly expressed during his visit to Washington are not in the best interest of our Christian brethren.
It is reported that upon his return to Tel Aviv, Netanyahu, after being told by both Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama that there must be no expansion of the settlements for any reason whatsoever, angrily shouted “What in the hell do they want from me?” The answer to that hastily articulated comment is simple: accept and work for the establishment of a Palestinian state, and stop expanding or adding new settlements in the West Bank to which your recent predecessors in the Office of Prime Minister already agreed.
Netanyahu has promised all of the minuscule Zionist and Orthodoxy’s religiously based political parties comprising his coalition government that he will not surrender one inch of the Holy Land given to them by Yahweh and that he will fight to the death to destroy any chance the Palestinians may have of ever, yes ever, abiding in their own state.
All of the Arabs states that are friends to the United States have been poorly served by the Bush Administration. While they have kept their part of the bargain, they still insist that the Palestinian issue is the most critical item on the present Middle Eastern agenda for the new president.
Obama must face Netanyahu squarely and not allow this man who tends to be intimidating in negotiations, to dictate the agenda. Obama must come down hard with real muscle such as withholding some of the $20 billion dollars Bush gave to Israel prior to his escape from the nation’s capitol.
If Israel, through Netanyahu, continues to insist on building new settlements in the West Bank, if I were Obama I would seriously penalize them for violating the international agreement that Israel must not expand its territory through the expansion of presently existing settlements, building new settlements on the West Bank further stealing land that is to be part of the new Palestinian state. The promise to cease and desist the expansion made by previous Prime Ministers is a promise that Netanyahu would not even agree to during his recent meetings with Obama.
I was glad to see that Secretary of State Clinton this week came down hard on Netanyahu’s stated intention to start building new settlements! I hope she continues to hold Bibi’s feet to the fire. And I trust that Obama, too, will realize that he must play hardball with the new Prime Minister because the Prime Minister knows no other way to fight and will persistently push his agenda to the end or die trying.
His election has delayed if not destroyed any immediate resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the U. S. has the tools necessary to bring this long, unnecessarily drawn-out process to a screeching halt.
Bush poured salt on the wounds of Israel’s neighbors and after demanding a democratic election that he naively believed would cure all of the aliments of the Palestinians, was shocked to find his naïve, biased and ignorance of the Palestinian frustrations gave Hamas a victory he never anticipated. More important, that Hamas victory was a thoroughly embarrassing outcome to Bush and the entire Western coalition.
Bush and Condoleezza Rice nearly paralyzed the Middle Eastern peace process because they allowed it to nearly expire out of abject neglect. The American president felt certain that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its political arm—Fatah would automatically be elected. Surely, he was startled by the results.
What Bush did not count on was the victory by Hamas the Islamic arm of the jihadist movement in Palestine that is heavily dependent upon terrorism, including suicide bombers as their weapon of choice.
What the president’s intelligence did not include was the fact that when people are without employment, without shelter, with inadequate food, water and medical care who have been living in a state of limbo for over sixty years. When your stomach throbs from hunger, you do not have the strength to worry about democracy or to argue over a philosophy of government; these people would support any political party that had been giving them the basic necessities of their lives. In their minds, survival is far more important than freedom.
Fatah that ruled the Palestinian for decades was ripe with corruption. Their politicians were not serving the people’s very basic needs. The voting public, disgusted with widespread dishonesty, “threw out the bastards,” who had corrupted the entire Fatah government for decades at the expense of providing its constituency with the basic necessities to make their miserable lives somewhat more bearable. Only the politically active Palestinians in the Fatah Party flourished in all of the decades the PLO was in power.
After Hamas’ election, Bush while forecasting a democratic election as a cure for the Palestinian problems, refused to recognize the new, democratically elected government because using his characterization, the members of Hamas were terrorists.
Murder is not in that book. Bombing of one’s enemies is not in that book. Hatred is not in that book. Once Hamas grasps the genuine message of their Holy doctrine, they will give up their foolish ways and practice their true faith to the benefit of all Palestinians.
There is no doubt that Hamas has done the Palestinians no favor by selecting suicide bombing as their weapon of choice. Even though we all know that they have been banned from attaining any other form of ammunition by the U. S. and the U. N., they are using suicide bombers as their sole means of retaliation against the treatment they often receive at the hands of the Israeli army personnel as well as its policemen.
They are jihadists and are aided by those countries believed by most of the western world to be on the far right of the Islamic gamut. They use the Koran as a weapon to boost their cause while ignoring many of the fundamental edicts of their Holy Scriptures that denounce killing, violence, most importantly, calls upon its followers to love and accept their neighbors.
Israel is not without sin in this conflict and it would be wise for the new president to recognize this very cogent fact. Israel must go and do likewise. Orthodox members must rethink their antiquated belief system and realize in the modern world no one is buying their claim to “all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile” as their “land of milk and honey” nor is the modern world succumbing to their claim to be the “Chosen People” of Yahweh when they persistently refuse to take responsibility for upholding the laws of Yahweh in both their personal and national life. They have sinned time and again against the laws of their Scriptures and wonder why they have not found the peace they so eagerly seek. 21st century Judaism must come to terms with the real world and the tribulations contained in the context of that real world experience.
It is only when these two ancient enemies re-think their hypocritical claims against each other and remember that prior to 1948 Jews and Arabs lived side by side in peace and sociability. If they can cleanse their souls of all of the hostility, hatred, and greed that has marked their relationship since 1948 and realize that both parties want nothing more than for the killing to stop, the skirmishes to cease, the ridiculous fence to be torn down, the check points to close, the rockets to become forever silent, the unlawful invasions to cease and desist and the irrational demands of each party to be dropped—then and only then will there be peace in the Middle East.
11:30:49 AM 
|
