Netanyahu’s Visit Confirmed Death of the Peace Process

by Salam Al-Marayati

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu presents a problem to the U.S.-sponsored peace process. While he charmed his audiences during his inaugural visit to the U.S., and received more enthusiastic support from the U.S. Congress for his hard-line views than he does from the Israeli Knesset, he made no change in his opposition to the land-for-peace framework carefully designed and engineered by U.S. officials.

Mr. Netanyahu advocates an expansion of the population of the Jewish state by 150 percent within a few decades, primarily through immigration from Russia and France. Thus, more Palestinians will be economically and physically displaced. Mr. Netanyahu’s appointment of Ariel Sharon, the notorious general who led the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that culminated in the massacre of Palestinian refugees near Beirut, to a cabinet-level position involving infrastructure will pave the way for this expansionist policy.

A Revisionist Tendency

What is more disconcerting is the revisionist tendency of the prime minister that serves as a foundation for his policies regarding the Palestinian problem. He believes that Palestinians never existed as a national entity but have been a part of southern Syria. Could we say the same about Jews who have lived in the region? Concerning the fate of the Palestinians, he believes that Jordan was carved out for King Hussein’s family by the colonial powers, and since Jordan is south of Syria, then that is Palestine for all intents and purposes. He wants the Palestinians and King Hussein to fight it out. Alarm bells have been ringing in the Clinton administration ever since the results of the May 29 elections were verified, because the framework for negotiations died with the political demise of Shimon Peres. In fact, Netanyahu has made it clear to President Clinton that Jewish settlements in the West Bank will increase, even though previous administrations considered these “facts on the ground” as obstacles to peace.

Before the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu said he has no quarrel with Islam, contradicting a past statement he made that the rise of Islam contributed to the historic suffering of Jews. While most scholars agree that Muslin-Jewish relations generally were positive until the beginning of this century, he views this relationship as one of deep-seated hostility for the past millennium. Even though the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and slaughtered innocent Jews, for example, he finds more reason to criticize Islam: “The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for Jews,” Netanyahu said, “but it was under the Arabs that Jews were finally reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be a national force of any consequence in their own land.” *

More Palestinians will be economically and physically displaced.

In fact, Jews were doing very well in Jerusalem during the early years of Arab rule. It was the Crusaders who “put to the sword” all of the Jews and Muslims (and many of the indigenous Christians) who fell into their hands when they captured Jerusalem. But, for the new Israeli leader, integration, equality and pluralism are out of the question, regardless of the fact that Jews flourished at the peak of Islamic civilization while suffering pogroms in Europe.

Another frightening example of Mr. Netanyahu’s bigotry is his admiration for the Spanish Inquisition that expelled or eradicated Muslims. He conveniently disregards the fact that the same treatment later was applied to Jews when he says: “What the Spaniards achieved in 8 centuries, the Jews achieved in 12.”

So, in his view, Palestinians are the aliens to the Holy Land, while the Israeli military and right-wing Jewish settlers are not occupying the West Bank, which he calls Judea and Samaria, only reclaiming it. His fundamentalist interpretation of religion does not accept the legal status of Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

Mr. Netanyahu considers State Department officials who sympathize with the plight of Palestinians as biased and short-sighted. In his opinion, they are part of a group extending the legacy of “British Arabists” who became “intoxicated with the romance of the ‘noble’ Bedouin.” Such racism has gone virtually unnoticed by political pundits.

Mr. Netanyahu also employs a double-standard on terrorism. While he talks tough about Muslim terrorists, he praises Jewish terrorist groups like Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi (Stern Gang) and Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi, which together were responsible for terrorist attacks against the British, including both the bombing of the King David Hotel and the hanging of kidnapped British soldiers, and against the Palestinians, including the massacre of the men, women and children of the village of Deir Yassin, during the first half of this century. He credits this network of “Jewish underground movements” for the British departure from Palestine and the U.S.-backed U.N. resolution that led to the creation of Israel in 1948.

While final stage implementation talks about a Palestinian state and the status of Jerusalem and land-for-peace negotiations over Syria’s Golan Heights were to be the key markers for progress in the Arab-Israeli negotiations, they have become issues that will not be resolved in the foreseeable future. Netanyahu has said there will be no Palestinian state, Jerusalem will be non-negotiable and under Israeli control, and there will be no Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Peace therefore has become an empty slogan for all sides for the sake of which human rights continue to be violated. Future tragedies rather than reconciliation seem to be the more likely outcome of Netanyahu’s policies, which received the support of 56 percent of Israel’s Jewish voters.

Highly respected East Jerusalem Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini called Netanyahu’s statement that Jerusalem will not be negotiable a “declaration of war.” So Prime Minister Netanyahu has killed the Oslo accords, and his eulogy for them was met with a standing ovation by U.S. leaders on Capitol Hill.

*This and all subsequent quotations in this article are from Binyamin Netanyahu’s book, A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World, published in May 1993.