Lieberman Steps Out of the Shadows
Israel's Minister of Strategic Threats
By JONATHAN COOK
The furore that briefly flared this week at the decision of Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to invite Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party into the government coalition is revealing, but not in quite the way many observers assume.
Lieberman, a Russian immigrant, is every bit the populist and racist
politician he is portrayed as being. Like many of his fellow politicians, he harbours a strong desire to see the Palestinians of the occupied territories expelled, ideally to neighbouring Arab states or Europe. Lieberman, however, is more outspoken than most in publicly advocating for this position.
Where he is seen as overstepping the mark is in arguing that the state should strip up to a quarter of a million Palestinians living inside Israel of their citizenship and seal them and their homes into the Palestinian ghettoes being created inside the West Bank
(presumably in preparation for the moment when they will all be expelled to Jordan).
He believes any remaining Arab citizens should be required to sign a loyalty oath to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state" --
loyalty to a democratic state alone will not suffice. Any who refuse will be physically expelled from Israel.
And, as a coup de grace, he has recently demanded the execution for treason of any Arab parliamentarian who talks to the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories or commemorates Nakba Day, which marks the expulsion and permanent dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1948.
That would include every elected representative of Israel's Arab population.
These are Lieberman's official positions. Apparently unofficially he wants even worse measures taken against Palestinians, both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. In May 2004, for example, he told a crowd of his supporters, in Russian, that 90 per cent of the country's Arab citizens should be expelled. "They have no place here.
They can take their bundles and get lost." His speech could have had second billing with one by Adolf Hitler at a Nuremberg
Rally.
Despite Lieberman's well-known political platform, Olmert has been courting him ever since Yisrael Beiteinu
(Israel is Our Home)
upset the expected three-way struggle between Olmert's Kadima party, Labor and Likud in the March elections. Lieberman romped home with 11 seats in the Knesset, making his party a sparring partner of both Likud and the popular religious fundamentalist party Shas.
According to reports in the Israeli
media, Lieberman has not joined the coalition until now because he has been playing hard to get, making increasing demands of Olmert before agreeing to sign up for the government. His hand has grown stronger too: according to opinion polls, he is now the most popular politician in Israel after Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party.
In the newly established post of Minister for Strategic Threats, Lieberman -- the avowed Arab hater --
will shape Israel's response to Iran, leading the chorus threats being made by Israel that the country is only a hair's ![]()
breadth from dropping bombs, possibly nuclear warheads, on Tehran. After that, he will presumably help the government decide what other "strategic threats" it faces.
Click to join catapultthepropaganda
While Olmert enthuses over Lieberman, most in the Labor party seem quietly resigned to his inclusion. Labor's elder statesman and former leader, Shimon Peres, says he has no objections, so long as Lieberman does not challenge the core policies agreed by Kadima and Labor.
This, of course, is precisely what Lieberman is doing -- it was the price of the bargain he struck with Olmert. Lieberman wants no peace overtures to the Palestinians, and favours the hardline neoliberal economic policies pursued by Kadima.
On Wednesday the Labor leader Amir Peretz, a supposed socialist and former head of the Israeli trade union movement, accepted Lieberman's entry to the coalition, as Olmert surely knew he would. In typical Labor style, Peretz bought off his conscience by insisting on a package of modest benefits for Arab citizens, the same Arab citizens Lieberman wants expelled. The last time the government made a similar promise to
its Arab minority back in late 2001 --
when the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak, needed their votes -- the $4 million pledge was broken immediately after the election.
So why are Israel's politicians, of the left and right, so comfortable sitting with Lieberman, the leader of Israel's only unquestionably fascist party? Because, in truth, Lieberman is not the maverick politician of popular imagination, even if he is every bit the racist --
a Jewish Jorg Haider or Jean Marie Le Pen.
In reality, Lieberman is entirely a creature of the Israeli political establishment, his policies sinister reflections of the principles and ideas he learnt in the inner sanctums of the Likud party, a young hopeful immigrant rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu and, of course, Ehud Olmert.
From their political infancy, the latter three were schooled in the minor arts of Israeli diplomacy:
feel free to speak plainly in the womb of the party; speak firmly but cautiously in Hebrew to other Israelis;
and speak in another tongue entirely
when using English, the language of the goyim, the non-Jews.
But Lieberman, who arrived in Israel as a 21-year-old, was not around for those lessons. He imbibed nothing of the principles of "hasbara", the "advocacy for Israel" industry that has its unpaid battalions of propagandists regularly assaulting the phone lines and email inboxes of the Western media. He tells it exactly as he sees it, even if mostly in Russian.
Inside the Likud party, his political training ground, that hardly mattered. He rapidly rose through the ranks to become director-general of Likud from
1993-96 and soon afterwards to head the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For many years he was the darling of the Likud, a party that today exists in two halves:
its original incarnation, once again led by Netanyahu;
and the renovated, sleeker model, Kadima, founded by Sharon.
But it was in breaking from Likud and founding his own party, Yisrael Beiteinu, in 1999 that Lieberman finally found his voice outside the Likud's smoke-filled rooms. The audience for his message was as untutored in the deceits of Israeli politicking as Lieberman himself.
Lieberman immigrated to Israel from Moldova in 1978, leading the vanguard of a wave of immigration from Russia and its satellite states that reached a peak in the early 1990s as the Soviet empire broke up. By the time most Russian speakers began pouring into Israel, Lieberman was already well esconced in the Israeli political system.
Yisrael Beiteinu's openly racist agenda spoke to the darkest instincts of the one million newly arrived Russian speakers.
Many of them poor and struggling to adapt to Israeli culture, they live far from the prosperous centre of the country in their own neglected ghettos, Little Moscows, where the signs and street language are more than a decade later still in Russian. They feel little affinity for the Jewish state --
apart from a loathing for everything Arab.
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates starting at 1ยข/min. __._,_.___
SPONSORED LINKS
| Power elite | Power team elite | Intelligence |
| Social network |
Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___
