Netanyahu Slaps Down Obama

Netanyahu utterly rejected all notion of two states or one state. Insisting on a state with security for Jews and a separate place without security for Palestinians, he made himself the enemy of any peaceful resolution of the dispute.

Netanyahu's speech in response to Obama's initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute amounted to a complete rejection. It leaves Obama with two clear alternatives: submit or turn his back on the Israeli regime.

After an extraordinarily onesided and utterly uncompromising rewriting of the history of the creation of Israel, he went on to twist Israeli-Palestinian relations out of all recognition, portraying himself as a man with whom one cannot possibly expect to reason.

Then, having presented Israel with its expansionism, its defiance of UN resolutions, its repression, its militarism, its apartheid, its ethnic cleansing as the innocent victim and Palestinians as the cause of all evil, he blandly asked them to accept Israel as a Jewish state. He made crystal clear that this would entail completion of the Zionist effort to ethnically cleanse Israel of its original inhabitants, stating that “we must solve the problem of the Arab refugees” which “must be solved outside the borders of the State of Israel.”

Then he began addressing the real substance, stating flatly, that “Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarization, with solid security measures.” Israelis and Palestinians will live in peace side by side, with Israelis living in the house and the Palestinians living in the dog house. And the dog will never be allowed in the living room.

Netanyahu with this astonishingly frank enunciation of Jewish priority over all others made it quite clear that he, at least, understands only the language of force, and he implicitly raised the question of whether or not the world can indeed afford to allow the continued existence of a Jewish state. For all who respect Jews or have Jewish friends or feel sorrow over the historical mistreatment of Jews, Netanyahu's blind and arrogant expression of Zionist extremism was a sorry day.